100 Words: Sketching teaches

Sketching teaches the elements of art, art as elemental, art as exclusion: I draw the absolute minimum needed to suggest something larger, more complex, more dependent upon the world. How many budding branches are in that vase? How many bricks in the neighbor building are visible from my kitchen window? Quantity becomes quality when what’s omitted guarantees what’s absent; the void on the page, the presence or absence of color, of fine detail, presents as evidence of things not seen. Feebly I suggest, with lines more or less crooked, some minimal fraction of the deserted world that meets my eyes.