That's a quote from Philip Pullman in the intro to his retelling of Grimm's Fairytales.
Immediately, I could take a post which begins this way in a few different directions.
For starters, it's an excellent audiobook for working in the studio. The tales are all short, so if you did get lost, just wait and another one will start.
But second, Pullman is a real anti-religious crank in the vein of Christopher Hitchens. Just glance through the Wikipedia. I've actually listened to a number of his other books. They're mostly good But that's really not what I want to go, either.
This particular statement, that a fairy tale is not a text, caught my eye (or my ear, if you will). A fairy tale is, thankfully, not a text. And rather than jumping into the issues of copyright, or all of the other issues that have come up in our text-focused post-modern universe, simply having tales told, reimagined, understood again, seems worth a moment's reflection.
There's nothing at all original a painter could do. Doing what we do, better, or what we've always done, seems more than enough for the time being.
I do often look at paintings as literary, in some sense. In the sense that they are made up of agreed-upon elements that we pick and choose and depict and portray, and that making a good painting means doing a lot of that really well.
The fact that they are not texts might be well remembered, as fairy tales are not texts.
The illustration is from the Wikimedia Commons digitized version of Grimm's Fairy Tales.
