In 1929 Mary Cecil Allen, an Australian painter and art teacher living in New York, wrote a book called Painters of the Modern Mind. The preface opens with a question put to a hypothetical artist: 'Why do you paint?' The answer given is, 'Because things I see excite me and I want to reproduce this feeling'.

This seems simple. Nothing could be more direct or more simple than this, could it? The artist bursts into drawing just as a singer or a bird might burst into song. The beauty of the painter's answer is its acceptance of the primary place of emotion in the production of art. But we sense at once that there is something missing in this answer, or perhaps in our understanding of what the artist means.