Delight and Contemplation

Virginia Woolf's biography of Roger Fry of course quotes the painter and critic himself.

"One thing I can say for myself," he wrote. "There are no pangs of jealousy or envy when I see someone else doing good work. It gives me pure delight." There perhaps lay the secret of his influence as a critic.

Earlier, Woolf quotes Fry on his own painting ...

I shall never make anything that will give you or anyone else the gasp of delighted surprise at a revelation but I think I shall tempt people to a quiet contemplative kind of pleasure — the pleasure of recognising that one has spotted just this or that quality which has meaning tho' mostly one passes it by.

This approach is consonant with a critical practice of returning again to the picture (not claiming that one has exhausted all there is to see). It is an intensely scientific and patient approach. Being in touch with the variable. And the constant.

And so for day 422
08.02.2008