DURING intervals a certain greater or lesser progress can be made in consciousness, but upon returning to work one is always surprised anew by the fact that independently of progress in consciousness, in practice one has regressed in the real work. A painter has to start again, and not even at the point where he broke off, but much further back. If a painter doesn’t feel like obeying this truth and yields to the illusion that progress in consciousness is already progress in the capacity for the work itself, he condemns himself to a road immeasurably longer, to a harmful illusion that is a conscious or unconscious lie to oneself, the destruction of laboriously won foundations for the work, sometimes forever.
This common fate of Polish painters, the slow but steady regression of once capable artists, is due to the fact that they take their own inner experience for a premise allowing them a creative leap in realization, a premature leap over a whole sequence of stages not worked out properly.
These skipped stages demand time, which isn’t taken into account; a lot of sweat, labor that quite often turns out to have been fruitless, which we consciously or subconsciously try to shirk. The faster a painter can humble himself, once again determine his actual regressed position, and start working again from that place without any rush, the faster he will be able to reach beyond what he has attained as the result of his previous work.
But with every subsequent step he will still have to put on the brakes as he moves forward, putting the emphasis the whole time on achieving a work temperature, a continuity, qualitative growth (depending on the individual and the stages, now a greater, now a lesser quantity in terms of work hours, a constantly changing technique, not just in work but in life).
In France probably fewer talents perish, while with us they almost as a rule go to waste, because from Poussin through David, Delacroix, Degas, Cézanne, and so many others, there is in France a continuously enriched and deepened tradition of “secret knowledge”: how to work, not just in the superficial sense of facility of execution but in the sense of a deep “breath” in painting, a connection between a vision and the realization of that vision.
In France there was never the superstition, so popular in Poland, that a painter has a right to be stupid.