>>3591853All art has a single thing in common: framing. Life is filled with things that don't matter. Things that are random, incidental, and meaningless, and they are all flying past you a million miles an hour every second of your waking life. It makes everything seem mundane and forgettable. As an artist, your goal is to apply perspective in a way that narrows and guides the attention of your audience, removing them from the literal world into a figurative world that is occupied only by that which has meaning. Art is simply the act of identifying everything that is not absolutely essential to that experience and stripping it away until all you've got left is the juice of your moment. You don't even necessarily have to aestheticize it, although we usually do. Literature does it, paintings do it, sculpture does it, film does it, photography does it. Their framing devices are different, but they're all the same idea applied in different ways. If you want to make the most of your art form, learn to strip things down. You'll really start to feel your head open up once you try to start off thinking of things in terms of what you should be removing, rather than what you should be including. Find the thing that draws you in, figure out why you're being pulled to it, then think really hard about everything that can be removed without reducing the subject's effect on you. This is already fairly intuitive for creatively-minded people, but making it a conscious practice for a while will strengthen your intuition.
