Treebeard

Fred, make that a minority of at least two.

I am far happier with considering myself a craftsman than an artist.

For me too, this thread has helped me to arrive at my own 'bonsai philosophy', which is pretty much the same as yours.

There is something else as well for me though. It's difficult to put into words, but I'll try...

I am not happy with picking apart emotional concepts to find out what makes them tick. I think that once you start to do that, you lose some of the 'magic' of the subject. If I happen to get it right with styling a particular tree, via my 'it looks right' method, It almost seems like 'magic' to me, and often I can't stop grinning from ear to ear, getting all the family to look at my creation. If I'd employed strict adherance to the rules, there would not be such a sense of wonder for me. It would be like painting by numbers.

If I style a pig's ear, then I can resort to the rules, and get some satisfaction out of salvaging a mess, or just keep re-doing it my way until it looks right.

It is possible that I absorbed all the design concepts when I first learned about them, and now it's all intuitive. I don't really know. I think that if I'd never found out about the accepted design concepts (rules) I would still have ended up styling trees that look ok.

Regards,

TB

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"Do not be hasty, that is my motto"
-JRR Tolkien, The Two Towers.
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