"The materia prima is exquisitely, brilliantly beautiful to the person who can understand it for what it is. In the midst of its rotting pile, it shines at the "true philosopher" with secret light. The idea that everything begins in squalor and refuse is an old one. Yeats said ..."in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." ...Visual art is the same, and that is one of its strengths. Artists cannot begin antiseptic abstraction, like philosophers with their notepads, or theoretical physicists at their blackboards. They have to begin in media res...so it is the artist's task to discern somehow what is worth saving, and what can be transformed, and finally to crawl out of the morass."

--What Painting Is James Elkins