April 11, 2008 I am amused to keep a caption from another of my portrait efforts, Paul Stanley. I'd created the drawing of Stanley after hearing him interviewed on the Bob and Sheri morning radio program. Synchroncity being what it is, today, Stanley was again interviewed, a very personable (and artistic) man with intelligent opinions. So in honor of that weirdness, I keep the 'rocking the art world' caption. It fits Gustave Courbet in a big way. "It is impossible to tell you all the insults my painting of this year has won me," he wrote to his parents, "but I don't care, for when I am no longer controversial I will no longer be important." (as quoted in the Smithsonian article) He wrote lots of letters through out his fifty eight years, and I quote from one now, "To the young artists of Paris, Paris, December 25, 1861", and took note of his advice: "Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artists who have lived in it. I hold that the artists of one century are totally incapable of representing the things of a preceding or subsequent century, in other words, of painting the past or the future. It is in this sense that I deny the possibility of historical art applied to the past. Historical art is by nature contempory. Every age must have its artists, who give expression to it and reproduce it for the future. An age that has not managed to find expression in the work of its own artists has no right to be expressed by later artists. That would be falsifying history. The history of an age finishes with the age itself and with those of its representatives who expressed it. It is not the task of later times to add something to the expression of previous times - to aggrandize or embellish the past. What has been has been. The human mind has the duty always to begin working afresh, always in the present, building on results already obtained. One must never begin something anew but always proceed from synthesis to synthesis, from conclusion to conclusion. The true artists are those who pick up their age exactly at the point to which it has been carried by previous times. To go backward is to do nothing, to waste effort, to have neither understood nor profited from the lessons of the past. That explains why antiquated schools of all kinds always end up producing the most useless compilations." (pages 203-204, _Letters of Gustave Courbet By Gustave Courbet_, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu) I think what he is saying there is to study the past, learn from it, but do not try to make an exact duplicate of it. Synthesize it, all your various observations of it, into something new.