The Siren of Easy Virtue

Sometimes great art inspires because it looks so simple

Bardelys hadn’t thought it out properly, when he had taken up the topic of the ‘Sirens of Art,’ and the reasons why we are inspired to try our hand at any art form ourselves.

Oh, he hadn’t recanted any of his previous notions. But there was an image haunting him, that would lead him to a new aspect of the whole process.

The image came in Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, by Blake Bell. It was a reproduction of a panel from a 1950s comic story Ditko had drawn. The panel looked down on a man standing in a square of light amidst darkness. The light was canted, and the design was bold, striking, and simple.

After returning to him a few times, the image finally struck the proper note in Bardelys’ mind. The key to it was its simplicity.

Not all great art is simple, but not all great art is complex, either. There is a kind of great art that is simple, and a class of great artists who make their art simple, deceptively so.

Some of those old panels by Ditko look so easy to draw!

There were later panels from the early and mid 1960s, from Ditko’s run on Dr Strange. Nobody had ever created such a strange universe of dimensions and timescapes as Ditko had. Even in the 40-odd years since Ditko left the strip, none of the exceptionally-talented artists and illustrators who had tried their hand at the strip had captured it.

And yet the dimensions Ditko suggested were drawn with only a few squiggly lines, a rectangle, an oblong, sets of parallel lines. Simple. Any kid could trace them. But those talented artists had not been able to duplicate the magic in them.

It wasn’t, Bardelys now knew, the stylization alone that lured young would-be talesmen and artists and musicians to want to follow the masters in their fields. It was also the deceptive simplicity with which so many masters cloaked their art.

It was like the answer to a riddle or a puzzle. Once you know the answer, it seems so simple a child should be able to figure it out.

But humming a tune you have heard is not the same thing as composing that melody; copying a drawing is not the same thing as originating it; retelling a tale is not the same thing as inventing it.

It only seems as though it should be as easy.

And so the Siren of Easy Virtue had, Bardelys realized, captured the hearts of many of the young. Indeed, she might have lured more hearts than all the rest of her Sisters had managed to net.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, August 3, 2008)