The Moon And Sixpence 21.4

Meanwhile hehad never ceased to work at his art; but, soon tiring of the studios, entirelyby himself. He had never been so poor that he could not buy canvas and paint,and really he needed nothing else. So far as I could make out, he painted withgreat difficulty, and in his unwillingness to accept help from anyone lost muchtime in finding out for himself the solution of technical problems whichpreceding generations had already worked out one by one. He was aiming atsomething, I knew not what, and perhaps he hardly knew himself; and I got againmore strongly the impression of a man possessed. He did not seem quite sane. Itseemed to me that he would not show his pictures because he was really notinterested in them. He lived in a dream, and the reality meant nothing to him.I had the feeling that he worked on a canvas with all the force of his violentpersonality, oblivious of everything in his effort to get what he saw with themind's eye; and then, having finished, not the picture perhaps, for I had anidea that he seldom brought anything to completion, but the passion that firedhim, he lost all care for it. He was never satisfied with what he had done; itseemed to him of no consequence compared with the vision that obsessed hismind.

在所有这些日子里，他的艺术活动一直没有停止过。但是不久他就没有兴致到画室去了；他只关在屋子里一个人埋头苦干。因为一文不名，有时他连画布和颜料都买不起，而这两样东西恰好是他最需要的。从他的谈话里我了解到，他在绘画上遇到的困难很大，因为他不愿意接受别人指点，不得不浪费许多时间摸索一些技巧上的问题，其实这些问题过去的画家早已逐一解决了。他在追求一种我不太清楚的东西，或许连他自己也知道得并不清楚。过去我有过的那种印象这一次变得更加强烈了：他象是一个被什么迷住了的人，他的心智好象不很正常。他不肯把自己的画拿给别人看，我觉得这是因为他对这些画实在不感兴趣。他生活在幻梦里，现实对他一点儿意义也没有。我有一种感觉，他好象把自己的强烈个性全部倾注在一张画布上，在奋力创造自己心灵所见到的景象时，他把周围的一切事物全都忘记了。而一旦绘画的过程结束——或许并不是画幅本身，因为据我猜想，他是很少把一张画画完的，我是说他把一阵燃烧着他心灵的激情发泄完毕以后，他对自己画出来的东西就再也不关心了。他对自己的画儿从来也不满意；同缠住他心灵的幻景相比，他觉得这些画实在太没有意义了。