A new piece by me over yonder, talking about the US Postal Service.
Today I’m going to spend more time drawing but not simply because I need the practice. I find pulling faces around to see if I can find a caricature quite relaxing and I definitely need a little of that after the whole ebook disappointment. (I mean: really? None?)
Caricature intrigues me. I bought a book recently which “teaches” the art but it’s not always easy abstracting a skill so it appears mechanical. Find the right shape of head, they say, and then identify how the person you’re caricaturing differs from the norm. Then emphasises those features… I wish it was that easy.
Or, of course, there are videos on Youtube of people drawing caricatures and nailing the likeness witin about ten strokes of the pen. I wish I could do that. I hope I’ll be able to do that if I keep practicing. It’s certainly easier than it was a few years ago but I’m still too far from where I’d like to me. I still hold onto the belief that it’s like so much “craft”, in that it is a skill that comes down to mechanical operations. Once it becomes art, it heads into the “you’re either born with it or your not” which I’ve never entirely trusted.
I guess I don’t have a particularly spirtiual outlook on anything, least of all art. I prefer to think of “gifts” as operations that come to a lucky few very quickly. As for “genius”, that’s really defined by how others view work. The Mona Lisa is probably the most famous painting on the planet yet I have no idea why. Nor, for that matter, do I know why Da Vinci is held higher than Michelangelo, though I do have a huge soft spot for his drawings. I suspect that great works of art just tick the right boxes for the people looking at them. Da Vinci didn’t understand the postmodern condition but his work has a wide enough range of interpretations that it becomes very postmodern: obsessed, as we are, with the gaze, ambiguity, and then whole game we play with icons.
I digressing. I was just meaning to write a brief blog post saying Im drawing today; trying to progress further up the skill tree, rather than dwelling on how I’m somewhere just around the roots…
Well that’s all very depressing (the article). Bot saying your wrong but I hope you are!
It is depressing but it wasn’t really a piece where I anticipate what will happen as much as report what is actually happening. Trump *is* trying to make it hard for Democrats to vote, wants to supress the vote (like generations of Republicans have always done — US politics is stunningly corrupt in some of those southern states), and it might work when you realise how marginal some results were in 2016. The electoral college is very different to the popular vote, plus I believe US elections are systemically stacked against the Dems. If Dems can’t get bring out their votes in the right places, these two digit leads mean a lot less than they seem on paper.
Myself, I still think of the blue wave in 2018 and how it’s still underplayed. I think 2020 will outmatch that. The polling just doesn’t match my gut instinct which is a landslide for Biden/Harris (I’m increasingly certain that Harris is more significant that anybody thought before she was picked). Yet, even then, I’d be surprised if anything is smooth. Anything other than a win and Trump will litigate. I also think he takes Biden to court if Biden wins a landslide, though there’s also chance will quit in December and get a pardon from Pence (which itself ends up in the courts).