The danger of a spirit of choice

Let therefore the young artist beware of the spirit of choice,it is an insolent spirit at the best and commonly a base and blind one too,checking all progress and blasting all power, encouraging weaknesses, pampering partialities, and teaching us to look to accidents of nature for the help and the joy which should come from our own hearts. He draws nothing well who thirsts not to draw everything; when a good painter shrinks, it is because he is humbled, not fastidious, when he stops, it is because he is surfeited, and not because he thinks nature has given him unkindly food, or that he fears famine.I have seen a man of true taste pause for a quarter of an hour to look at the channellings that recent rain had traced in a heap of cinders. art oil paintings