time to get into watercolor

read to the end for thoughts on Brian Thompson's assassination

it’s high time to get into watercolor

Winter shrugs its shoulders and seals the windows and the Chicago townhouses become rough-formed grey rock canyons almost overnight, some neon here or there in the dull grey storefronts and dry cleaning spots. I put up plastic wrap on the windows and used a hair dryer the melt the edges of the plastic onto the window frame, that way we keep the cool draft from seeping into our apartment. After I’m done I sit down at my small table and the cling wrap domes ever so slightly away from the glass. I’ve begun to think about taking up watercolor. I’ve been looking up brushes and easels.

I went out recently for coffee and sandwiches at a café in Logan where a large wooden alligator danced above the espresso bar, and I brought this watercolor idea up with June and Walter. “It goes everywhere,” I said. “Like the paints themselves decide where they go, how they’re feeling, and that’s… that’s so great. Like I barely even need to paint at all, — I can just go at it with little strokes and see what it forms.” I explain that I’m not a very mindful painter, or a mindful artist in general, — my artistic strategy (including this blog) has always been one of throwing whatever phrases feel right onto a word document that I copy and paste into the Substack editor. The same goes for how I imagine watercolor would be.

June, an exchange student in painting from Amsterdam, — who I met through a friend’s bar crawl, — laughed at this.

“What?” I said. “You do abstract painting, what are you laughing about?”

“It’s nothing, nothing,” she said with a smile. “It’s just so much more than that. It takes years and years to get the precision. It’s not a gatekeeping thing, it just takes time to get good and it has its own kind of precision. I spend months and months putting together the shapes, specific figures and images in one piece, you know? They’re meant to, how do I say this?, unlock a sort of nostalgia in the viewer…”

“And then you blur them out in a way,” I said. “And make them unrecognizable in a way.”

“Right, so the audience doesn’t know what they’re looking at yet it unlocks something in themselves they didn’t know was there,” June said, sipping her coffee. “Something buried, repressed, not acknowledged; something red, something blue…”

Walter, to her left, - the two weren’t dating, per se, but after a certain threshold of drinks they would start locking arms on the sidewalk between spots, leaned forward in his seat, poured another pouch of sugar into his coffee. “See, that’s funny, whenever I see abstract art, — and yours is great, don’t get me wrong,” he quickly added. “But whenever I see an abstract work on a phone screen my eyes sort of like glaze over, but in person it fully makes sense because the canvases are so big, like full sized all in my vision.”

“It’s the size of the canvas that matters,” June agreed.

“They’re so big. Your paintings are huge,” he said.

“That’s the point. It’s meant to be absorbing.”

“When you paint,” I began. “Is it more about feeling or like technical achievement? Like I don’t know how grammar works but I more-or-less just feel it out as I go on. Is it the same with painting your stuff?”

“With what?” June said, frowning.

“With, I don’t know, composition?”

“It’s a lot of feeling I would say,” she said. “I think the more important thing is to lock into what way you want display images in any art that matters the most of anything,” June said. “Getting a handle on how you present imagery.”

“And going back to the scale thing, you look at like a Bosch painting in real life,” I said. “And it’s tiny but the images are clear but they’re confusing. So like the small size of the canvas allows for a more focused blurring of images into whatever the fuck he was painting.”

June broke into small smile. “I don’t like Bosch all that much, though. I find he’s very overrated. People in the art world think he’s overrated anyways.”

Walter sat back in the booth, having finished his cup of sugar-coffee. “You don’t like Bosch?”

“You do?”

“I don’t know. I like,—I don’t know. I think they’re good.”

June shrugged, sipping her coffee but making a small slurping sound to make clear a dissatisfaction with this take.

They began arguing for and against Bosh and I found myself zoning out. As I waited for these damn dialectics to end, the waitress came by to fill our coffee cups. I asked her if the cafe around the corner was any good.

“Oh Hank’s?” she said. “We don’t like Hank’s.”

“What? Why?”

“They opened last month. They took our whole menu and changed all the names. You look at the sandwiches and they’re essentially the same as ours.”

“What they have Turkey sandwiches?” asked June, still incredulous from arguing.

