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Maybe there are a thousand painters in America you could take seriously, but I don���t know if there are a thousand such writers here. I don���t know. But I do think that when you write about painting without involving yourself with the life of the painter, I���m not sure the criticism has the same value as it may when you are reviewing a book or doing a piece of literary criticism. If you have 10 people reading a book and you have 10 people looking at a given painting, an important painting, let���s say, the variations in reaction to the book are going to be much more circumscribed than the variations received from looking at the painting. Painting does not lend itself to critical language. Rather it���s a springboard to all sorts of sensations, emotions, metaphors, indulgences, new concepts ��� whatever ��� but it���s as if each of these people is exploded out from the work. That is the excitement of painting. You go to see a painting to be shifted, startled, moved into new awareness. Whereas, very often with a work of literature what you are looking for is more resonance than one���s own thought. To a degree that we learn about the life of someone else, which you can get out of a good book, we understand the life we would otherwise never have come near to. So we are larger, more resonant within. CB: When you were doing your interpretive biography of Picasso you must have thought hard about the issue you just articulated ��� the limits of what you can say, verbally, about a visual experience. When did it occur to you that you had the ability to do that book, especially your ability to substantiate your assertions in actual descriptions of Picasso���s paintings? That, to me, was the accomplishment: locating your insights in the work itself. NM: Thirty years before I started that book I signed a contract to do a book on Picasso. It never went anywhere. I ended up writing a HYLAND 25