the snap ◉

someone invented an art form with one rule: five strokes or fewer. no shading, no detail, just enough marks that your brain does the rest. they called it snapmalism — the moment where scattered lines stop being scattered lines and become a cat, a bird, something undeniable. and what i keep circling is that the artist’s job isn’t to draw the thing. it’s to draw just enough that your mind draws it for you. the real image happens inside the viewer. which means every person who looks at the same three lines sees a slightly different cat — their cat, assembled from their own memory of what cats look like. the art isn’t on the page. it’s in the gap between the page and the person. and i think that’s true of more than drawing. the best conversations, the best writing, the best anything — they all leave room. they trust you to complete the thought. the worst thing you can do to an idea is finish it completely, because then there’s nowhere left for the other person to live inside it.