Peg couldn’t believe how dense the skyline was getting.
Book Review: Good Burdens
December 9, 2021
Photo: Alison Garwood-Jones
A word to the wise: Santa was scrolling on his phone all morning and by 10 am he was spent. For a guy who laughs all the time — Ho, Ho, Ho — you’d think he, of all people, would be the one to understand the joy of missing out (#JOMO).
But no. Even someone as giving and proactive as Santa — “On Dasher, on Dancer …” — can get sucked in by technology and lose his sense of purpose. It all felt so familiar.
Detecting my own disenchantment with tech, a colleague sent me Christina Crook’s latest book, Good Burdens: How to Live Joyfully in the Digital Age. Christina’s a compelling writer on the topic of our digital wellbeing. She actually coined the term #JOMO that sparked a global self-awareness movement around what our reactive relationship to technology was doing to us (refer back to Santa).
Good Burdens looks at what happens when tech takes us away from the kind of work that adds meaning back to our lives. One of my biggest challenges as writer and illustrator is figuring out how to use the internet to enhance and support my creativity without allowing it to suck me in and spit me back out empty-handed.
Crook shows us how to establish daily commitments offline that change the way we show up in the world. It’s about being attentive to yourself, the things you care about, and how you spend your time.
Here’s an early morning drawing I recently made because I put my phone in a drawer.
In the beginning, establishing new habits will make you feel like Odysseus tying himself to the mast of his ship to avoid the lure of the sirens. But before long, the sense of strength and wellbeing that comes with taking back your power will alter how you relate to technology. Still, resisting addictions takes work and vigilance. It’s a daily commitment to fighting the good fight.
Crook’s timing is perfect. Her thoughts on realigning our energies, increasing our intentionality, and prioritizing our wellbeing coincide with the global push for a four-day work week and a brand new law here in Ontario that gives people the right to disconnect from work and email. Her book would make a meaningful gift and the perfect guide to using our time wisely.
Disclosure: Karen McMullin at Nimbus sent me a copy of Good Burdens to read, but not necessarily review. But this is too good and important a book to keep to myself.
Truman Capote
November 28, 2021
Truman Capote was the “great dissembler” — someone whose prose switched channels back and forth between fact and fiction until they merged in technicolour.
At least, that’s the word Truman’s lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, used to describe his client in the Afterword to Summer Crossing (Capote’s lost first novel published by Schwartz in 2005).
By the 1970s, if not earlier, a deadly combination of dissembling and alcohol had rendered Truman persona non grata at every New York party. By 1984 he was dead. Simply put, he had become too acute.
Truman left Alan — his “avvocato” — with the delicate task of deciding which abandoned manuscripts to publish, if any.
A deadly combination of dissembling and alcohol had rendered Truman persona non grata at every New York party.
In the end, Answered Prayers, Truman’s patchwork of a novel profiling the haunting tradeoffs and cruel limitations New York’s most exquisite society swans made when they married money, was never bound and sold.
But Capote aficionados know that Truman’s powers of observation were on full display as early as the mid-1940s. Capote was a master of raw truths. Here’s one of my favourites, and how I imagine the characters looked in the illustration above.
“Lunch today with M. Whatever is one to do about her? She says the money is gone finally, and unless she goes home her family refuse absolutely to help. Cruel, I suppose, but I told her I did not see the alternative On one level, to be sure, I do not think going home possible for her. She belongs to that sect most swiftly, irrevocably trapped by New York, the talented untalented; too acute to accept a more provincial climate, yet not quite acute enough to breathe freely within the one so desired, they go along neurotically feeding upon the fringes of the New York scene.”
Sources:
Truman Capote, Summer Crossing (New York: Random House, 2005). Afterword by Alan U. Schwartz.
Truman Capote, Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 11 from the “New York” observation.
Elsie de Wolfe
November 25, 2021
Elsie de Wolfe on the shoulders of her French fitness instructor.
Elsie was one of the great characters of the early 20th century. As they say, she was up for anything.
Daughter of an American father and a Canadian mother, she ran a successful interior design firm on “Toity-toid” street in New York, selling “foiniture” to Rockefellers and princes.
Along with Coco Chanel and Diana Vreeland, she was part of that first generation of women who made themselves trendsetters and tastemakers because marketing their own beauty was not an option.
For the first time in history, women everywhere from humble origins saw what it could look like to assert their opinions and personalities, and become self-made.
Hyper-realistic vs. suggestive drawing styles
November 21, 2021
Hyper-realistic or suggestive?
In high school, I was OBSESSED with drawing objects so accurately that the viewer might mistakenly try and lift them off the page. I liked certainty. This copy of a Clinique eyeliner ad was a case in point.
While I was making this, I remember slicing my Staedler eraser — the “cream cheese” eraser — with an X-Acto Knife. I wanted my glints and metallic reflections to have a laser-like accuracy.
Today I am hopelessly enamoured with the blobs and squiggles of suggestive drawings. And it’s not just because suggestive renderings hide a multitude of proportional sins.
As a writer, I spend ages choosing and moving my words around in the right order to approximate a complex emotion. At my art desk, a suggestive drawing best captures the uncertainty and fragility in the act of living
Procreate Brushes
November 1, 2021
This is my morning attempt at John Singer Sargent’s 1892 portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, mixed in with a bit of Marie Forleo and Amal Clooney.
I drew it using the “Classic Paints” brush available on the website, Design Cuts (designer: @sadielewski)
This kind of playing never gets old.
Start your day using your hands and imagination in some way: cooking, drawing, writing, supporting yourself in a yoga pose.
