Tidbits: Armatures, all food, and genius!?!
(Do-over): A sample of the monthly paid subscriber email!
My apologies, friends! It seems that there are secret steps I need to take to make emails open to all, which, as you can read below, had been my intention. So here’s the email again!
Hello! This is the kind of email I’ll be sending to the folks who have paid or requested access to the paid list for Finding Out. It’ll arrive in inboxes on the first Thursday of the month, just like this email has. The January tidbits will be available to the folks on that list, so get to it!
It’s December! I hope you’re giving yourself grace this season, and taking breaks when you need them. Wherever you find yourself, consider that it’s totally reasonable to go outside for a walk or grab a quiet spot inside to take a breath.
Armatures
Training to be a guide at the St. Louis Art Museum means I have extra encouragement to pick up my drawing practice. Above are sketches I did while watching one week’s assignment, a presentation about the Black model from the 1860s to present.
A tidbit to look for in the sketch are the “armatures,” the geometric lines on faces and boxes for some of the bodies. By observing and sketching these armatures before the rest of the figure (that’s art lingo for “people”), I can better approximate their proportions.
Something that blew my mind when I was learning this method was this: Most people’s eyes are not only in the middle of their face from side to side, but also on the middle of their head from top (dome) to bottom (chin). Take a look at someone (or a photo) to check this out and take in a little awe.
All food
One cornerstone of my parenting approach is to find library books that explain stuff that I don’t know how to explain to my kid or that he’s having trouble absorbing (or both).
A month or two ago, I noticed that our 4.5 year old had taken to asking whether a food he was eating was healthy or not. Perhaps it was related to a show or something from school. But the movement in the last decade called “intuitive eating” has really caught my attention. So I found the picture book All Food is Good Food. It teaches my kid (and reminds me) that “All food has a purpose. Food does many different things.” It concludes, “The foods that make you feel good are the right foods for you. All food is good food.”
Genius
I’m rewatching the show Elementary, a take on Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. They live in New York City; Holmes is a man recovering from a drug addiction (previously used to dull his senses); and Watson is a woman acting as his sober companion. Also Watson is played by Lucy Liu, and how can that get any better? Anyway—in one episode, a fully capable Holmes quotes this aphorism from the 19th century:
“Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”
And he says that ”taking pains” can mean failures. I’ve found myself returning this idea, with a substitute for “genius:” activism. We take pains and move through them so that we may contribute to the world we hope to have. I’d say that maintaining sustainable contributions to activism is a practice and a capacity not that different from genius.
Latest Essay
If you missed it, here’s the most recent Finding Out essay:
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Mentioned in this issue: “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today” with Denise Murrell; intuitive eating; All Food is Good Food by Molly Jackson Elhert and Fanny Liem; Elementary with Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu; and an aphorism about genius. PS: I watch Elementary in spite of it being a police procedural.