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KISS: Keep it Simple Stupid. This does not refer to the face painted rock band, which - although renowned for being simple and stupid (just an opinion) - is a different thing entirely.

KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. It's a meme, a teaching tool, and a design principal. Doesn't matter if you're designing a skyscraper or a toothbrush: simplicity is the goal and unneeded complexity is the enemy. The saying is attributed to an aeronautical engineer named Kelly Johnson, who in the mid 20th century participated in the design of aircraft such as the SR-71 Blackbird and the U-2. There's no proof that he originated the saying - the name of that genius is probably lost to history - but he made it his mantra and thus became the person Wikipedia mentions most prominently in connection with the concept. 

Notwithstanding the high tech aerospace vibe, keeping things simple is not a new concept, to wit:

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." (Leonardo da Vinci)

"Less is more." (Mies Van Der Rohe)

"Brevity is the soul of wit." (Shakespeare)

"Our life is frittered away by detail...simplify, simplify." (Thoreau)

Two years ago, I titled a blog entry "Occam's Razor," which is the fancy (pronounced "foncy") way of saying Keep it Simple Stupid. In that bout of word processed diarrhea, I discussed simplicity in the naming of paintings. 

Moving beyond simplicity: in this blog, and this one too, I discussed being driven to paint certain images multiple times until I achieved satisfaction with the way they turn out.  And in two November 2021 blogs, I yammered on about trying to save a painting from what turned out to be an inevitable pathway to piece-of-shitness.

Putting all of these themes together, here is a second try at Virginia's Afton Mountain Vineyard with mist in the valley behind it. In painting it I attempted to follow the KISS principle, it is an example of my being driven at times to try try again, and as for success, well, (to me at least) it did not turn out to be an abject P.O.S.

In this painting I took the advice of every art instructor ever, which is that you don't have to paint every leaf on a tree for people to know it's a tree. I took it to such an extreme that I didn't get fussed about even the trees, let alone leaves. The trees became random blobs. I kept the foreground simple and the background simpler. The drawing under the paint omitted all but the most basic partitions, to remove temptation to capture this nuance or that widget or some trick of the light over there. The November attempt was slapdash, which sometimes works but didn't in that case. The sole guiding principal for this January version was to Keep It Simple Stupid. 

I'm glad I took the KISS approach. Because I like the way this one turned out.