Simple art is the best art.
Learning when to phone it in.
“Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy”
― Isaac Newton
I don’t know about you but there is currently a lot of stuff filling up my brain. Wildfires, financial worries, anxiety about school, carefully-made plans being thwarted by pandemics, trying to remember masks and hand sanitizer, health concerns, longing for friends and family, underemployment.
And I have a serious mouse problem.
My brain is not functioning at peak performance, no matter how much coffee it is fed. So I don’t want to make any complicated art full of nuanced color schemes and thoughtful patterns, elaborate dreamscapes or perfect recreations of a ring-necked pheasant. I want to make simple, satisfying and, yes, beautiful art that helps me relax and express myself and does not make matters worse.
Simple art to me just means something that didn’t kill you to make but is just as powerful as the more laborious, time-consuming, all-consuming masterpiece you started working on last February and haven’t been able to return to because your brain is tired and your soul is crushed.
Don’t spiral in self-loathing over this delay in your masterpiece. Epic art is only some of the art. Make something easy. Focus on a line, a single color, a simple shape.
There is no better model of the power of simple art than Matisse, the man who painted this complicated, masterful painting “The Red Room”.
The Red Room harmony in red 1908, Henri Matisse, The Hermitage museum in Amsterdam , Amsterdam, Netherlands
As Matisse aged he was physically limited in what he could do and could not longer do his large paintings so he turned to simple paintings and collages that focused on shape and color interaction.
Matisse at the Hôtel Régina, Nice, c. 1952. Photo: Lydia Delectorskaya. © 2014 Succession H. Matisse via MOMA.org
Matisse's Violet Leaf on Orange Background (1947). Photograph: © Succession Henri Matisse/DACS 2014
The Necklace. May 1950. Ink on paper, 20 7/8 x 16 1/8" (52.8 x 40.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection, 1978
After all, Matisse is a man who said:
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
The plant, fruit and flower paintings of Ellsworth Kelly are also great sources of inspiration.
Ellsworth Kelly, Apples, Paris, 1949
Painter Clementine Hunter is famous for putting together some pretty complicated scenes, full of people, symbols, animals and scenery, like this painting called “Uncle Tom’s World”, which required lot of attention to composition, space and color.
But even she sometimes needed to just chill out and paint some zinnias in a pot. But, of course, all of these painting masters might have been working with a more simplified goal or approach, but they couldn’t help but produce masterpieces just the same.
CLEMENTINE HUNTER (1886 - 1988) Untitled (Zinnias in a Yellow Pitcher). Oil on board, circa 1970.
Clementine Hunter (American, 1886/1887-1988). "Zinnias in a Blue Pot". Gouache on paper. c1973.
What about the work of Hasegawa Tohaku, a legendary painter from 1500s Japan?
Pine Trees, Silk Screen Painting
Or his perfect depiction of the leaves of a weeping willow:
Willows in Four Seasons, Paper Screen by Hasegawa Tohaku
Simple art is not easy. Knowing when to pull in the reins and not apply that additional color and not add that last tree or line or wrinkle or eyelash is something that it takes a long time to master. Simplicity doesn’t come to the impatient. But it is easier on the brain to remove some choices, which leaves room for more emotion, more heart, more calm.
You can find inspiration in the whittling down of a work off art in poetry, like one of my favorite poems by Frank O’Hara, a simple bit of storytelling about joy that could not have been easy to write called “Today” :
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
Or the poem This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
What simple art can you make today? Maybe take your smallest brush, the brush that requires no energy to lift, gently dip it into your black paint and do a line drawing of your cat. Or use only two shades of yellow and languidly paint nothing more than a yellow moon in a yellow sky.
Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up over what you do or do not make; this is 2020, and we’re all doing the best we can.