Lignes de fuite - 4 (Mervyn Peake)

"All artists are inspired by beauty, but not all artists see beauty in the same places or in the same way. For Mervyn Peake, it was the line that inspired him, rather than colour, tone, or texture. [...]

This ability not merely to see but also to render on paper the subtlety of the outline of the human figure made him acutely aware of how tiny a difference separates beauty from ugliness.[...]

Seeing how rarely the human face or figure attains perfection gave Peake the potential to be a caricaturist, or a cynic; instead he lovingly played with the borderline and created grotesques. That he was quite aware of this is illustrated by his comment on Fuchsia: She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful (from Titus Groan)"

(G.Peter Winnington in "Lines of Flight - Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Work")