“They even stole our sign. We have the big sign that says SANDWICHES out front. They took the same font, the same style, but theirs says PANINIS. Who are they fooling? This business has been here half a century. We’ve been here before and we’ll be here after they go under. Anyways, I was going to say your food should be on its way in a moment.”

“Alright.” “Sounds good.” “Thanks.”

I sat back, tapped the table with my fingernails, looked around. Carnivorous plants filled the front window of the cafe in small glass cubes hanging from the ceiling, the glass inside steamed and dotted with water droplets from the draft seeping in through the cracks in the big glass pane windows at the front from where I could see steam billowing over the buildings from a number of unseen horizons like icy, somber campfires.

“I used to follow along with Bob Ross videos on microsoft paint. Would switch around to the spray bottle for the washes and the paintbrush for the fine detail. It was fun.”

“That’s great,” June said. “I would sketch my sister over and over.”

“I used to draw Calvin and Hobbes strips from memory in my binders,” said Walter, pouring a pack of sugar into his coffee.

a good restack

on the fashion influencer lawsuit

The ongoing “Vibe” lawsuit is interesting; it sets a major milestone for the online creator economy, which, as we’ll see going forward into the twenty-first century, is fated to overshadow the twenty-first century’s media monoliths.

I find myself wondering how the American courts will handle such a thing as a curator stealing another’s’ content almost verbatim, — even if the content is remarkably bland and minimalistic, as, according to Kyle Chayka, it’s hard to declare ownership over a “neutral, beige and cream aesthetic.” But it does seem perfectly clear that Sheil is copying Gifford’s videos, using the same products advertised, taking videos with the same furniture, the same camera framing, the same buzzwords, etc.

This whole ordeal seems rather baffling in light of how most of us live online, i.e. the anonymity of most of these online spaces wherein our profiles are rather anonymous nodes among sometimes hundreds of thousands of others spread across a network spanning beyond the realm of what any single person can imagine.

But the internet is where we will all continue to make our living, and our living will grow out from the internet as a new centerpiece of our labor and our work. So certainly there must be some legal protections in place to preserve the work a person does from being copied verbatim by another, even if that work is (um) bland shilling of Amazon products.

And besides, we copy many things in our lives. We emulate people we admire, our family, our friends. Here on substack, and at family dinners, we copy lines that can be inserted carte blanche into any political conversation, the easiest of which is to blame the victim for their shortcomings: too poor to afford food? That’s on them for not working hard enough; dating apps are toxic? That’s on the users for opting in in the first place; hispanic americans are soon to be deported en masse? That’s on them for voting for trump.

If only Freya India could sue substackers for blaming the victims when she so clearly did that first, then maybe we could have less of this dumb, brutish accusatory dialogue here in our dumb, brutish stage of our collectivist online growing pains.

a good restack

on the aesthetics of assassination

Similarly, the growing number assassinations, successful and unsuccessful, of political figures in America , — and let’s be clear here that while all murder and gun violence is brutish and bad, I don't weigh the shooting of Brian Thompson any more than I would the shooting of a homeless man on the south side of Chicago even if Thompson was objectively a deeply evil man¹, — is growing in number too because, similar to the proliferation of emulations of influencer aesthetics and the styles of painting throughout history, there’s developing a lineage of styles of assassination in the same way there was a lineage of styles to the school shootings of the 90s and 2000s as promoted and disseminated by 24/7 news stations. As in, a Columbine style school shooting would inspire other school shootings through the aesthetics of the event being reported on, be it CNN or Fox News, and within our current style of news consumption, that being the Twitter format, it seems as though American Political Assassination has found a ready home in the zeitgeist.

from Mark Ames on X/Twitter

But, despite all virality-oriented gun violence perpetrated by societal outcasts being (well) bad, there’s a pretty clear distinction to be found between the killing of school children and the killing of an evil CEO of a company that has likely killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in favor of his shareholder’s monetary gains, — I’ll let you decide what that difference is.

Okay, that’s all! Have a great weekend, everyone, — I’ll be back on Monday with something new.

Best wishes,

briffin glue

1. And also there’s the fact that the city of New York would not have put a $10,000 bounty on the head of someone who shot a homeless man, — why does his life matter more than anyone else’s? Well, it doesn’t.