Painting a picture is an act of violence.

The paint does not agree to comply with your wishes and then move into the
positions you prefer. Rather, you have to club it into submission with your brush,
and the fact that the movements are accomplished by means of the genuinely soft
hair of dead animals or polite-seeming and chemically unidentifiable synthetic
human-made fibers does not alter the brutal nature of this reality, for the ineluctable
tactics manifested by the tips of the bristles are forces nonetheless and it is only
because of this that the paint goes where you want it to, as surely, and in the same
mood and surrendered manner, as a condemned prisoner of war or a sheep to the
slaughter.


by Robert Hampton Burt
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