JAN from Gavin - horror vacui

 

Gavin followed the suggestion to put something inside the envelope so that it was not eaten by the USPS machines - which is what happened to his DEC envelope. This one came through beautifully. He lives near St. Louis and must have been inspired by the abundance of snow that St. Louis had. There was so much extreme weather in so many parts of the US, I spent a lot of time wondering how the exchangers were doing...but I didn't say anything on the blog. It seems like real time jabbering throws me off. I need to just write things in order - and no back-tracking.

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Am I the last person to find out about horror vacui? Spellcheck is not cooperating. It looks like latin and the obvious translation is being horrified at emptiness. That is correct. It is the flip side of my natural inclination to leave some white space. While I lean towards loving white space, I often admire works that fill up all the space gracefully. I'm not a big fan of haphazardly shoving everything into a space just for the sake of filling.

I was allowing myself five minutes to scan through IG and some work by Jurgen Vercaemst. I popped over to his page, scrolled a bit and discovered a reference to horror vacui which led me to Wiki - and this intro:

In visual art, horror vacui (Latin for 'fear of empty space'; UK: /ˌhɒrə ˈvækjuaɪ/; US: /-ˈvɑːk-/), or kenophobia (Greek for 'fear of the empty'),^[1] is a phenomenon in which the entire surface of a space or an artwork is filled with detail and content, leaving as little perceived emptiness as possible.^[2] It relates to the antiquated physical idea, horror vacui, proposed by Aristotle who held that "nature abhors an empty space".^[3]

I felt better when I read Jurgen's blurb (below) along side the above image - which suggests that he, too, has only recently learned the official terms.

Work I did a few years ago without any purpose or goal as to layout whatsoever. It seems I’m avoiding layout issues by using this ‘method’. Or as someone recently put it, horror vacui or a matter of kenophobia.