To understand the artistic tradition of one artist learning from another, you have to understand artists and their problems. Solving these problems is the actual act of creation. These problems recur from generation to generation, even if each generation attempts to solve them in a different way.

Along the way, the artist achieves partial success, failure, and if they are lucky a masterpiece. Some like Pietro Mascagni achieved greatness only once. In all of them it is a process.

In the end it is a psychological process, where the artist exposes their inner life, sometimes only indirectly, or in a disguised form to the world. Some, for example, Edvard Munch, or Walt Whitman are more obvious. Others such as Baudelaire or Emily Dickinson, are more subtle. The greatest, such as Shakespeare, often disappear entirely.

The viewer’s, reader’s, or the listener’s task is to see how the artistic technique is used to expose the artist’s world without being too distracted by how the effect was achieved.