"...Kingfishers catch fire,"

"Dearest Bridges,

I am sorry to hear of our differing so much in taste; I was hardly aware of it. (It is not nearly so sad as differing in religion.)  I feel how great is the loss of not reading, as you say; but if I did read I do not much think the effect of it would be what you seem to expect, either on my compositions or on my judgments.

…The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.  So it must be on every original artist to some degree,  on me to a marked degree.  Perhaps then more reading would only refine my singularity, which is not what you want …"

Letter to Robert Bridges,  sent from University College, St. Stephen's Green, Dublin.  Sept. 25 1888.  Gerard Manley Hopkins

The artist's answer

"If you look for only one answer, then you will find only one."

Pablo Picasso.

Henry Moore's sketchbook

"...
Londoners lie under London, incubating
A different energy, a different life.

Round the corner the artist watches,
Jotting notes on an envelope.
To have drawn from life would be like

Sketching in the hold of a slave ship.
Not the Cockney wags of legend, but huge
Muffled forms, trussed and bandaged

Like Lazarus.  Wood and stone,
As well as bones and veins, wait inside
These vast vulnerabilities.

From their coding, we can construe
Houses falling, bridges falling, London falling,
Civilisations falling down.  The artist

Must show this without saying. Just
His sketchbook's sotto-voce.  Abstractish figures shelter background,
And  Try white again then scramble greyish over." 

 from Underground  (on Henry Moore's 'A Shelter Sketchbook')   U. A. Fanthorpe 

The duty of the artist

"to face the void without flinching, to declare that the world will yet be saved, and to weave their single strand of the great rope that holds the universe together."

Bernard Levin,  The Times, 17 December 1983.