Picking About The Gravel

A painting for the trees and snow series, an 8x10 oil on panel.

From my reading on John Keats, I've found that better words for "negative capability" might be "sympathetic intuition" or "sympathetic imagination."  Walter Jackson Bate wrote in his book called Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats the following:

"The Imagination ... looks inward, grasping by an effort of sympathy and intuition the hidden intention and reality of life; and what it seizes, synthesizes, and creates 'must be truth -- whether it existed before or not.'"

This leads him to say: "For the poet is the object, endowed with a means of expressing itself" and "... the poet is the object, and the force at work within the object is also at work within him."

As an example, Bate writes about the poet, and quotes Keats:  "if a sparrow comes before his window... 'take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.'"

Is it too presumptuous for the painter to say "I am the trees and snow"?  How closely do you identify with what you paint?