Every artist knows in his heart that he is saying something to the public. Not only does he want to say it well, but he wants it to be something that has not been said before. He hopes that the public will listen and understand ----he wants to teach them, and he wants them to learn from him. What visional artists like painters want to teach is easy to make out but difficult to explain, because painters translate their experience into shapes and colors, not words. They seem to feel that a certain choice of shapes and colors, out of the countless billions possible, is very interesting for them and worth showing to us. Without their work we should never have noticed these particular shapes and colors, or have felt the delight which they brought to the artists. Most artists take their shapes and colors from the world of nature and from human bodies in movement and at rest; their choices show that these aspects of the world are worth looking at, that they contain beautiful sights. Modern artists might say that they only choose subjects that provide an interesting pattern, that there is nothing more in it. Yet even they do not choose totally without thinking about the character of their subjects. If one painter chooses to paint a decaying  leg and another a lake in moonlight, each of them is directing our attention to a certain aspect of the world . Each painter is telling us something, showing us something, emphasizing  something - all of which means that, consciously or unconsciously, he is trying to teach us. It is hard to explain what a painter is saying because    _   .
most painters do not express themselves well a painter uses unusual words and phrases a painter use shapes and colors instead of words many painters do not say anything