“Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat, stood, or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter’s movements, a portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts. …
“Painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.
“All those meanings are intact in the paintings that hang in museums: they preserve the memory of the tired bodies that made them, the quick jabs, the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures. Painters can sense those motions in the paint even before they notice what the paintings are about.
“Paint is water and stone, and it is also liquid thought. That is an essential fact that art history misses…”
James Elkins, What Painting Is
I think it’s possible to identify painters in an art gallery. They’re the people who also step to one side to look at the painted surface from an angle, which makes brushmarks and layers clearer. And often clasp their hands behind their back so as not to give into the temptation to touch. Paint is a non-verbal language that speaks across time.
