The world is filled with artists who aspire to faithfully render nature into art. But they are either misguided or uninformed, and certainly deluded. An artist cannot transcribe what he sees in nature into art; he can only translate it through his medium. As the eminent aesthetician, E.H. Gombrich wrote*, “ . . . the correct portrait, like the useful map, is an end product on a long road through scheme and correction. It is not a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful construction of a relational model.”

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