i can't stop thinking about jlos documentary
this is an archived version of a letter i sent. you can subscribe to get new letters here:
hello friends,
i think i've finally hit a point where i'm ready to disentangle myself from twitter. it's not even really fun to lurk anymore since it is designed to only show me shit from people i dont follow that can crash my mood pretty instantly.
in grad school, i took a wonderful critical disability studies seminar, and one of the books we read was willow weep for me. there's a part where meri danquah talks about how one of the things she learned to do for her depression was to not answer the phone, because her family would call her often unpredictably and say things that would crash her back into depression. so instead, she had everything go to voicemail, so she could choose if she was able to engage with what they wanted to talk about at that time or not. that's really stuck with me. i think one of the challenges of contemporary social media is that it's designed to work against curation. even if you only follow who you want to follow and use blocklists and hide tags and so forth, the system is still like 'hey boss here's some dude everyone is hate-quoting would you like to see' and it's like...well this isn't actually good.
anyway. i want to write emails more! i don't have much to share project-wise at the moment, but y'all do get to see some little paintings i've been doing at work. they're just studies based on pictures from beasweetbeauty on IG, one of my fave makeup artists. i love how her photos of makeup shes done on runway models distorts the model's faces a bit, it's very fun.
i usually do these by initially blocking out/tracing the reference directly--my goal is to study the form/shape so i dont like to take so much time trying to copy the placement of features yk. like i could grid it but. it's 2024 and i have procreate.
then i switch to working from the reference to block in shadow/light and refine features. it's been fun to work in black and white too! i should do it more often.
hope you're all doing okay,
r