I was trying to be slightly humorous in my prior post, but if you want to know the truth, I have been thinking for a long time about the concept of beauty and how to adjust painterly technique to enhance that quality. My current thinking is that beauty is essentially a fluid concept and strength/ truth is essentially a solid concept. Since Paxton loved to paint beautiful women, he used words like 'flow' and 'swim' as metaphors for the quality he sought to express that went beyond the rendering or the more photographic, literal qualities of reality.
I don't know if the paragraph above makes a lot of sense; in fact, I will probably come back and change it later.
