Most secular modern and post-modern creatives intuit that the age of naturalism is long since over. But this discovery confronts us with the enormous, gaping hole that yawns, where we’d expect to find a metaphysical framework able to give coherence and moral order to non-naturalistic artworks…. I submit that this is the real sickness in contemporary culture: not the abandonment of naturalism as such, but the widespread (and highly politicised) refusal to allow the reality of any metaphysical substrate able to sustain the artistic depiction of forms, and ends.
In other words: Why are you making what you’re making? Truth has many layers; you don’t have to depict the obvious one. But I will submit that if you don’t begin by studying the obvious one, you will never be able to see what lies behind it. You may have your ideas of it, but you won’t be able to see it.