Ben

“She has no interest in the composition from ten or twenty feet—that will come later. What she wants is topography, the impasto, the furrows where sable hairs were dragged into tiny painted crests to catch the light. Or the stray line of charcoal or chalk, glimpsed beneath a glaze that’s three hundred years old. She’s been known to take a safety pin and test the porosity of the paint and then bring the point to her tongue. Since old-world grounds contain gesso, glue, and something edible—honey, milk, cheese—the Golden Age has a distinctively sweet or curdled taste. She is always careful to avoid the leads and the cobalts. What”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank—to distract themselves from the abyss.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos