Marsden Hartley (1877 – 1943)
American Modernist painter and poet in the early 20th century.
(I was) happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method.. .. rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.
I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imagination. Therefore what has been retained in the mind’s eye is what lives. I have seldom or never worked from nature for this reason and so what I see is what I believe to be true, and that becomes the truism of the creative artist.
(they) maintain an enviable balance between the material & spiritual worlds (so) they symbolize for me the term ideal. (remark on the Mason family where Hartley stayed during 1938 – 1941)