True beauty, elegance, and function roots from simplicity.
Many individuals in the world try to make things more complicated or complex than the things need to be.
Why do they do this? In order to confuse you, feel superior to you, and perhaps protect their job.
What I’m trying to do as a photographer and visual artist is to make pictures that inspire, motivate, and empower my viewer. I want people to look at my picture and feel joy, elation in the soul and spirit, and to feel inspired to make their own pictures.
I feel the best way to do this is to be simple and direct as a visual artist.
Making simple yet dynamic pictures is very hard. You must distill a scene into the purest shapes and forms, yet still have the image to have dynamic composition, an edge, grit, and soul.
How to make more simple pictures
To make more simple pictures, distill the person or scene. Remove clutter, and distractions. You’re a visual sculptor — the whole world is your block of marble. Your job is to CARVE out and chip away the superfluous in your piece of marble, to uncover the beautiful statue within.
Lately, in the spirit of Piet Mondrian, I’ve been distilling my images to the absolute basics. To the extreme edges of simplicity. It has been a good exercise for me — to better understand my color theories, my compositions, and the impression or image I give to the viewer.
I’ve been using the iPad and Procreate app to create layers of colors, and lines — to deconstruct, analyze, and better underdone my images. Like a post-mortem examination by a surgeon. And as modern photographers, we are visual surgeons.
So friend, in your artistic vision: seek to be simple. There is more difficulty in being simple than complex and complicated.
Keep it simple,
ERIC
