“It is only the amateur who expects success. It is not possible to succeed. The mastery of one’s means is technique, and this can be attained, but the exhaustive expression of the inexhaustible suggestion of nature can never be attained.
“Yet we may form a sort of grammar of standards by which we may judge the coherency with which the language of art is spoken. I know no other way of judging a picture than by three rules or qualities–the originality of the conception based on the possibilities of that subject, the sense of beauty, the technical achievement.”
Maria Oakey Dewing, “Flower Painters and What the Flower Offers to Art” in Art and Progress Vol. 6, No. 8 (Jun., 1915), pp. 255-262
Note to self: it wasn’t a dud flower painting, it was but another step in the “exhaustive expression of the inexhaustible suggestion of nature”.
If you’re striving for the unattainable, then what you judge to be unsuccessful results aren’t failures because you weren’t supposed to be able to do it anyway.
great words for life in general… 🙂