`Croissant`

Entered the college art exhibition with the results of my year's labour - a painting in green of pyramids, sphinx etc. Although it was passable in its own way, it was merely a school picture, a few lines executed as if under orders, no meaning of its own. Besides, my writing let me down as usual: I couldn't produce a straight hieroglyphic. Instead, they all meandered as if carved there by drunken amateurs, or distorted by some unusual refraction of the desert light. Next to my splashes of green on white were a set of photographs which outshone them in every way. They showed the view downwards into a lake, hundreds of feet deep. The water was clear right down to the bottom where could be seen, as if on an opposite hillside, a horizontal forest of dead, straight pines, semi-fossilized in the positions in which they had fallen. The timelessness of the scene made it hard to tell whether they might have fallen in the last few days or during the time of the dinosaurs. However, the lakes and trees in themselves left the pictures only half finished. Two of the pictures completed the tableaux by showing a small group of croissants floating untethered on the lake's surface. On first view the pictures seemed, like mine, to represent the joy of the amateur, the holidaymaker. However the execution, and in particular the positioning of the croissants, gave the scene an appearance of having been planned for years, and of having a far more serious message to carry.

To be a great artist, one's prejudices must be enormous and well formed.

With enormous but unformed prejudices, one may make it as an art critic, but never as a serious artist. It is said that those who can, do, and those who can't, teach. However, this singles out teachers unfairly. There are also those who write about or discuss the fine points of a subject, with no reason for doing so other than it is something which may be done. Most artists resent the critic who, with no sense of vision, derides their work according to common formulae. There are infrequent exceptions, such as certain jazz critics who truly immerse themselves in the world described, and so through this process their writing becomes another form of what they are writing about, improvised phrases, scat shifted by a dimension to become swinging prose.

Note: God knows where in my mind I dredged this from, or why!