Illustration tells a story. Art may also do so, but in the telling may sometimes transcend the story. [A masterpiece is a work that by definition transcends the artist's intentions, and the problem with art schools - in which I have both studied and taught - is that they encourage students to consciously try to paint a masterpiece, which by definition cant be done.]
“I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.”