The practice of art is not directed towards producing artists who can paint or sculpt with real ability, nor towards producing more works to fill our homes and galleries. It is directed towards producing human beings with a sense of wonder at life and that precious ability to inquire into its outward manifestations.

Klee and Miro … urge us to paint like little children. Perhaps they mean we should try to … rediscover that lost attitude to art in which the actual creative act, the experiment, the solving of problems, are more important than the result or solution.

… our whole vision, our interpretation of reality, is a complex structure built on the understanding of artists long dead or still living. Every artist who ever lived and worked lives in us. We, or rather our vision and our understanding, are the products of twenty thousand years of art, the temporary crystallization of an ever-changing interpretation of the nature of reality.

By participating in this ever-changing way of seeing, we are learning about ourselves and about the external world. By learning how to see and how to live we are being artists. We have to be artists to survive.
Fred Gettings, You Are An Artist: A Practical Approach To Art.

the wonder of wonder