Obviously, Travis Rice and I are having too much fun with iSight and iPhoto.

***

Hard to believe, after three years of silence, I finally get news from Annie McDermott. If you need to know, Annie is one of the three people responsible for my decision to pursue a writing career (the other two being Marc McKee and J. Allen Hall), although I think Annie saw me becoming a fiction writer.

***

The New York Times has an article on the art of drawing.

Drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.

Louis Pasteur was a talented illustrator. So were Charles Darwin, Guillaume Apollinaire, Alphonse Musset and many others. Nowadays, it would be a little bit harder to know whether Harold Pinter, Elfriede Jelinek, Francis Crick or Gilles de Rennes (sp? The French chemist who won the Nobel in 1995). Other people known to illustrate include Kurosawa Akira, Kitano Takeshi (his paintings are featured in his movie Hana-Bi), Anne Boyer, John Sakkis, Gary Sullivan, K. Lorraine Graham, Shin Yu Pai, Claire Webb, ...

What bugs me about this article is how it asserts that the practice of drawing has declined. Every time I went to an anime convention (three times), I seemed to see a slew of people either sketching or doodling or whatever. The same is probably true of comic book conventions. Not to mention the number of people trying to make a living out of drawing, mostly in advertising or in comic book drawing (such as Nikki Cook or Rami Efal).

Perhaps the situation with drawing is the same as poetry, in that it has professionalized itself, although it seems easier to get into the "industry" without an MFA or a BFA (just having a look at the Hernandez Bros, Will Eisner, and the younger generation, Brian Wood, Rami, etc.). And much like the poetry "industry," the illustration market is saturated. But the point is, there are professional tracks to be a "drawer." The Joe Kubert School of Comic Book Drawing, the Brooklyn School of Visual Arts and the various BFA and MFA programs in the nation. And the same is pretty true across the ocean (and has traditionally been), with Les Gobelins, for example (a school I actually wanted to enroll in, before I realized that I wasn't good enough and not quick enough).