A Few Notes

Tim Vanderweert has died. He was the proprietor of the excellent Leicaphilia blog forever, he wrote well, photographed well. I reviewed his book, Car Sick, recently. Tim was scheduled to die much earlier, so when he failed to do so I was able to write the long-put-off review in time for him to read it, which was very nice. I liked him, and I liked his work. He was wrong about Barthes, but everyone except me is, so I don't hold that against him. We are poorer for his loss.

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In other news, I have lately taken up drawing. Well, I draw more seriously now, or at least more regularly. I'm trying to make it a daily habit, but I'm up to about 50% so far.

I am not very good at drawing, but that doesn't much matter. While it's true that I hope to get usefully better at it in the long run, the main point at the moment is to get better at observing. As near as I can tell, drawing is essentially an exercise in observation. There's a certain modest amount of hand-eye co-ordination involved, but I don't seem to have any trouble there. Where my drawings fail, and they all fail, is almost invariably a lack of observation. I have failed to notice that this line is parallel with that one, that these two features align thus, this the relative sizes of this form and that are so, and not thus. And so on.

I draw, quickly, and then I photograph. Then I compare the two, and make notes. I think I'm getting better at observing, although this may of or not be showing up in the actual drawings. Usually the drawing is too chubby. I probably should practice more before trying to draw my wife.

The hope here is that by being better at observing, I will become better at photographing. We always say, repeating it like idiot robots, that photography is reeeeeeally just seeeeeeing, right?

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In a third item of news, I am working up a newsletter, because I think it's both funny and kind of fun. I perceive a possibly non-existent gap in the market: for a daily almanac style of art-history tidbits, in roughly the style of Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. There are any number of people out there who are looking for social media clout by appearing to know something about art, so this newsletter exists to service those people. For $50 a year or $5 a month, you can get a weekly newsletter of artisanal, glib, art-history snippets to copy to your own social media to impress the rubes.

There's also a free monthly, that has a smaller list of items. I recommend this one. If you ask nicely I'll give you a free sub to the paid version too.

If you know anyone who's seriously into engagement farming on social media and needs some content, please send them to Gliblets. I suppose teachers and newsletter writers and whatnot could use it too. I dunno. It seems like a kind of thing that people could use. Obviously, feel free to send me money, but if I know you even slightly I'll hand you gift subscriptions like cookies because, whatever.

It's been kind of fun groveling out a large database of Little Facts and reverse indexing them by date. I know a lot, ok a little, more art history, and I will probably glean more as I write up weekly newsletters!