Visions of loveliness

[Gabrielle Dean]

A character in a fiction novel I read, an artist, said that every painting he did was a failure because it never lived up to the vision of it he had seen in his mind. I found it incredibly depressing, as at the time I was dabbling in writing, but what if he had thought of it another way, and revelled in the beauty of a different vision and realised that what he had produced went some way towards expressing the vastness and beauty available to all who look out and try to express what they see? What if he saw something new each time he looked?

(The book was Clean Straw for Nothing by Australian author, George Johnston (husband of Charmian Clift). I was about 27 when I read it, and it lives on as one of most miserable books I've ever read.)