Wouldn’t it be amazing to paint like Titian? I recently saw in the Louvre his portrait of a young boy, ‘Ranuccio Farnese’ (normally in the National Gallery of Art, Washington). The way Titian can use paint to be skin, to be fabric, to be metal… To say it’s clever imitation misses the point, for me. It’s more than that. My reaction to paint is a bodily thing, a felt thing, I can’t quite explain it. Although I love looking at really good photographs, I don’t get that kinaesthetic reaction to them that I get when I look at this painting.
