Jim Charter wrote:

> But the story bothers me.  The painter should have called the
> patron an idiot and left it at that, imo.  I mean suppose he'd
> painted it in a single stroke first time then and there!  Would
> that be more, or less, impressive/valuable?
> 
> More purely in the art realm, either it is beautiful/stirring/etc.
> or it is not.  Does it matter if takes Mozart second, a week, or
> ten years to come up with a beautiful musical motif?  If two
> hundred years later hearing it played gets us out of our seats
> cheering madly,...  then it does.

Painting the bird in a single stroke the first time would have been less 
valuable. Could the painter have done so and had he called the patron an 
idiot, the patron would have walked across the street and purchased 
another single-stroke painting of a bird. APTITUDE IS COMMON. The more 
art I see, the more certain I become that *the* open frontier in art is 
work ethic.

I will say of my own picture, despite its flaws, that although a person 
may not find it beautiful or stirring, nor understand why it took me 
months to complete, he won't often see another like it. The form can be 
repeated, but the details I have taken the time to include, however 
minuscule, are *something* extra-ordinary he can take from it. That 
cannot be said of a thousand nude photos one could download from the 
Internet, no matter how beautiful/stirring/etc. those photos may be.

  -Shay

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