What we should learn from artists

Whenever possible utilize sunset, sunrise, rainy days, mistiness -- any transitory effect of nature that bespeaks luminous coloration or a sense of softness.

In general, I love a focal plane that favors the center of interest, and allows mid-distance and distant areas to remain blurry.

To distance oneself from things until there is much in them that one no longer sees and much that the eye must add [Vieles hinsehen muss] in order to see them at all, … or to look at them through coloured glass or in the light of a sunset, or to give them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent: all this we should learn from artists…

Star filters used sparingly, but an overall "gauzy" look preferable to hard edge realism.

Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of first nature removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and employed for distant views—it is supposed to beckon towards the remote and immense. In the end, when the work is complete, it is clear how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small…

The concept of beauty. I get rid of the "ugly parts" in my paintings. It would be nice to utilize this concept as much as possible. Favor shots that feature older buildings, ramshackle, careworn structures and vehicles, and a general sense of homespun simplicity and reliance on beautiful settings.

(Thomas Kinkade, memorandum, 8 & 10; Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 295; Kinkade, op. cit., 4; Nietzsche, op. cit. 290; Kinkade, op. cit., 14.)