On Copying Nature

I could not agree exactly more with French Poet and Critic Charles Baudelaire and his quote below:

"I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial."

-Charles Baudelaire (1821 -1867)

I never understood the value of painting still-life's, other than maybe some basic skill training with a brush or pencil. An evolved artist moves beyond a desire to recreate what they see, into reinterpreting what they see. Or creating something entirely new, using varying degrees of subjectivity or completely non-representational, conceptual approaches to expression. I don't buy into that myth that everything's already been done. As individuals we are unique and have the ability to share a completely original form of expression, whatever that may be, by limiting that vision to simply recreating images from concrete reality, is a travesty.