“Ultimate skill and imagination would seem to assume a plenitude in painting when the ‘earthed’ human image is compounded in the great compositions, enigmas, confessions, prophecies, sacraments, fragments, questions which have been and will be peculiar to the art of painting. …In Hannah Arendt’s beautiful introduction to Benjamin, she likens that wonderful man to a pearl-diver who wrests what he can from the deep past, not to resuscitate the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages, but because the rich and strange things he has found in the deep ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in a new form and shape.” – RB Kitaj
