Creativity Quote by John Dyer

A painter confessing he “deliberately moved away from the coast” is really talking about training his eye by changing his world. John Dyer is remembered for landscapes, but this line casts him less as a passive recorder of scenery and more as an artist-engineer of experience: he leaves Cornwall not because it’s lacking, but because it’s too formative. Distance becomes method. Five years away is long enough to interrupt muscle memory, to make the familiar strange when he returns, to turn “the coast” from background into subject.

The phrase “consequently ended up” does sly work, pretending the separation was an accident of education while the next sentence admits agency: “I deliberately moved.” That pivot from inevitability to intention mirrors the broader 18th-century tension between vocation and self-invention. London, then, isn’t just a city; it’s the cultural machinery of the period - patronage, academies, taste-making, competition. Studying there means entering a market where identity is sharpened, even commodified. Cornwall’s coast suggests rootedness and local character; inland life implies variety, social mixing, and the kind of observational range a landscape painter would need to appeal to metropolitan buyers.

There’s also a quiet critique embedded in the “different way of life.” Dyer hints that place can trap you into a single palette of habits, assumptions, even compositions. Leaving is presented as artistic ethics: don’t paint only what you know; earn what you know by testing it against elsewhere. The subtext is that authenticity isn’t staying put - it’s returning with changed sight.