hit by a rock

You can do a lot with educated eyes. What I mean by “educated” is simply how pictures, among other things, can teach you about how to see, and what’s visible when you look hard enough or most openly. At a certain point, past the shock of seeing, you want to do something about it. That’s what makes an artist begin being an artist in the first place. At one time or another you get hit like with a rock. I have a theory that the course of anyone’s artistic life is determined largely by the attempt to retrieve that original rock, or what the painters used to call The Dream. [14]

—Bill Berskon, “Poetry and Painting,” Sudden Address (Cuneiform Press 2007)