Favourite Artist Quotes 02 Aging Artists

Life and Coincidence

A recent article (link below) about David Hockney 

quoted his reflections on painting as being an 

"old man's art".

David Hockney says he’ll keep on painting into his 80s 

and may well have his greatest work ahead of him. 

“The Chinese have a saying,” the 78-year-old told the Radio Times. 

“Painting is an old man’s art. 
I told Lucian Freud that a long time ago. 

I think it is, actually. It means it’s an accumulation of things.”

Further along in the comments section

 references were made to the Japanese artist Hokusai.

 Hokusai, on his death-bed at the age of 87 said 

"If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... 

Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."

and this quote
 

"I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works 
that won some reputation, 
but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. 
At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, 
insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. 
If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, 
so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. 
At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, 
while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more 
I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke
 I paint will be alive. 
May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.”

Hokusai (1760-1849)

Hokusai must the source
 for the unidentified artist
  in Ester Freud's book. 

(earlier post). 

But this whole discussion prompts 
an examination of the work of older artists.
A thought to cheer me 
as I stiffly descend the stairs
on a cold winter morning!

Matisse

 

"Matisse, on the other hand, 

soared in his last creations of cut-up coloured papers, 

doing some of his best work in an entirely new medium. "

Link to Guardian article