"beauty" in positive space vs negative space
november 6, 2025
this image is actually from at least a month ago. i drew it initially to try to put to words what i was feeling in the moment, then i came back to it later and decided it was probably gibberish. i often (but not always) doubt the validity of my own experiences fundamentally (not sure why) so i have a hard time discerning what is a "universal experience" and what isn't. so i don't know if what i have to say is always worth sharing (is this a waste of time for someone who might be reading, etc). well, when it isn't just me talking about my life, i mean. if you're choosing to read my personal experiences, i imagine you're fine with having your time wasted. we all got something like that.
anyway, i don't know if this an established concept in art technical terms or anything, i was just thinking about it and trying to understand the reasoning of my own feelings about the aeshetics i was experiencing. when i'm drawing, i really like simplified figures drawn in lines that feel like they flow effortlessly. like, when you're painting and you draw a really smooth brush stroke in a single swipe with a perfect shape. it feels good to look at it in a really literal sense. as in, dopamine firing into my brain.
obviously, i love every type of art from either end of abstraction to realism. there is literally infinite beauty to be found at every point between. and it's obviously much more than a simple sliding scale. many artists masterfully mix simplification into an otherwise heavily photo-real style. a good example of this is the artist (warning: 18+ and pornographic) meesh.
what i was trying to express with this is the idea of carving a simple shape into negative space with the least amount of brush strokes until it resembles a subject is a type of beauty, and that the inverse of that would be to continue that carving, adding, and refining until you get to the other end of the scale, which is photo-realism; the end of that scale being its own platonic ideal and expression of "beauty."
i'm really still not sure if this is gibberish or not.
also, this is a total departure from what i usually put here, i am aware. the thing is that it's slightly too embarrassing to put anywhere else because i don't want to look like a buffoon saying something that is either universally already known, or complete and total hogwash. i cannot discern if it is either!