cryptic

Instead of answering Pam Rubert's question/comment on last night's blog in a private e-mail, It seemed like a good opportunity to ruminate out loud a bit. I said I need to work more cryptically and Pam wanted to know what I meant. GOOD QUESTION, Pam. What do I mean?

Well - I'm a writer - and to me, being more cryptic means getting the message across in the fewest words possible.. So I naturally translated that into the visual, which defies translation - but you get the picture. Prozna St., Warsaw is what I mean by cryptic: it conveys a sense of place without a lot of detail.

I went scurrying to the on-line dictionary to see what it had to say for itself and there are several definitions of cryptic: a)having or seeming to have a hidden or ambiguous meanning :MYSTERIOUS b) marked by an often perplexing brevity expressing much in few words.

It seems that most of my work fits a) - I always like ambiguity in a piece of art (mine or anybody else's); it gives the viewer a chance to have a dialogue with the piece and infuse it with meaning if he/she so chooses. Or not.

So now, I want to go back to definition b) - although brevity is not necessarily perplexing: that seems like the editor's opinion. And "brevity" doesn't translate into the visual - so here we go again.

Pamdora is neither ambiguous nor cryptic - and why would we want her to be?