The following text is adapted from Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse.
Lily Briscoe is attempting to capture a scene in a painting.
She could see it all so clearly, so distinctly, when she was not hurried; the color was there, the balance was there, and the mass was right. Yet the moment she took her brush and approached the canvas, a terrible leveling force intervened, reducing the luminous clarity of the inner vision to an awkward and unresponsive array of pigment and line. Between the conceived perfection and the executed form lay an insurmountable chasm that left her standing baffled before her own easel, conscious of a profound discrepancy between imagination and achievement.
Lily Briscoe is attempting to capture a scene in a painting.
She could see it all so clearly, so distinctly, when she was not hurried; the color was there, the balance was there, and the mass was right. Yet the moment she took her brush and approached the canvas, a terrible leveling force intervened, reducing the luminous clarity of the inner vision to an awkward and unresponsive array of pigment and line. Between the conceived perfection and the executed form lay an insurmountable chasm that left her standing baffled before her own easel, conscious of a profound discrepancy between imagination and achievement.