"Hypostasis is the feeling that something as dead as paint might also be deeply alive, full of thought and expressive meaning. One moment paint is nearly nothing, an excuse for some historian to write about the influence of Florence and Siena, or the difficulties of realistic painting- and then suddenly it is also there in all of its stubborn weight and thickness, clinging to the canvas, gathering dust, wrinkling with age. Ordinarily paint is a window to something else, a transparent thing that shimmers in our awareness as we look through it to see what the painter has depicted: but it is also a sludge, a hard scab clinging to the canvas. "

"Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body."

James Elkins- What Painting Is