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What is realism? And one of the
things that I'm convinced of, both in
my relationships with teaching and so forth,
and just talking to people is that everybody's idea of reality is different.
So we carry our reality
around in our heads. I notice this, for instance
some people, and just huge variety of differences in that what we see. One
person walking down
here, this street will see something entirely different. Probably will edit
out a lot of this stuff. I think we tend to edit
things out and so any painting
in any style is really the realism
that is in the head of whoever it is that did the painting and
whoever and it may also depend on things like accident,
where suddenly something works. Or it doesn't work
that you think's going to work. So I think this is a real complicated
question and
kind of a fascination with the whole thing as to what is reality?
And there's no question about it
As I say I keep coming back to this idea it really is a personal
thing. I guess I could cite the example which
I do sometimes of my wife and I driving down the road.
She was very into raising especially
while she went through a phase where she was looking for wild asparagus.
so we'd be driving down the road and I remember one time
she would say, "Stop the car, there's some asparagus!" and it would be
among the grass and she'd seen it. Meanwhile I was looking at the hills or something,
and seeing something totally different.
There's a famous passage
that says
looking at the death of a
famous individual, the
lawyers thinking about the estate, the
doctors looking and seeing what he died of, and so forth
and so on, and the artist is looking at the colors in the face of the corpse
and you can't get away from that so,
I get back to that same point,
our reality is our reality.