Henry Miller on Painting - Part 2

Henry Miller describes the "artist eye" in the book Paint As You Like And Die Happy.

"To paint is to love again. It's only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat, and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. See into and around. Or, as John Marin once put it, 'Art must show what goes on in the world.'"

Henry shares about how he was transformed when he first began to view the world with the eyes of a painter. The most familiar things, objects which he had gazed at all his life, now became an unending source of wonder and affection.


Henry Miller