My answer in my illustration has been to allow the materials to speak as directly as possible. Does an apple taste best bitten directly into, sliced thinly with a light squeeze of lemon, or baked for an hour with nutmeg, sugar, cinnamon, flour and egg whites? Maybe the answer is that there is a time for all of those things. There are sauces that contain endless lists of ingredients, and there are sauces that contain only a few but in exquisite proportion. If you happen to be trying to say something about lightness, then the art should be light as well. So, if you labor heavily upon a work of art, then part of what you are saying is, this is a heavy work of art. It is an offhand remark of Wordsworth’s that helped me when I needed a new way to move forward: “The matter always comes out of the manner.” How you say something has direct bearing on what you say. Perhaps he means that there has been an imposition of too much of my will upon the material with which I was working. “There is too much sweat in it,” is how my friend, the artist Vladimir Radunsky, would put it. But I found that the harder I tried, the more tired whatever it was I was working on looked.
In the early days I was laying it on as thickly as I could, trying very hard to get it right. Hmm, I’m not sure minimal is such a complimentary term, but I’ll accept it. I’m sometimes asked about my general approach to illustration, which has over the years come to be described as minimal.
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