“Life,” he said, “life – that’s the great, essential thing. You’ve got to get life into your art, otherwise it’s nothing. And life only comes out of life, out of passion and feeling; it can’t come out of theories. That’s the stupidity of all this about art for art’s sake and the aesthetic emotions and purely formal values and all that. It’s only the formal relations that matter; one subject is just as good as another – that’s the theory. You’ve got to look at the pictures of the people who put it into practice to see that it won’t do. Life comes out of life. You must paint with passion, and the passion will stimulate your intellect to create the right formal relations. And to paint with passion, you must paint things that passionately interest you, moving things, human things. Nobody, except a mystical pantheist, like Van Gogh, can seriously be as much interested in napkins, apples and bottles as in his lover’s face, or the resurrection, or the destiny of man.”
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