Through the Looking Glass
painting by Paul Strisik
"Consider Literature: Not being a writer, I might need ten pages to describe Rockport Harbor. I'd list all the details of the scene and hope that these pieces would give the reader a sense of the place. Tolstoy, on the other hand, could do the same thing in a paragraph. He would describe only the characteristic aspects of the scene. We don't expect him to tell us everything; if he did, we'd find his writing tiresome.
...the writer's statement will be more effective [ if ] its personal.
When you paint things exactly as they are, you don't show people anything they couldn't see for themselves; you're telling them what they already know. The viewer, however...wants you to help them. As Charles Hawthorne said years ago, the painter 'must show people more- more than they already see, and he must do so with so much sympathy and understanding that they will recognize it as if they themselves had seen the beauty and the glory.'."
Paul Strisik
(from his book "Capturing Light in Oils")