[another part / version of Whistler's lecture:]
Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful-as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony. To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano. That Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.
James McNeill Whistler
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Colours no longer looked as brilliant to me as they use to do [Monet's sight was beginning to fail], I no longer painted shades of light so correctly. Reds looked muddy to me, pinks insipid, and the intermediate or lower notes in the colour scale escaped me. As for forms, I could see them as clear as ever, and render them as decisively. At first I tried pertinacity. How many times I have remained for hours near the little bridge, exactly were we are now, in the full glare of the sun, sitting on my camp-stool, under my sunshade, forcing myself to resume my interrupted task and to recapture the freshness my palette had lost! A waste of effort. What I painted was more and more mellow.... and (when) I compared it with what I used to do in the old days. I would fall into a frantic rage, and I slashed all my pictures with my penknife.
Claude Monet
You start to think, when you're younger, how important everything is and how things have to go right-your job, your career, your life, your choices, and all of that. Then, after a while, you start to realise that – I'm talking the big picture here – eventually you die, and eventually the sun burns out and the earth is gone, and eventually all the stars and all the planets in the entire universe go, disappear, and nothing is left at all. Nothing – Shakespeare and Beethoven and Michelangelo gone. And you think to yourself that there's a lot of noise and sound and fury – and where's it going? It's not going any place... Now, you can't actually live your life like that, because if you do you just sit there and – why do anything? Why get up in the morning and do anything? So I think it's the job of the artist to try and figure out why, given this terrible fact, you want to go on living.
Woody Allen
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Paul Samuelson