When possible, I prefer to paint "en plein-air, on the spot" because I feel the mood of the place and my reaction to the surroundings are of vital importance to the production of a good painting. I believe that if I spend a lifetime seriously and humbly studying the beauty of the spots of color made by objects as they come together, it cannot but react on me as part of God's creation and by the time I have painted my 1,000 and 1 paintings, I'll begin to have a glimmer of what beauty is. As the man C.S. Lewis called "my master" George MacDonald expressed it, . . . "we ourselves must will the truth and for that the Lord is waiting . . . The work is His, but we must take our willing share. When the blossom breaks forth in us, the more it is ours, the more it is His."
Writer Heney James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: What was the artist trying to achieve? Did he/she succeed? The third- Was is it worth doing?