Offered as confirmation of his own technique: read the life of Da Vinci, who said that was how he got all his paintings - when he wanted to paint he would look into a mottled wall, and all these people came out dressed in costumes, and they were not paid models. He also drew the model of the aeroplane before the Wright brothers were thought of. Neville's own version: take a table or a rug, do not look at it but focus beyond it with the eyes partially open and try to look below its surface, and suddenly the whole thing becomes alive and people appear in its depths. Take a wall in your home, or the fireplace stones; they become so familiar, and then the wall changes its face, and it changes with your mood. There is nothing dead in this world.