ee alike, nor
feel alike, nor think alike. How, then, should they paint alike? The
attempt to do a thing because another has made a success of that sort
of thing is the most fruitful source of the commonplace in painting.

Paint that which appeals to you most fully. Don't try to paint what
appeals to some one else. If you like it, then do it; and do it in the
most direct way you can find; only do it so as to fully and completely
convey just what it is that _you_ like, unaffected by anything else.
And because you have seen or felt for yourself in your own way, and
expressed that; and because you are not another, nor like any other
that ever was, what you have done will not be like anything else that
ever was--and that is originality.

But never imitate yourself, either. Be open. Be ready to receive
impressions and emotions. And if you have done one thing well,
accept that in itself as a reason for not doing it again. There
are always plenty of things--ideas, impressions, conceptions,
appreciations--waiting to be painted; and if you try to paint one
twice, you fail once of freshness, and lose a chance of doing a new
thing.

That is what a painter is for, not to cover a canvas with paint, hang
it on a wall, and call it by a name. The painter is the eye of the
people. He sees things which they have no time to look for, or
looking, have not learned to see. The painter serves his purpose best
when he recognizes the beautiful where it was not perceived before,
and so sets it forth that it is recognized to be beautiful through his
having seen it.

There is the difference between the artist and the photograph, which
sees only facts as facts; which while often distorting them does so
mindlessly, and at best, when accurate, gives the bad with the good in
unconscious impartiality. But back of the painter's eye which sees and
distinguishes is the painter's brain which selects and arranges, using
facts as material for the expression of beauties more important than
the facts.

But what is a picture? I have met some strange though positive notions
as to what is and what is not a picture. Some persons think that a
certain (or uncertain) proportion of definite forms and objects are
necessary to make canvas a picture; that it must contain some definite
and tangible facts of the more obvious kind. I remember one man who
asserted that a canvas in an exhibition was not a picture, but only a
sketch, because it had nothing in it but an