@design_RG Excellent share... ruins the joke a bit, but jokes are sometimes intentionally naive :)

Though there is still a sort of simplicity to japanese art. Some may say it takes less talent, I dunno, I just see it as its own style and in some ways even more beautiful for its simplicity and uniqueness.

@freemo Sorry if the joke was a bit diluted by my comment, but I felt a bit uneasy about it.

Some people might see it in a less flattering way, as a meme putting down one region's art as opposed to other (with high art examples provided, and a less flattering one in the lower part of the image).

While the mastery of the Western art in the examples is undeniable, Eastern art has wonderful works as well.

This was the motive of my posting a comment with a good example - that gravure is superb, and culturally I think it has the added advantage of being reproduced and sold, unlike the one off oil paintings from the Western masters which will hang on a Museum at best, or in some rich person's collection, and have much less accessibility.

@design_RG No need to be sorry, It was a good perspective to add.

@freemo @design_RG
Japanese art, much like almost every other aspect of Japanese culture and society, is heavily influenced by almost a thousand years of the philosophy of Zen.

Zen originally was Japan's adoption of China's Cha'an Buddhism, which ITSELF is a mixing of India's Mahayana Buddhism with the native Chinese philosophy of Taoism.

Like most branches of Mahayana, Zen embraces sunyata ('emptiness' or 'the void') as a powerful, necessary force unto itself -- which. This shows itself in so much of both ancient and modern Japanese artwork, architecture, poetry, and the like.

There's also Zen artwork embracing the whole "flowing of the energies of life and nature" from the no-mind/no-thought concepts from Taoism's creative quietism -- which does NOT mean "not thinking" but more like "getting out of your own way" and "INTELLIGENTLY going with the flow, working with it as it works with you until you and the flow become as one" as a third option between "fighting the flow, thereby tiring yourself out and drowning" and "nihilistically letting the flow drag you around until it smashes your head against a rock or throws you down a waterfall".

To keep this post from becoming a multi-page thesis on the ins and outs of Zen and Taoism, here are a few examples of the mixings of both sunyata's and Taoism's celebrations of the beauty of emptiness and the positivity of nothingness -- as opposed to a Westerner's fundamental distate of 'nothing', seeing it as somehow a bad thing; Easterners tend to find this idea as bizarre and illogical as hating a valley but loving a mountain peak when they're both as inseparable and necessary for each others' existence as up & down, black & white, life & death...):

o The large area of a canvas untouched by the brush above a painting of mountains and trees expressing the grand, untouchable sky.

o A room with only tatami mats on the floor, the futon kept rolled up in a corner closet during the day, unlike a bed whose unmoving bulk keeps "interrupting" the visual silence of pure, empty space.

o Rule Of Three. I can't be arsed to come up with more examples, I ran out of brain...

@freemo @design_RG Oh yeah, I forgot:

o Ever wonder why there are barely any facial features (or much of anything but the bare minimum to be a human body) on most anime characters? Say hi to Zen again, inviting you the viewer to accept your mind's eye to "fill in the blanks" like the slight wrinkles and damage from surviving teen acne below Rintarou Okabe's left cheekbone. You don't see them? No, don't LOOK closer, as that would be getting in your own way as Taoism helps one avoid. Don't TRY to see, ALLOW yourself to see...