Last week was my wife’s and daughter’s Spring Breaks, so we drove with the dogs down to the Florida Panhandle, where we stayed in an especially crooked fishing shack hanging over the Aucilla River. From there, it was an easy paddle down to the Gulf of Mexico, complete with old-man’s-beard, leaping mullet, and easily spooked alligators.
Context: Last week I attended ICFA—who are nice enough to invite me every year to read a story, comp me a couple meals, and otherwise leave me alone to mooch appetizers and wine from various receptions and schmooze with academic folks I’ve never met before and editors I know. On Saturday I attended a panel that featured Nancy Hightower, whose photography work largely focuses on capturing NYC cityscapes in puddles. Her work is absolutely stunning. Earlier that morning I’d gone to see a panel where Ann Leckie was being interviewed about her upcoming novel Radiant Star. Leckie mentioned, in passing, that she’d gotten some inadvertent writing advice while attending a beading class years ago, to the effect of “if you are looking for a structure and don’t have one, repetition always works.”
So that was what was in my head Saturday morning, when I looked at Hightower’s uncanny, liminal photographs of the exceptionally mundane airport conference hotel we’d all been living in for four days:
Mirrors are repetition machines; repetition is the fundamental rudiment of structure; structure is the lone difference between “art” and “a neat thing I saw”
… and then I was alone in my room with this shiny post-modern coffee table, and I had my phone in my hand, because I always have my phone in my hand, because we all always have our phones in our hands, and taking a picture is a helluva lot better for my mind than looking at the news one more time.
This is that picture.
Expect more of them.
I mostly sketch from photographs, simply as a practical matter (I mostly work from home, and am mostly in a college town in mid-Michigan; nit a lot of horses and barbarian ladies sitting around my kitchen waiting to be models). But this gets me thinking a lot about how high-speed photography has changed drawing and painting, not by replacing them—the perennial anxiety about art and technology—but by giving the artist one more tool to see more clearly in ever smaller increments. At my most hopeful, I wonder about the ways genAI will offer creatives sharper scalpels and finer microscopes. (And at my least hopeful? There, I’m pretty hopeless.)
Anyway, last week was all “furious dancers,” a subject that is devilishly tricky to capture from life if you haven’t first had the benefit of capturing it from a snapshot.
This lady in the flowing skirt was my son’s favorite from last week. He insists it’s legible, but I worry; her posture is so striking and strange. Either way, it is indeed a good sketch, in that it captured what I hoped to capture. I just wonder if I maybe chose the wrong subject to begin with.
I think this one was my favorite. Draped cloth is a fun challenge in restraint, and I think both the dynamism of her gesture and its dignity and grace all came through. 10 of 10, A++; would draw again.
