No constraint, no breakthrough

Yesterday I mentioned Kyle Mainard.

He reminded me that arguably the most creative period for Matisse began when he found himself in a wheelchair, forced to invent a new way to paint. And that’s how we got his cut-outs.

Then I remembered Jacqui Kenny, the agoraphobic traveler who takes you on a trip around the world through Google Maps Screenshots. She had an exhibition in New York last time I heard about her.

Or Mike Winkelmann, who decided to improve his craft by completing an artwork a day and went on for fourteen years, never missing a day. He sold that NFT for $69 Million a few months ago, remember?

Instead, Georges Perec wrote a three-hundred-page novel titled La Disparition (A Void) without using the letter E once. Ernest Vincent Wright did the same before him in his fifty-thousand-word novel Gadsby (No, not The Great Gatsby; that’s another guy). The letter E is the most frequent letter in both English and French. Not that they were physically unable to type it, mind you … Actually, it seems that Wright did tie down the E on his typewriter.