I’m sipping coffee and waking up from sleeping nearly fourteen hours straight. I evidently needed sleep because yesterday evening I went out like a light and even doing things like moving from curled-on-couch to bed and this morning yielding to cat blandishments and feeding her before returning to bed never fully woke me up. Little stiff this morning, but feeling like I can take on some projects that badly need my attention, the world outside is slowly coming back up to normal (for Texas) temperatures, and I want to be in it.

I picked up this book, the Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed recently on kindle, to see if it would be useful to have a digital reference as I’m drawing, and to my delight it’s more than just a how-to drawing book. Originally published back in 1913 it mentions that color photography might some day be a thing, and in another section dismisses the photograph as being ‘art’ which amuse me, as both those shibboleths have been surpassed and shattered in the wake of progress. Given we are once again in what he called a turbulent time of art, I thought these were interesting. The other thing is that he does not limit his word art to simply the flat planar visual or the full scope of the sculpture, but makes certain his readers understand that he means art to be singing, dancing, poetry, and prose.

In the era the book was written, before the Great War, global travel was becoming more accessible, and with that, trade in ephemerals such as art and art students where they could travel to learn much more than the local styles which were accepted – and I am amused by his references to ‘modern art’ as what we call such did not yet exist in his time. Still, the broad strokes of the Impressionist were as wildly different from the formal realistic rendering of the Renaissance as you could get then.

With the internet, I can and do set up my feeds on, say, X, to give me art from around the world and through the ages every time I open it up. It’s not just pictures, though, the written word has bloomed into something extraordinary over the last decade as the gatekeepers have been made unnecessary through the rise of independent publications that can circle the globe from author to reader.

We can’t be stuffed back into the fenced-off fields, waiting for some beneficent agent to beckon us through a gate fiercely guarded. We are able to progress at our own paces, on our own merits, and to sink or swim with what audiences we can find. We are Indie. Authors, artists, we all have that freedom and a daunting thing it is, to consider that we can approach the public, rather than waiting on the lottery-odds of becoming a gallery or publisher darling. It isn’t easy. It is so worth it.

Knowing that we must strike out on our own, we need to prepare for it. Set ourselves up to be able to conduct business, to have the mindset to not only make the art, but bring it successfully to the audience which will best appreciate it.

From the practical, he delves into the spiritual, defining art, and where it comes from. You’ll note that his point isn’t the skill of the artist, it is the motive force behind what the artist brings forth and presents to others. He presents several definitions of art, but prefers Tolstoy, as it is not limited to the visual art.

I think we’ve all seen artwork, or read a book, where the creative mind was simply going through the motions. It falls flat, and you can tell. You may even wander off, bored, from the thing. It is the feeling which makes all the difference.

It may be a book about drawing, and you never intend to draw. However, I think you’ll find food for thought in these quotes from an era which seems much like our own – a Gilded Age – in art as well as potential.