To paint is to love again. It’s only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty-bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. See into and around.

Henry Miller, from “To Paint is to Love Again”

“The painting’s world is only explicable in the sense that it is what you’re looking at. That actual experience is happening to you as you look at the painting. That’s why painters make paintings: to have you be in that place.” -Brice Marden, Cold Mountain