On the other hand...

   I can give an indicative, but not definitive, short list of favourite painters, in no particular order, that indicate my passion effectively.
   Toyen, Matta, Victor Brauner, Titian, Goya, Gericault, Botticelli (the early "pagan" works) Picasso, of course, and Matisse, Giacometti too, both as draughtsman and painter (quite apart from his sculpture, which is not under discussion at this moment). I love those pastels that Kitaj did from the mid-70s into the 80s and their effect on his painting when it was the most embodied, but had a sense of a ruptured and fragmentary reality. I fell in love with the work of Frank Auerbach at first glance, as it were, it was a revelation to me, although its effect on me had to be partly undone! Equally and opposite, for  awhile, the influence of Lucien Freud, especially his earlier works. Francis Bacon, definitely.
   Mikulas Medek, Eva Svankmajerova, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, I have not mentioned Rembrandt yet, although I do love his work, maybe it seemed just too much of  a cliche to say so?
   I'm now wondering what all these artists might have in common, apart from being highly rated by me. Many are surrealists, but some are at the opposite extreme to surrealism, many are earlier, and I could go on about renaissance artists that I love whose names don't arise at this moment because I am more fixated on the moderns. It might be more instructive to mention the artists I don't rate highly or am indifferent to, artists whose work I despise or feel a great antipathy to, even if I respect it for, oh, I don't know, art historical reasons. (Do I really give a damn about such things though?)
   Such a list really only starts to define the territory for me as I rethink my own work, on etiny step at a time.