Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

The woman (assuming the artist is male) is always on a loser: if she brings money into a marriage, this is imprisoning; if she doesn’t, she brings anxiety. If she makes him happy, she dulls his artistic edge; if she doesn’t, she acts as an additional distraction from his art. And then there is sex (which a lot of this is often about). Even if prevailing social hypocrisies apply, and the man is allowed to roam – but appearances are kept up – what happens if he wants to write about it?

We believe too little, and aesthetically know too much; so we re-create, we find new categories of pleasure in the work.

The title of The Raft of the Medusa, incidentally, is not The Raft of the Medusa. The painting was listed in the Salon catalogue as Scène de naufrage – Scene of Shipwreck. A cautious political move? Perhaps. But it’s equally a useful instruction to the spectator: this is a painting, not an opinion.“Keeping an Eye Open”.

The title of The Raft of the Medusa, incidentally, is not The Raft of the Medusa. The painting was listed in the Salon catalogue as Scène de naufrage – Scene of Shipwreck. A cautious political move? Perhaps. But it’s equally a useful instruction to the spectator: this is a painting, not an opinion.

Many artists live with the shadow version of themselves. Unawareness of how things might have been if they have done this and not that. If life had made this choice for them rather than that. The road not taken remains at the back of the mind. For some their shadow exists as an external presence, for others an inner haunting.