An artist's initial broad stroke is always most impactful, and obsessively adding layer upon layer of paint to fill in details often diminishes the painting's aura. When an aura is lost, it is impossible to get back.
Interpretation
Artistic expression should focus on impactful simplicity rather than excessive detail.
Ryuichi Sakamoto emphasizes that the initial bold strokes of an artist's work carry the most emotional weight and impact. As layers of detail are added to the artwork, the original aura or essence can be diminished, making it challenging to recover the initial vibrancy and spirit that captivated viewers in the first place.
In practice
In a speech about creativity at an art gala.
In the old days, people shared music; they didn't care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.
The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.
I'm just delighted to be living, to be able to have a simple conversation, to feel a ray of sunlight on my skin and listen to the breeze move through the leaves of a tree.
Conceptually, I am open to mistakes - errors, actually. I do play lots of wrong notes while I am making some music, and a mistake or a wrong note is like a gift for me: 'Oh, wow, an unknown sound or an unknown harmony. I didn't know about this.'
But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed.
My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.
I've wanted to design golf courses ever since I was a kid. I suppose it comes from the way I've played the game. To find the proper way to play any hole, I've always begun by asking myself what the architect has tried to do with it.
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
I believe that perfection handicaps cinema.
I wanted to write about what we were doing at the French Laundry, the recipes and the stories.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.