Contingencies

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Foredune, today. Path [ "Just passing through" ]

Min/max temperature: 5°C/7°C; humidity: 91%; precipitation: 0 mm, sea level pressure: 1026 hPa; wind from W 20.9 km/h; Clouds: overcast 60 m.; visibility: < 2.0  kilometres

"It is not so much the subjects one depict that create beauty; rather it is the need one has felt to represent them, and it is this need itself that gives one the strength to carry them off…. One might say that anything is beautiful, provided it is at the right place at the right time, and, conversely, that nothing is beautiful if it comes at the wrong time… Beauty is what is apt. […] What we call "composition" is the art of communicating our thoughts to others. […] A work should be all of a piece […] and people and things should be there for an end. I wish to say what is necessary plainly and strongly… and I confess to the greatest horror of superfluities (however brilliant) and of filling up. […] In my pictures of fields I see only two things: the sky and the ground, the two separated by the horizon, and imaginary lines, rising and falling, I built on that and the rest is either accidental or incidental. [ I intend ] to give man the principal role and landscape the status of a creation, showing it all in its significance, grandeur and truth as it is actually created. […] In the cultivated places, although at times in regions hardly at all tillable, you see figures spading or hoeing; you see one, from time to time, straighten up his back… and wipe his forehead with the back of his hands. You will eat your bread by the sweat of your brows. […] 'Cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herbs of the earth. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return of the earth.' […] Nature yields herself to those who trouble to explore her."

Jean-François Millet in 'Drawn into the Light', edited by Alexandra I. Murphy, page 5, 22, 28, first published in 1999 by Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

"Money, food, grades, and honours must be husbanded carefully, but the automatic reinforcements of being right and moving forward are inexhaustible."

B.F. Skinner in 'The Technology of Teaching', page 158, first published in 1968 by Prentice-Hall, Inc., USA