Great stuff. I have no real help around definitions, yours seems as good as anyone’s and as you rightly point out language sort of fails in the detail when it comes to setting boundaries in the creative world, which makes sense as creativity can be about escaping language or more specifically bringing new ideas which may add to our language.
I dont find the numbers high (surprise!) :) But then again I have half a toe in the world of painting and music where the numbers are so high and so niche and yet there is still a hunger for more. And whats great for me is this is a prime time for a new wave of critics and curators.
Indulge me for a moment?
So I went over to deviant art and narrowed my search to most recent landscape paintings. This is the latest one when I looked and it was released a few hours ago.
Now this also is a first time artist according to her/his notes and you know what? I like it. I got something out of this. All I had to do was look into the daily releases. The anon artist calls it “spring landscape”, why? Where does she/he live? is that Australia? How does that tree fit the landscape? Is it unfinished? It seems not, so are we to take the central landscape as a representation or something more? Incidentally I do like her/his colour work of the green to parched yellow. Is this a painting actually about creativity? It reads like that to me , it may just have been a landscape from a first time artist trying to draw what he/she saw. Is the artist a man or woman? What race and age? Does that matter?
I am being half silly but this is the kind of thing that interests me and I would like to see more of in wargames. I like seeing my art “form” (again language as this makes no real sense in the 21st century) evolve and it seems to me small private artists like Lou Coatney working away to a tiny audience is just the kind of thing I want. I also love big budget wargames of course, but I appreciate the small works too.
I dont really have a point here, it just pleased me to muse over what you were doing by counting wargames Bruce, thanks!