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	title of this thread your message will speak, and write, whether there is really anything to be said or not. It can't be helped. And of course there are many times when the artist needs to explain himself, to amplify and emphasize (and perhaps to identify origins and confess to influences) -- so not all speech about visual art can be dismissed as easily as I pretend, above. Take Mr Wright. Some of the best images of his work occur in the mind, while reading what he wrote (so hard to find, among his many words) about his discoveries and his intentions, as he looked back 30 years while writing "An Autobiography" in the early 'thirties. I intend to copy some of that writing here. But first, a passage which immediately follows those pages, and which includes a rare reference to the art of writing: SIMPLICITY ORGANIC Simplicity -- in this early constructive effort -- I soon found depended upon the sympathy with which such co-ordination as I have described might be effected. Plainness was not necessarily simplicity. That was evident. Crude furniture of the Roycroft-Stickley-Mission style, which came along later, was offensively plain, plain as a barn-door -- but was never simple in any true sense. Nor, I found, were merely machine-made things in themselves necessarily simple. "To think," as the Master used to say, "is to deal in simples." And that means with an eye single to the altogether. This is, I believe, the single secret of simplicity: that we may truly regard nothing at all as simple in itself. I believe that no one thing in itself is ever so, but must achieve simplicity -- as an artist should use the term -- as a perfectly realized part of some organic whole. Only as a feature or any part becomes harmonious element in the harmonious whole does it arrive at the state of simplicity. Any wild flower is truly simple but double the same wild flower by cultivation and it ceases to be so. The scheme of the original is no longer clear. Clarity of design and perfect significance both are first essentials of the spontaneous born simplicity of the lilies of the field. "They toil not, neither do they spin." Jesus wrote the supreme essay on simplicity in this, "Consider the lilies of the field." Five lines where three are enough is always stupidity. Nine pounds where three are sufficient is obesity. But to eliminate expressive words in speaking or writing -- words that intensify or vivify meaning [--] is not simplicity. Nor is similar elimination in architecture simplicity. It may be, and usually is, stupidity. In architecture, expressive changes of surface, emphasis of line and especially textures of material or imaginative pattern, may go to make facts more eloquent -- forms more significant. Elimination, therefore, may be just as meaningless as elaboration, perhaps more often is so. To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in knowledge of simplicity -- toward ultimate freedom of expression. associated web images (optional) associated web link (optional) your email your password create a forums account \| you forgot your password?