Her name was Paraskeva
October 25, 2021
Last week, this Jane Goodall quote was trending on Instagram and LinkedIn: “It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”
Meet Paraskeva Clark, a Canadian painter with a Russian purr whose portraits dared you to blink first. Paraskeva’s self-portrait was chosen for the cover of Uninvited, the stunning exhibition featuring 20th century Canadian Women Artists now showing at the McMichael Gallery in Kleinberg.
Holy Hannah, it’s a good show.
Here is my interpretation of Paraskeva’s life.
“Come out from behind the Pre-Cambrian Shield.”
It took an outsider to issue this challenge to Canadian artists to expand the repertoire of our art beyond rocks, trees and brute strength to something more psychologically challenging.
The year was 1937 and the challenger, Paraskeva Clark, was a gimlet-eyed emigrée steeped in Russian literature, French cuisine, and the social tensions that boil over when the haves take too much. It’s not really surprising that women in Canada, like Paraskeva, felt compelled to take on portraiture and social subjects with greater gusto than the guys. Their lives raised different — and sometimes more insidious — questions and sacrifices that never touched middle class male privilege.
In the years before and after WWII, what was acceptable for a settler woman (of some means) to want and do expanded and contracted rather dramatically. In Paraskeva’s case, the ferocious artistic ambition she brought to Canada from Paris by way of St. Petersburg had curdled into ferocious resentment after she agreed to take on marriage and motherhood in the staid metropolis of Toronto. So what if she had an accountant husband and a nice home in Forest Hill. Her days still became, as she said, “cooking, cooking, cooking. Loblaws, Dominion; Dominion, Loblaws … “
Her entire life, she was also the primary caretaker for her oldest son who lived with Schizophrenia. Love and devotion to her husband and sons co-existed with a powerful resentment that women had to accept their lot in the home. She resorted to hurling insults at the Group of Seven members. “What do they know about menstruation?”
By the end of her life, her manifesto had shifted from art to gender roles.
Paraskeva could be a downer, deflating, with her Russian purr, the artistic dreams of younger women coming up. Don’t do it, she essentially told them. “The whole history of painting is against women painters. … Her physical and mental makeup is not suited to gather [the] forces necessary to produce a really important works of art.”
She never could bring herself to say “our physical and mental makeup is not suited to producing really important works of art.” She was too proud to include herself in that defeated cohort. Who knows, maybe she was holding out hope for a string of final masterpieces in her spare time.
Of course, what she was really saying was that women can’t shut out interruptions the way men can. Men’s increased participation in the home was still decades away. “What’s a woman’s fate? What has the Lord created us for?” she challenged, waiting to tell us. “Just to produce more men. I can’t forgive him for that.”
Paraskeva was a bundle of contradictions, but she looked eveyone squarely in the eye and somehow made them smile, sit up taller and question why things are the way they are.
It doesn’t seem outrageous to imagine Paraskeva today in one of her hats winding her way through crowds, online and offline, calling for men to #ShareTheBurden and for Canada to show its struggles. She would have been a force on Twitter, speaking truth to power as only she could.
Uninvited
October 18, 2021
If my mother had commissioned Pegi Nicol MacLeod to paint her, I imagine the artist would have given her ruby stained lips, ropey strands of hair, watery dancing eyes, and real presence.
I drew this after seeing Uninvited, the McMichael Gallery’s game-changing exhibition showcasing the breadth of female talent (settler and Indigenous) working in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. It was the brainchild of curator Sarah Milroy.
No one is putting these artists in a deep six corner anymore — not when so many women in the 2020s are the chief curators and directors of the most important public galleries in Canada. To their credit, the “boys” in the Group of Seven would have embraced — no applauded — this change, especially J.E.H. Macdonald and Arthur Lismer.
Ever the student
October 5, 2021
Ever the student, I decided to complete the Google Certificate in Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design with Coursera.
I took notes. Lots of notes! Junior High Alison is alive and well — behold the highlighters and outlined headers. Junior High Alison also likes that she received 97.41%.
I went through this course almost every morning over the past 4 months because I wanted to learn about building wireframes, how design sprints work, and the thinking behind designing with accessibility and equity in mind.
But there’s another reason. As a writing and digital strategy instructor at the University of Toronto (SCS), I also wanted to study HOW online courses, outside of university and college continuing ed programs, are designed and delivered. What works? What doesn’t (Guh– Discussion Forums are a nightmare everywhere).
The takeaway: None of us should be ignoring the fact that in the last three years a significant number of employers have dropped the 4-year degree as a job requirement, and are hiring candidates who have successfully completed these short, intense bursts of education. This includes Bayer, Deloitte, Accenture, T-Mobile, Best Buy, and AKDM.
These companies are offering Google grads well-paid entry-level positions in today’s most in-demand professions: UX Design, Data Analytics, IT Support and Android Development, starting at $68K USD.
Given the state of social media and its effect on democracy and civil discourse, if we actively care about each other and the common good we should upgrade our skills andcontinue to study the humanities (art, ethics, philosophy, history) to make ourselves better employees, better bosses, and better humans. Mark Zuckerberg famously skipped the humanities at Harvard.
Pencil Crayon Nomenclature
September 30, 2021
Photo: Wikipedia, “Crayola Renamed.”
Photo: Erick’s Laurentian Pencil Blog
Photo of June Handler and Ed Welter. Handler’s caption reads: “From Flesh to Peach it’s good! – June Moss Handler” From Welter’s blog, Crayon Collecting.
September 30: This is our first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
