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6. a convincing portrayal of atmosphere. One learns how to make water have both a surface and depth, how to paint snow in a medium where there is no white paint, how to indicate sand shining under water, how to suggest the character of a brick surface without drawing each brick. There is no other way to learn each of these things except to paint and fail and paint again until you find a way to do it. And as you conquer each such problem, you find there's always another one ahead. You learn in this way that painting is not simply a joyous aesthetic lark, as perhaps you imagined it was when first you began to paint---but very hard work, not only mentally but physically. And yet, above all else, you must obliterate from the work all signs of the exhausting effort which has gone into it. The work should look effortless like a vision which has just stained itself onto the paper by some supernatural process. I would be happy thus if when you look at one or another of these pictures you would feel--' it exists...there it is, ...a unity,all of a pliece...'rather than that you should think, yes,it is put together out of this piece and that piece, and this piece is clumsy, although that one is well accomplished. I would rather have you feel that the artist is in control of the picture, than that the picture is in control of the artist. I believe that the same three basic requisites I demand of good acting---relaxation, concentration, and authority--- can be demanded of painting. Relaxation, that means the ease, the lack of obvious strain. Concentration, that means the unity, the exclusion of all that is irrelevant and the weaving together of all the parts into the whole. Authority, that is the beholder's sense that the artist is in command of the entire enterprise, with the precision of mastery in his field, and not at the mercy of wayward bursts of varying skill. This is the aim, which is an ideal, and here is the achievment [[achievement]], which is a reality. The degree of success or failure between the intention and the execution is for you to judge.