It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
![John Berger Quote - There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].](https://minimalistquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/theres-the-artists-intimacy-and-truthfulness-to-hi-683x1024.jpg)
