Leonora Carrington (asked if there had been other artists in the family): My mother used to paint biscuit tins for jumble sales. That’s the only art that went on in my household.
Interviewer: I wonder where it came from?
Leonora Carrington: I have no idea.
Interviewer: No other artists in our family? None at all?
Leonora Carrington: Why are you fixed on the idea of heredity? It’s not hereditary … comes from somewhere else, not from genes. You’re trying to intellectualize something desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make a kind of intellectual mini-logic. You never understand by that road.
Interviewer: What do you think you do understand by then?
Leonora Carrington: By your own feelings about things …if you see a painting that you like… canvas is an empty space.
Interviewer: If I got one of your pictures down from upstairs and said to you what were you thinking when you painted this…?
Leonora Carrington: No. It’s a visual world, you want to turn things into a kind of intellectual game, it’s not… the visual world, it’s totally different. Remember what I’ve just said now, don’t try and turn it into a …kind of intellectual game. It’s not… It’s a visual world, which is different. The visual world is to do with what we see as space, which changes all the time. How do I know to walk –that’s one concept– to this bed and around it without running into it. I’m moving in space. Or I can have a concept of it and then I can see it as an object in space…”
- Leonora Carrington (1917 - 2011)
Don't try to intellectualize art
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