I've learned from experience that if a good thing is good, it must remain good to sustain my interest, or else it is wasted potential. I have a good little gallery here, and though I have pushed the limits of how far it is about the work in comparison to how much it is about me, I am still proud of the work I do. It is personable, teaches me a lot about myself, teaches you a lot about me, and improves all those who take the time to read it.
But I realise that writing long and with a great deal of strain is a task for somebody with more time than I have, and so I have forced myself to apply two limitations. The first one is for this week - it's orange week, because I coincidentally have a bunch of different slightly-interesting pictures that couldn't carry an article by themselves and yet go perfect in a series. The second restriction is indefinite; I'm limiting myself to six paragraphs of exposition from now on.
One of my favourite mottos is “less is more,” and I can bang on about the philosophy of art it adopts, stripping away all extraneous details and getting to the core of the message. For writing, it's saying the right words and the right amount of words and no more. With art, it's never adding a stroke that doesn't need to exist. It's understanding that all that must belong in a work must justify its existence within it. If it does not fit, it belongs somewhere else. If it is not brilliant, it must be made so, or be taken out. In essence, perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.
I should have realised way back in the day, when I did short, episodic reviews of Haruhi, that a good writer is able to work within their confines and create meaningful work regardless - like how Seth Godin can write a hundro and still be relevant. There is certainly room for the well-researched and intensely-written article, such as what Art of Manliness does so consistently excellent. But for someone who works alone, I must be practical and limit myself.
Such is the case with this brilliant work by... Hamdanmourad. Less is more, mate.
It's rare that a piece just falls into place, where the composition is so nice and the colours so muted that hardly anything at all needs to be done for the bloody thing. A piece that is simultaneously cool as well as being easy to work with is a piece that gets a top commendation from the producer side of me, but the pragmatist side of me still understands that there must be some emotional undercurrent to a work to make me, say, pin it up against my bedside, like those blokes who take anime bedspreads and nail them to their roof.
But it is cool, with the same hot-hot colours evoking the cool-cool desert, a tasty contradiction, and so hard to master. It can be traditionally defined as “a good picture,” but art is itself a bunch of traditions, all at once, being broken and rebuilt every minute of every day. Sometimes those traditions are right; without them, we wouldn't know what's good and what's bad. A good artist can follow the rules. But it's the best artists who know which rules to break, and which ones to keep.
Date: 2017–03–25. Size: 5,168 bytes. Colours: 8.
Upscaled Dimensions: 256×256. Original Dimensions: 256×256.