«Woe betide the man with a poor desire, for that desire shall be realized. Nothing is what one believes, nothing shall be what one expects.»
This work is deliberately limited to the essential things a painter should know about the technique and inspiration of his art.
The aesthetic that depends on the artist’s culture and social milieu that surrounds him, is not the object here of any type of gratuitous analytical game.
We reserve solely for qualified critics the care for commenting upon the work that springs from the darkness of the hidden being.
This book is intended to encourage the production of their work in those who possess the innate gift, and it is written to enlighten those who cling stubbornly to the belief that one can penetrate Art through trickery, through force or through mediocrity.
Those who are called will have to endure for the love of their God, poverty and solitude, seeking no other consolation than their art, so as to put their vocation to the test and keep themselves whole until the uncertain day of the elective triumph.
Even when the test takes on the air of an extermination, as is the case in certain critical periods of our modern societies, the artist must survive all the temptations of the world, whether they come from abandonment or glory, from misery or opulence; and for this there is but one means: «forgetting oneself» in disinterested love for one’s art.
For the artist, the test of incarnate life is particularly unsettling, but it is this apparent dirty trick that keeps him awake in the very midst of the death of the world that surrounds him; and there is no other outcome for his rebellion than acceptance and abandonment to the current of tangible life that drags him along and submerges him.
When he has renounced all, he shall possess all. Such is the occult and wise law that delivers the world only to him who could no longer be the victim of that astonishing possession.
«He spoke only to enrich men.»
UNKNOWN BOOK
