“I remember standing on a
street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village,
waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, “Look.” I looked
and all I saw was water. And he said, “Look again,” which I did, and I saw oil
on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to
me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw.
Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that
experience, you see differently.” James Baldwin, in a 1984 Paris Review
interview
A Yorkshire Lane in November, 1873, John Atkinson Grimshaw