This is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets but one task for each of us: to further the production of the philosopher, of the artist, and of the saint within us and outside us, and thereby to work at the consummation of nature.
An artist must only judge of what he understands, his field is just as limited as that of any other specialist... That in his sphere there are no questions, but only answers, can only be maintained by those who have never written and have had no experience of thinking in images.
In order to find reality, each must search for his own universe, look for the details that contribute to this reality7 that one feels under the surface of things. To be an artist means to search, to find and look at these realities. To be an artist means never to look away.
Whenever the truth is uncovered, the artist will always cling with rapt gaze to what still remains covering even after such uncovering; but the theoretical man enjoys and finds satisfaction in the discarded covering and finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts.
Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist's mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.
Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspectthey differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.
every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.