John Berger wrote an essay titled "Painting a Landscape." Though he wrote that "landscape painting" is dead, painting a landscape can be a "starting point" for painting. He wrote, "As I work I am faithful to what I see in front of me, because only being faithful, by constantly checking, correcting, analysing what I can see and how it changes as the day progresses, can I discover forms and structures too complex and varied to be invented out of my head or reconstructed from vague memories." Also, "The marks on the canvas must have a life of their own." Again, "The thing interpreted becomes the interpretation." Further, "However short-lived, there are moments of triumph, incomparable in my experience to moments achieved in any other activity. They are short-lived because they depend upon a correspondence existing between the totality of relations between the marks on the canvas and those deducible in the landscape..." And finally, "...it is the consequent sense of the near impossibility of the task which allows me to take pleasure in the little that I have temporarily achieved."
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