The greater the artist the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. "As a painter, I become more lucid in front of Nature," Paul Cezanne wrote to his son in 1906, the last year of his life. "But that realization of my sensations is always very painful. I cannot attain the intensity which unfolds to my senses. I don't have that magnificent richness of coloration which animates nature."
As Picasso famously said, it's Cezanne's anxiety that is so interesting. But not only the anxiety. There are anxious mediocrities too. It's the achievement that...
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