“I believe the success of a painting depends far less on any closeness to its model, to what it aims at and represents, than on its closeness to a self, to the self’s memory and gaze and truth. A painter painting is like a canvas which radiates, a page which invites, a woman who glows: he’s faithful to himself: he filters nothing, he must stick to his own perception and imagination and his own five senses…If an artist is true to what lies deepest in him, like the coal at the bottom of a mine, his work invites.”
Katya Berger Andreadaki and John Berger, Titian, Nymph and Shepherd, p.72