Giorgio Morandi

I was lucky enough to see an exhibit of Morandi's paintings at the Met recently. He worked with a very limited palette, painting landscapes and more interesting to me, still lives that portray a small group of objects in slight, but fascinating variations.

"I believe,"[Morandi] said, "that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree."