The most important thing an artist must convey, to be truly worthy, is thought. “Straight from the horse’s mouth. You have to know when you succeed and when you fail and why. Know thyself in fact. In short, you have to think,” says Gulley Jimson.
“The Horse’s Mouth” is the last part of a trilogy written by Joyce Cary, an artist, poet, and writer lightly mentored by George Orwell. It could be called a sequel to James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in that Cary’s portrait depicts the artist as an adult, yet still individualized and disconnected from the norms of society and devoted to his art.