A mostly nonverbal man, he taught Bean both by example and by critiquing Bean’s work. Bean learned two important lessons from Robinson. The first was to develop an acute attention to detail, a pure devotion to each blade of grass. The second lesson was to paint from photographs and models. Reality could be abstracted or represented, even misrepresented, but never painted accurately from memory. Artists of every representational school had learned the importance of painting from life; the old masters had sketched from models directly onto canvas—or had their assistants do it—and contemporary photorealists traced from slides projected right onto their canvases. The art, Bean realized, came from the artist, not his methodology.