An artist's initial broad stroke is always most impactful, and obsessively adding layer upon layer of paint to fill in details often diminishes the painting's aura. When an aura is lost, it is impossible to get back.
Interpretation
Artistic expression should focus on impactful simplicity rather than excessive detail.
Ryuichi Sakamoto emphasizes that the initial bold strokes of an artist's work carry the most emotional weight and impact. As layers of detail are added to the artwork, the original aura or essence can be diminished, making it challenging to recover the initial vibrancy and spirit that captivated viewers in the first place.
In practice
In a speech about creativity at an art gala.
In the old days, people shared music; they didn't care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.
The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.
I'm just delighted to be living, to be able to have a simple conversation, to feel a ray of sunlight on my skin and listen to the breeze move through the leaves of a tree.
Conceptually, I am open to mistakes - errors, actually. I do play lots of wrong notes while I am making some music, and a mistake or a wrong note is like a gift for me: 'Oh, wow, an unknown sound or an unknown harmony. I didn't know about this.'
I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.
As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air.
Words are like gems to me... imagine yourself walking through a very shallow stream and picking up beautiful stones that catch your eye... that's what names are like for me.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.