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For expressing his own feelings and thoughts about life, nature, or other considerations, the artist's rightful purpose is to find plastic equivalents or symbols that parallel his personal emotions and reactions to a given scene or idea. The original scene may be one of physical reality and the artist's reaction may be largely mental; but if the result of his reactions is told only in terms of literary descriptions, then he should make his statement in words rather than in paint or marble.
The point is that the painter or sculptor should speak in terms of his special medium with planes and symbols, whether his subject be physical, mental, or emotional. Sometimes his symbol for a given thing may be quite like the actual appearance of the natural motif, which is legitimate as long as it is arrived at through honest use of the artist's plastic means. But if it is arrived at through the channels of literature, that is, merely through sentiment and storytelling, depicting objects and things primarily by way of literary descriptions and mental ideas, then the expression is dishonest and illegitimate as far as the arts of painting or sculpture are concerned.
Normally there is little physical difference if any in the way each artist sees nature. But there is a great deal of difference in the way each is capable of seeing or chooses to see nature in the mind's eye. This is what is meant by the saying, "each artist sees nature in a different way."
In respect to this matter of personal interpretation, it is interesting to note that in analyzing and diagraming a work of art, the same creative process is used that the creative artist uses in interpreting nature. In order to clarify the thing he wishes to say concerning his feelings or ideas of the thing at hand, he extracts certain things, recreates, dramatizes, simplifies, diagrams, and symbolizes them. The quality of the resultant expression depends upon this inner vision, coupled with the ability to interpret it in a unified way so that others may clearly perceive the idea or emotion in mind. The lack of this quality is one of the reasons that the uncreative, imitative worker in any of the arts cannot be accepted seriously as a true artist, for as we have said elsewhere, imitation does not express anything. It merely transfers a view or parts of it from one place to another.
It is a fact that every great artist from the most ancient to the most modern has changed the normal proportions and general photo-exact likeness of nature to some greater or lesser extent for reasons of expression or design. There are dramatic effects that can be achieved in no other way. The comic strip and movie cartoon are examples of this distortion of fact for purposes of dramatic expression. One can easily imagine how lacking in drama and emphasis either would be if these caricatures were replaced with factual proportions and doings. Distortion of natural facts works the same way in the more serious picture. The plastic and graphic artist has need for poetic license no less than the poet. As pointed out before, the extent of the use of this license is an individual problem and may vary from artist to artist or even from picture to picture by the same artist, depending on the need or purpose of the expression in each case.
Artistic talent depends to a great degree on two things: form, the ability to organize; and expression, the ability to feet intensely. This leads to a logical and important conclusion on the subject of theme and expression--that the artist, in order to interpret the mood and spirit of a thing, must first feel profoundly that spirit. In order to feel profoundly he must have swum deeply in thesea of life.
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