Before retiring from active art criticism after nearly 35 years of it, I conceived the idea of choosing a dozen painters (and paintings) of the post-Picasso age that are specially close to me. Some of these 12 artists are living, some are dead, but all are figures who still seem modern and relevant if not always "contemporary". I do not claim that they are necessarily the greatest of their time, though I am quite sure some of them are, or will prove to be so in retrospect.
Very reluctantly, I have excluded Irish artists. This is not because of any lack of faith in their talent (quite the reverse), but because I find it hard - in fact, impossible - to step back and view them objectively, from the necessary distance. And I have stuck to painters alone: no sculptors, graphic artists, conceptualists, installationists, performance artists or earth artists are included. Other voices, other rooms!
Painting, I know, is supposed to be unfashionable just now, though sales, attendances and other factors would seem to prove the opposite. The fact that other visual media and styles have proliferated in the past three decades has no more put it out of court than the invention of the camera did so in the mid-19th century. Only painting can do what painting can do; other art forms, whether lasting or ephemeral, are not a substitute for it, any more than films or TV have proved to be a substitute for literature. They are simply different fields, different disciplines, and one should not be used to beat the other.