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The profanity of paint cover

The profanity of paint

Chapter 7: 6. The Magic of Words
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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.

6. The Magic of Words

THERE is something in the art of the master that I can never find a word for. I believe it is a sin to seek for one. Art in the finer sense is beyond the limitations of all words assigned by the philologists. The master is a magician, therefore it is only the poets that can speak with authority about his work: and it requires all the magic of poetry to deal with the creation of things. Words must be arranged so as to lose all their etymological stiffness before they can ever express the things born of inspiration. Only inasmuch as the poet’s song transcends the meaning of his words does he approach the spiritual sense of art.