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from the canvas you can look at it calmly, for there is no danger of becoming involved. To put it another way, you are not robbed of your faculties by considerations of self interest, and are therefore able to devote all your energies to observing the movements of the figures from an artistic point of view. This means that you are able to give your undivided attention to judging what is, and what is not beautiful.

p24

Even something frightening may appear poetic if you stand back and regard it simply as a shape, and the eerie may make an excellent picture if you think of it as something which is completely independent of yourself. Exactly the same is true with disappointed love. Providing that you can divorce yourself from the pain of a broken heart and, conjuring up before you the tenderness,

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the sympathy, the despair and jest, even the very excess of pain itself, can view them objectively, then you have aesthetic, artistic material.

p.47

It is only afterwards when we tell our experiences to others that we revert to being artists. Putting it as a formula, I supposed you could say that an artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.

p48

Because of this lack of common sense, the artist is not afraid to approach those areas, both in the natural and in the man-made world, from which the average person shrinks back, and in consequence is able to find the most exquisite pearls of beauty. This portrayal of beauty where it is commonly believed that none exists, is