Though his contemporaries frequently celebrated Arthur McInnes for what they perceived as a reckless, impulsive brushwork, McInnes himself maintained a starkly different view of his creative process. In his personal journals, he described his method not as an act of spontaneous inspiration, but as an agonizingly deliberate exercise in geometric division. He wrote of spending days calculating the precise spatial ratios of his horizons before a single pigment was mixed. Yet, despite this clinical preparation, his private correspondence reveals a man consumed by a profound intellectual insecurity, constantly fearing that his reliance on mathematical grids was a sign of artistic cowardice rather than discipline. To the public, however, McInnes presented the face of an unshakeable, even arrogant, theorist who dismissed all traditional landscape techniques as obsolete relics of a bygone era.
According to the passage, McInnes's private correspondence explicitly reveals that he possessed which of the following traits?
- AA reckless impulsivity in his physical approach to painting
- BAn unshakeable arrogance and disdain for traditional techniques
- A deep-seated intellectual insecurity regarding his own artistic methodsAnswer
- DA profound aversion to calculating spatial ratios and grids