"Oh, how creative!"

I have painted a total of about 50 paintings. Most of them get an OK response from people, but a couple of them really seem to impress people. I have been trying for a while to figure out what it is about these paintings that people really get excited about. I think I've figured it out - it's a factor I call "Oh, how creative!"

"Oh, how creative!" is the response that a typical person has to a painting that has some unusual design element to it, that the viewer thinks is an incredible leap of human imagination. For example, my painting Snowed is a painting of a room, where snow has fallen on the furniture, etc. If there was no snow in this painting, the viewers would be bored. However, add the one element of snow, and it's, "Oh, how creative!".

Another example is the painter Josh Keyes. At first I, like many viewers, was very impressed with his paintings. But then I realized that his paintings are actually very simple scenes, with 1 or 2 simple "gimmicks", like cutting off the edges of the ground (see pic below). This is a perfect example of "Oh, how creative!". If you imagine the painting below without the ground cut off, you probably would not be impressed.