Nothing Left to Add

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, 
but when there is nothing left to take away"

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

While working on a pasta collage at school, Grafton completed his masterpiece when he declared,

"It's done, it only needed one thing!"

Clearly, Grafton figured out that it was easier to stop adding early on, rather than having to agonize later over what to take away.

This also reminded me of a scene from the movie "Six Degrees of Separation",  where Flan Kittredge provides the following anecdote during a dinner party, explaining the secret behind the great works of art:

I thought...dreamt...remembered...how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then, one day, he loses it. Loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting. I remembered asking my kids' second-grade teacher,

"Why are all your students geniuses? Look at the first grade--blotches of green and black. The third grade--camouflage. But your grade, the second grade, Matisses, every one. You've made my child a Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into the second grade. What is your secret?"

"I don't have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them."