spareness

I can see the shape of the wind on the water. [italics mine] Anyone who can write sentences like those italicised above, deceptively simple, or glancingly suggest that we're not so very different from those titmice, as well as set mood, scene, and theme with such spareness, is a seriously good writer.

One of my tests

RestaurantTHE MODERN: For a new dining room overlooking the sculpture garden of New York's Museum of Modern Art, the firm of Bentel & Bentel had to meet restaurateur Danny Meyer's seemingly irreconcilable demand for both "spareness" and "warmth."

THE DESIGN DOZEN

It has a clean, almost apothecary spareness, with lots of sharp angles and galvanized steel and slate.

Old-Fashioned

The spareness of the set contributes to this feeling of inertness.

Howard Kissel: The Met's New Faust

But Barbara Vine has a classy spareness to her writing, and an unerring instinct for the place where festering emotions turn pathological.

Catching Up « Tales from the Reading Room

He was rather undersized, as Chinese go, and the Chinese narrow shoulders and spareness of flesh were his.

Chun Ah Chun

And where some perfumers sought opulence, others pursued spareness and simplicity.

Scents And Sensibility

There is a surprising wealth of transepts, side-chapels, and little forgotten mosaics here and there, despite the overall ordered spareness of the interior, and while I know nothing of the liturgy of the parish, one is amazed by the spacious potential for solemn liturgy that could be had if it was desired.

St. Monica's, Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin

I learned that great rock was not about volume and wildness, but about precision and spareness.

Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso in London

Bellow, who confessed to reading the King James Bible all his life, drew on its "stylistic spareness" as a counterweight to "the exuberant side of his writing."

Beginning With the Word