"There are two kinds of painters, the great ones, the real ones, they are plastic poets, they possess the imagination, that queen of faculties. For them, nature is only a quarry from which their genius extracts the matter of the temple that their hands create. Those create worlds of their own, they make us live there, they find the path of our soul, they finally dominate us. The others are mere observers incapable of discovering, linking and grouping the various elements to form a whole."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_d'Echerac