Why isn’t there at least one artist in all of the world painting today whose ability equals Rembrandt’s, and who uses that great gift to evoke the depths of compassion for the human condition as Rembrandt did? For in my opinion there isn’t such a one around. By extension, why isn’t there a Rubens or a Velazquez or a Vermeer operating now? My choices are personally arbitrary, or course — yet why don’t we have a Rembrandt contributing to  our current reality? Just those four artists, whose lives spanned a period of only 98 years (from 1577 to 1675), explored human insight in powerful ways. To link the “great masters” with our species’ reincarnational intents and drives, opens up a new field for understanding my question, and a very large and intriguing one indeed.

Our many excellent “modern” painters inevitably work within a different world ambience. Our species’ art is just no longer the same — a fact I both applaud and mourn. However, I do feel that in the course of ordinary time we have either lost certain qualities of art or no longer stree them.