from The Carpenter's Pencil: A Novel of the Spanish Civil War by Manuel Rivas:
“It was nothing out of this world. What suggested the sea was the lighthouse, Hercules Tower. The sea was the shadows. I didn’t want to paint it. I wanted it to be heard like a litany. The sea is impossible to paint. A painter in his right mind, for all the realism he would like to introduce, knows that you cannot transfer the sea on to a canvas. There was one, an Englishman–Turner he was called–who did it very well. His shipwreck of a slave traders’ boat is the most astonishing image of the sea that exists. In it, you can hear the sea. In the shout of the slaves. Slaves who possibly knew no more about the sea than the rolling of the hold. I should like to paint the sea from within, but not having drowned, in a diving suit. To go down with a canvas, paintbrushes and the rest, as I’m told a Japanese painter did.
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