‘Blue Wood Wood Truth’
In our time, painting is a scholastic practice. Fortunately detached from any material or social utility, painters seem to be related to those Byzantine theologians who, it is said, argued about the size of angels while the Turks were besieging Constantinople. This is not a reproach, but rather a huge compliment: self-sufficiency and self-absorption have given rise to some of the highest achievements of the human spirit: mandalas of coloured sand, the Dictionary of Universal Language by Dr. Sotos Ochando, the interior decorations of contemplative monasteries, heraldic science, those frescoes that Goya painted in the Quinta del Sordo, personal diaries. The singers of epic poems have generally despised these useless and self-contained feats, carried out (to top it all off!) amidst certain comforts, as if climbing cliffs or crossing seas amidst enormous hardships contributed more to human progress than spending the afternoon drawing next to the stove.