The question a machine world presses on us is not whether the machine can make the picture. The question it forces is what our capacities are — what it is we can do, as human beings, that the picture alone never shows.

To see — really see, and not merely look. To suffer, and make something of the suffering. to re-enchant the everyday world. To make a self out of the wreckage. To stand in front of what exceeds us and not look away… These are the shape of a human life lived awake — and they belong to all of us, not only to the ones who paint. Not to the machine, which has no body, no world, no death, and therefore nothing to say about life. The artist is simply a human being like the rest of us — just more determinedly awake, more honest, more unflinchingly in contact with existence, and moved to make. Pointing to capacities that are in all of us.