Most painters know that they a re dealing with relative degrees of abstraction; whatever they do depends on vision and must be translated into other senses. Paintings can never directly reproduce the taste or smell of fruit, the touch and texture of yielding flesh, or the note in an infant’s voice that makes the milk begin to flow in a mother’s breasts. Yet both language and painting symbolize such things; sometimes so effectively that they elicit responses close to those evoked by the original stimuli. If the artist is very successful and their viewer shares the artist’s culture, the viewer can replace what is missing in the painting. Both the painter and the writer know that the essence of their craft is to provide the reader, the listener, or the viewer with properly selected cues that are not only congruent with the events depicted but consistent with the unspoken language and culture of their audience. It is the artist’s task to remove obstacles that stand between his audience and the events he describes. In so doing, he abstracts from nature those parts which, if properly organized, can stand for the whole and constitute a more forceful, uncluttered statement than the layman might make for himself. In other words, one of the principal functions of the artist is to help the layman order his cultural universe.
— Edward T. Hall. The Hidden Dimension: An anthropologist examines man’s use of space in public and in private. 1969.
