Aphorisms for Artists by Walter Darby Bannard

Aphorism #29

Good art carries a high density of choice.

Our culture is a massive structure of accumulated human judgments going back tens of thousands of years. Every work of art is a tiny tip of a huge cultural iceberg. It is what an artist starts with.

Then there is looking at other art, learning technique, working out a method and trying to make the art as good as possible.

Mondrian struggled for 20 years, through realism, Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism before coming to his simple geometric paintings. There may not be much in them, but there is a hell of a lot behind them.

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