They arise in the mind, which is the great distorter of truth. What the artist seeks to do is to approach his object as innocent of knowledge about it as a baby. The camera approaches it innocent, but insensible. The artist, on the contrary, must be highly sensible. A photograph is a one-sided experience; the object alone is undergoing a sensation, and the camera merely recording. A painting is a duet, a struggle, a love affair; the artist's senses are eagerly absorbing a part of the object and vigorously rejecting other parts. That's why a painting is a definition of personality and why no two good paintings of the same object can be alike."
"I don't think I, for one, could ever restrain my mind from whispering to me and telling me what the object meant," said Grover thoughtfully. "I'm afraid, even with hard training, I could never see things as uninterpretatively as a baby."
"So much the worse for your painting," said Casimir, drawing forth another canvas.
But so much the better, reflected Grover resentfully, for my everything else. After all, if cultivation of the mind was a sine qua non of growth (and you were prepared to swear that it was), then the deliberate setting aside of mental processes, even for the sake of pure painting, must be by way of being a degrading occupation, however good sensual exercise it might be. Perhaps I'd better be a philosopher, he concluded sardonically.
