Pastoral Resources

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.

Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.

I am a great lover of art, in many forms: paintings, objets, textiles. I don't have the talent for painting, but I have a very good sense of colour, a love of visual beauty.

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.

Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.

Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.

Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn't leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.

When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it's more like movie making.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.