It is the common defect of modern art study. Too many students do not know why they draw.

I am always sorry for the Puritan, for he guided his life against desire and against nature. He found what he thought was comfort, for he believed the spirit's safety was in negation, but he has never given the world one minute's joy or produced one symbol of the beautiful order of nature. He sought peace in bondage and his spirit became a prisoner.

After all, the goal is not making art. It is living a life. Those who live their lives will leave the stuff that is really art.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him.

If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.

There is only one reason for art in America, and that is that the people of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time, and their own land.