The profanity of paint

Chapter 14: 13. Critics

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A collection of short, reflective essays by a painter that privilege romantic vision and intuition over technical realism, treating colour as a mutable, almost spiritual force beyond pigments. Through meditations on trees and the limits of representation, the author argues that literal training and excessive knowledge can stifle true artistic feeling, and he champions silence, poetic language, and personal temperament as essential to creation. Individual chapters address rhythm, relation, critics, the middle class, extravagance, tragedy, genius, and the idea of a masterpiece, concluding with moral reflections on the artist’s mission and the tension between perception and portrayal.

13. Critics

A BOOK is not worth its paper if it cannot suffer by the process of critical mutilation; writing, and also painting, must be viewed as a whole, but never pigment by pigment or line by line. Every paragraph read separately must call forth some opposite view or else the book is poor stuff. Every inch of the picture closely viewed by itself must bewilder the observer; otherwise, it is a weak, insipid, belaboured canvas, good for nothing. I tell you for your own sake: do not hold a microscope in front of genius!