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[[image - photograph]]
Lobster Fleet photographed by his friend Paul Strand.[

[image - painting]]
The coast of Maine and its ships: Marin's Eastport Docks, 1933.

Marin, continued

within. I can have things that clash. I can have a jolly good fight going on. There is always a fight going on where there are living things. But I must be able to control this fight at will with a Blessed Equilibrium.

Speaking of destruction, again, I feel that I am not to destroy this flat working surface (that focus plan of expression) that exists for all workers in all mediums. That on my flat plane I can superimpose, build up onto, can poke holes into——[but] By George, I am not to convey the feeling that it's bent out of its own individual flatness.

Too, there comes to me with emphasis that all things within the picture must have a chance. A chance to play in their playground, as the dancer should have a suitable playground as a setting for the dance.

Too, it comes to me a something in which I am curiously interested. I refer to Weight balances. As my body exerts a downward pressure on the floor, the floor in turn exerts an upward pressure on my body.

Too, the pressure of the air against my body, my body against the air, all this I have to recognize when building the picture.

Seems to me the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms——Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain——and those things pertaining thereto, to sort of retrue himself up, to recharge the battery. For these big forms have everything. But to express these, you have to love these, to be a part of these in sympathy. One doesn't get very far without this love, this love to enfold, too, the relatively little things that grow on the mountain's back. Which if you don't recognize, you don't recognize the mountain.

What a great city is doing

Shall we consider the life of a great city as confined simply to the people and animals on its streets and in its buildings? Are the buildings themselves dead? We have been told somewhere that a work of art is a thing alive. You cannot create a work of art unless the things you behold respond to something within you. Therefore if these buildings move me they, too, must have life. Thus the whole city is alive: buildings, people, all are alive ...

I see great forces at work; great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and the small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. Feelings are aroused which give me the desire to express the reaction of these "pull forces," those influences which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses, each subject in some degree to the other's power....

In life all things come under the magnetic influence of other