>>10740310Also OP, something else I've noticed in anime art is the constant striving among artists towards improvement in being able to better depict the idealized beauty they admire, theres no sour grapes among those artists they don't settle for "good enough" as much as western artists seem to, I think its because in chasing the perfect expression of beauty and especially that of the female form and nature it motivates and stimulates an artist to keep striving to better be able to express and capture that beauty, this is why the ancient Greeks and later Romans were able to produce statues of unparalleled beauty and complexity, sculpting soft skin, veils and ropes out of hard marble, and why European artists strove for realism to best depict nature in all her beauty and splendor, as well as the female form
When cameras rendered that pursuit "redundant" in the eyes of many, a crisis of purpose perhaps arose in Western art leading to postmodernism whereas in Japan it was different, they remained in the pursuit of capturing idealized beauty, something no camera could capture, it has to be created for it exists in the mind and the realm of ideal forms. Though I suppose western sci-fi and fantasy art could be said to be a similar outcome, think John Harris and Syd Mead, fantasy also had a place in western art but to a smaller degree than in Japanese I think.
