I see a painting of nude women in the middle distance at the edge of a lake. All the trees and the women, their anatomy, the way the light strikes them, the rendering of bodies and trees and water, it’s all perfect. No idea why I’m seeing this painting done recently but I’ll leave that to the artist.

The thought occurs to me after a bit, “It would take some doing for you to bring your technique to within reach of this artist’s technique.”

This makes perfect sense, of course. But it’s unimportant.

The sense comes from the obvious fact that this kind of painting is what this artist does. He enters the studio and works on painting figures in landscapes. His work is restricted to these two things. And he paints them over and over and over again. His skills are all hard-earned.

The unimportance of this artist’s superiority in technique derives from my disinterest in painting anything like this painting. I have no inner need to generate by hand paintings that might well have been painted two hundred years ago. I don’t have any deep abiding need to master techniques from pre-photography eras.

We live in a time when art is on the one hand derided and downgraded and disregarded, and on the other it’s stolen for commercial use. I see no room in all of that to become a painter from 1850.