Beauty In Simplicity

One can make pretty pictures full of detail, but to me the most satisfying art is a simple object against a blank field. For example, simple brush strokes depicting bamboo in a Chinese painting. Or in Japanese flower arranging, the vase and flower placed in an empty location with nothing near it.

In Asian art, beauty is revealed in masterful presentation of the simple and familiar.  Lifetimes are devoted to learning the qualities of something so the beauty of its essence can be presented. There is beauty in minimalist architecture, flower arranging, or brush strokes of calligraphy. When I toured through Japan, I watched the ritual precision of the Tea Ceremony: whisking the tea, turning the cup two quarter-turns, presenting the cup to the guest, and so on. The ceremony is always the same, and beauty is in the grace of execution as well as the variety of variable elements such as apposition of a round kettle to a square plate and in the variety of sound the boiling tea kettle makes: does it suggest water flowing over rocks in a creek, or rain in a forest?

In simplicity, subtle variations become major statements.  In one of my favorite movies, the 1953 film by Yasujiro Ozu, "Tokyo Story," an elderly couple are seen in a distant shot sitting silently on a stone wall watching the ocean. This single shot continues quite a long time. Eventually the woman slowly stands up - a routine movement - but then falters. That very subtle error is emotionally devastating: you know immediately that she is falling ill.

I just stood in my early morning springtime backyard and looked around. All the detail of grass, hedges, fence and so on fell away and my eyes saw only certain elements as if in a Japanese painting:  almost bare grapevines stretching across the trellis (with splashes of new-growth green); in the southern sky, the half moon hovered between wispy clouds; across the fence, a neighbor's small tree presented tiny buds of green on its dark branches.  An ability to see simple objects of beauty among the clutter can make one's day so much more pleasant. I recommend learning to do it.