Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.

Work that loses contact with the real thing drifts wherever fashion blows it. Once you are copying other people’s copies rather than looking at what is actually in front of you, there is nothing left to correct against, and each season’s cleverness becomes as good as any other. Observation is the anchor: the actual face, the actual sound, the way the thing really behaves. Without it, style is all that remains.

Go and look at the primary thing again, whatever your version of it is. Spend an hour with the source rather than with commentary about it. Let what you find contradict something you were confident of.