The Sower

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify.  That, indeed, is nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.  Millet had done a hundred sketches of peasants sewing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable.  All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying and sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves, for one that was better and more universal.”

Willa Cather
 

Pretty Cool! -- MV