Art & Creativity Quote by George Sutherland

A judge boasting about defying the odds in art is a neat little paradox: the voice of the establishment borrowing the diction of the outsider. Sutherland frames the world as a chorus of “they” - anonymous gatekeepers, conventional wisdom, maybe even the genteel class that treated art as pastime rather than profession. Then he snaps the frame shut with a contrarian engine: prohibition becomes provocation. It’s not a plea for inspiration; it’s a declaration of appetite for resistance.

The line works because it performs a legal mind’s favorite move: it sets up a presumption (“the average person can’t”) and then introduces the exception as a matter of will. “Average” is doing quiet violence here. It’s a statistical label masquerading as destiny, the kind of supposedly neutral judgment that institutions love because it sounds empirical while policing ambition. Sutherland’s retort doesn’t refute the economic reality of art; it refuses to let that reality define his identity. He makes the conflict psychological, not financial: the true opponent is the suggestion of limits.

Context matters. A late-19th/early-20th century judge lived in a culture that prized respectability and stable income, especially for professionals tasked with embodying order. For someone like Sutherland, pursuing art isn’t just risky; it’s socially dissonant. The subtext: I know the rules intimately, and I still choose transgression - not criminal, but imaginative. It’s ambition as rebellion, spoken in the calm cadence of authority.