Talking About Your Work

Quoted from Gang of Four, Cathy Horyn's article about Rei Kawakubo (of Comme des Garcons) for T Magazine:

For as much as journalists remark on Kawakubo’s cryptic silences, it is actually language — or verbosity — that inhibits the creative process, shutting off the possibilities of imagination. Katsuya Kamo, a hairstylist who works on Watanabe’s shows, said as much when he told me, "Western designers explain everything. ‘The clothes like this, the music and lighting like that.’ It gets complicated.” Watanabe, by contrast, says almost nothing, but that refusal, Kamo said, leaves the hairstylist room to exercise his own imagination.

This reminds me of something that I hated about studying art. People were always asking you what your art was "about." Often I was driven to paint something without really know what it was about, and I would either have to make up something, or later, I found that I was led to create work that I wasn't that excited about but that I could explain. As a result, I was very unhappy with my senior VES thesis at college.