Self-portraits

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Here are four self-portraits I drew today, in the order I drew them.

The first was a blind contour like I’ve been drawing every day since Valentine’s Day. The second was done completely blind — from memory, not looking at the paper or a mirror. The third was done from memory while looking at my paper. The fourth was done while looking in the mirror and looking at the paper.

Taken together, they suggest to me that my latest blind drawings rely more on muscle memory than actual looking. Probably time to move on to another subject. Or draw myself upside down or something.

A friend on Twitter said they reminded him of these self-portraits done after taking different drugs. (Probably inspired by this famous series done during an LSD trip.) The way my face shifts and morphs over time makes me think more of these terrifying and sad self portraits by William Utermohlen “as he slowly deteriorated under the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.”

A final thought: like with all images and words, the meaning of these drawings shifts based on the words I put underneath them. It’s worth pausing to think about what these images would or wouldn’t have said, if anything, without words underneath them…

Circling the airport

Monday, May 4, 2020

John Waters called Anne Truitt’s Daybook “an intelligent, simple and moving record of what an artist’s day-to-day life is really like,” but when I started reading it last week it wasn’t really doing it for me.

My friend Julien has a rule that if a book/movie/etc. is “supposed” to be good but no one he personally knows has ever talked about it, he retains a certain amount of healthy skepticism.

So, as I often do, I did a “People You Follow” search to see if anybody I follow had written anything about it.

My search turned up this lovely thread by game designer Frank Lantz, who was a student of Truitt’s:

One of the things Anne taught me that I’ll never forget is the idea that you don’t need to immediately pass judgment on every new artist you encounter. You can let them “circle the airport”. You don’t have to bring them in for a landing or send them away, just let them circle.

And there you have it. Same goes for books: No need to rush to judgment right away. Just set it aside for a bit and pick up something else. A book that isn’t for you right now might be for you tomorrow.

The purpose of this volume

Sunday, May 3, 2020

Here are two collages I made for the first and last pages of a new diary. (The majority of the image above comes from a chopped up copy of Durër’s Apocalypse.)

Filed under: Sunday collage

Incineration intervention

Saturday, May 2, 2020

Stacy Schiff tells us this story about the first time the manuscript for Lolita was saved from incineration in her biography of Véra Nabokov:

She stepped outside to find her husband had set a fire in the galvanized can next to the back steps and was beginning to feed his papers to it. Appalled, she fished the few sheets she could from the flames. Her husband began to protest. ‘Get away from there!’ Véra commanded, an order Vladimir obeyed as she stomped on the pages she had retrieved. “We are keeping this,” she announced.

Her husband tried to burn his manuscript several other times and was thwarted only by her interventions. Schiff continues:

Plenty of manuscripts have burned, among them early drafts of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dead Souls. A three-person brigade intervened to save A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the flames; in Pale Fire, Kinbote looks on as John Shade indulges in a little backyard auto-da-fé. That Lolita did not meet with the same fate, in the context and climate in which Nabokov was composing in the early 1950s, is testimony to Véra’s ability to—as her husband had it—keep grim common sense from the door, shoot it dead when it approached. She feared that the memory of the unfinished work would haunt him forever.

“Without my wife,” her husband said, “I wouldn’t have written a single novel.”

The calm of collage

Friday, May 1, 2020

So, it ain’t just me: several writers have turned to making collages during the quarantine.

Here’s Luc Sante:

I enjoy the challenge of making something that can be consumed by the eyes with no thought involved, and at the same time introduce a thought that lies just on the edge of meaning, preserving maximum ambiguity. Collage-making suits the moment; it is a meditative practice that requires the regular exercise of fine motor skills. It imposes calm.

Here’s a great video of Donald Margulies in his basement studio:

I find that during this bizarre time that we’re living in globally, I’m not able to write. I’m just not able to focus and put words together in any satisfying way. I’ve found tremendous solace and release in collage.