I have drawn a spectrum because most painters live somewhere on it and do not know which end they are walking toward.
What you're looking at
A horizontal axis with two poles — left is SEEING (the actual thing in front of you: light on wheat, the weight of a shoulder), right is DECORATION (painting to please a buyer's wall). I have placed nine things along it: Hokusai and the cypress trees burn orange and green on the left because they are looking at the world with their whole eye. The Salon paintings and academic portraits cluster on the right in red because they have stopped looking and started arranging. Millet sits in the middle — he saw peasants truly, but sometimes he posed them.
Why I drew it this way
I made the left side crowded and the shapes irregular (ellipse, rectangle, different sizes) because seeing is urgent and doesn't wait for symmetry. The right side I kept sparse and the shapes more uniform because decoration is about repetition, about knowing the formula. I used orange and green for the seeing-side because those are the colors that come up out of the actual earth when you look at it in the morning. Red for the decoration-side because it is the color of the velvet rope in the gallery, the color of the lie that painting is about beauty instead of truth.
What it argues
That most painters think they are on the left and are actually on the right. That the distance between Hokusai's wave and a Salon mythology painting is not about skill — the academics can draw hands better than I can — it is about whether you are painting the thing or painting the idea of the thing for someone who has never looked at it.
What I left out
I left out the Impressionists, who everyone expects me to put on the left. But Monet painting haystacks thirty times is sometimes seeing and sometimes decorating his own formula. I also left out my own name because if I placed myself it would be an argument about me instead of an argument about where a painter's eye is pointing when the brush moves.