Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Piano: Forever Love by X Japan
Posted in Art, Hobbies, Music, piano, Song Lyric, tagged Forever Love, lyric, piano, X Japan on July 29, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Cardboard Drawing: Chinatsu Kano from Blue Box
Posted in anime, Art, Hobbies, tagged anime, Badminton, Basketball, Blue Box, Coming of Age, Drawing, Kouji Miura on July 23, 2026| Leave a Comment »
The manga Blue Box ended after five years. This coming of age story may be simple, but I enjoyed it. The characters are likeable, each with their own distinct personalities, dreams, and struggles. As someone whose favourite sports are basketball and badminton, the series resonated with me even more. Here’s a video about the anime (with spoilers).
What Makes Art Great
Posted in Art, Hobbies, Links, tagged Art, Great, Nabeel, podcast, Tyler Cowen on July 14, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Nabeel on what makes art great: 1) Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising. 2) Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes. 3) Great art contains more meaning than can be paraphrased.
Here’s a Jackson Dahl podcast with Tyler and Nabeel.
Excerpts:
In good human works, every detail feels carefully chosen.
Great artworks are hard to compress (i.e. have high information content); slop is easy to compress.
We barely see everyday objects because we are so used to them (low novel information again), but great art can make you see these objects afresh, the way a child might.
This strangeness is essential for the effect of great art, because we like to make sense of things, and if we make sense of things too easily they are not interesting to us; great works of art are therefore necessarily somewhat difficult to grasp the meaning of, their meanings are multiple and constantly shifting, and they require a pleasant kind of effort to make sense of.
Great literary works are full of these hidden patterns, which silently create a kind of electric charge of coherence across the text as you are reading, and which contribute to the feeling that we are reading something intentionally knit together as an aesthetic whole.
…not only do you have to surprise readers in interesting and precise ways, but you also have to make sure that multiple patterns cohere across the entire work and are not simply local and uncorrelated.
There’s a feeling of limitless depth that is unique to the really great works: it feels like you can always find more patterns, more coherence, more beauty on rereading. Or that more readings will give you a deeper understanding, but never a perfect or complete one.
Another facet of depth is mystery. Good art is always a bit under-explained. It allows you to speculate. Characters may have multiple motives.
How to Make a Living as an Artist
Posted in Art, Hobbies, Links, tagged Aesthetic, artistic_expression, business of art, creative_process, Hobby, Make a Living as an Artist, Solopreneur, what public want on July 9, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Advice from someone making a living as an artist.
Excerpts:
Most people who enjoy making art should not try to make it their full time job. When you turn an avocation (hobby) into a vocation (job) you have to do new things you do not enjoy…Even the work itself can become a burden because you now have to make it. Amateurs can wait for inspiration; professionals must create every day.
You can look at art through an aesthetic lens (how does it look?), a technical lens (how is it made?), an emotional lens (how does it make you feel?), an interpretive lens (what does it mean?), and a political lens (what does it say about our world?).
There are a set of things that excite you artistically, and there are a set of things that the public enjoys, and you are looking for something in the intersection of those two sets. You can make work that is commercially successful while still staying true to your artistic interests.
Just make art that excites you, and make enough of it that you eventually make work that resonates with people.
Art is absolutely an expression of yourself. But your art is not you. Try not to entangle your ego with your art.
I have heard this approach referred to as “shots on goal” — the more shots you take, the more likely you are to succeed. If you are too scared to show your work to anyone or too defensive about the feedback you receive, you will have fewer shots on goal and thus less chance of making a living as an artist.
My First Acrylic Painting: Hours on the Court
Posted in Art, Health and wellness, Hobbies, Relationship, tagged acrylic, Art, Basketball, painting, parenting on July 7, 2026| Leave a Comment »
I received a free acrylic painting session after dining at an art-themed restaurant. The restaurant has an art room that provides canvases, paints, and brushes, but unfortunately, it does not offer instruction.
This was my first time trying acrylic painting. I did some quick research to get a sense of how best to proceed. Partly due to time constraints, and partly my lack of patience, the result was not as good as I had envisioned. But it was a good experience. It captures my first attempt at acrylic painting and the many hours I have spent with my boy on the basketball court.
Working from the Heart
Posted in Art, Hobbies, Links, tagged Art, Artist, creation, David Hockney, Maria Popova, obituary, painting, Shelia hicks, the marginalian on July 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »
From The Economist’s obituary on David Hockney:
Having decided on the composition, he used props and photographs, played with perspectives, and paced out measurements in the studio: all the techniques he’d learned at art school and since. Mostly, though, he was working from the heart. Painting was how he made sense of the world…
Painting 18 hours a day, seven days a week, he finished it at last the night before the shippers came to take it to America. He felt like his hero Picasso, who liked to say: “I’m not painting; I’m exploring.”…
He stopped worrying about being contemporary and set about creating his own kind of art, art of his own time…
Finding new ways of making art filled his life with a sense of renewal…
Soon he would swap paints for pixels, becoming just as adept at painting portraits and landscapes first on his phone, then on an iPad. In 2012 he covered four walls of the Royal Academy with iPad paintings of one particular bend of one lane in east Yorkshire, on every day of the year and in every sort of light. Just before covid-19 struck in 2019 he moved to Normandy, and posted digital pictures of the emerging spring. These were later turned into a massive galleria, a cathedral of green, enough to fill L’Orangerie in Paris. If his poolside painting of the man in the peachy-pink jacket was a snapshot of a moment when he was 35, he described his final work as his Bayeux Tapestry, a long walk through a whole life.
From BBC’s obituary:
He had simply followed one rule: “Paint the things you love”…
He was single-minded and devoted to drawing. The wartime shortage of paper restricted his early efforts to the kitchen floor and hymn books in church…
Hockney’s appearance may have been flamboyant but his work ethic was Protestant. For 12 hours a day, he worked furiously at his easel…
His work-rate remained prodigious. He placed a sign at the foot of his bed in Notting Hill, telling himself to “GET UP AND START WORK IMMEDIATELY”.
If he grew tired of drawing, Hockney would take photographs, do etchings or design operas. He was haunted by the feeling he wasn’t doing enough…
Few artists have been more excited by technology than Hockney…
Hockney’s new passion was landscapes: the traditional pastime of the weekend amateur.
He moved to Bridlington, where his sister and elderly mother now lived, and began to paint the Yorkshire Wolds.
Each summer, the teenage Hockney had cycled here from Bradford to earn pocket money on local farms.
The countryside was beautiful and brought back memories of working on the harvest and sleeping in barns with his friends.
For Hockney, this was just as much a paradise as California in the 1960s.
He stood outdoors in all weathers, he painted hundreds of scenes of lush meadows and roadside verges. They were often on a monumental scale.
It was an old man’s challenge to an art scene focused on the young, the cynical and the conceptual.
And Shelia Hicks on her work from Maria Popova:
I don’t even think about art. People want to pull me into the art thing all the time… Is this art or isn’t this art… What is art? I think people do what they feel like doing, and not authenticating things. These podcasts and these interviews and this reportage and these exhibitions, a lot of it has to do with trying to authenticate things, validate things. Here in Paris, we have a hundred exhibitions opening every week. What are we validating? And if you’re not validated and if you’re not being exhibited, what are you doing? Are you wasting your time or are you just simply doing what you feel like doing and that you like doing?
…
When I made this, I didn’t make it with any intention that it’s supposed to be craft or art or design or decoration. Or what is it? It just is. Take it or leave it.
Sketches: Shiromi Sakana Illustrations XII
Posted in Art, Hobbies, tagged Drawing, Shiromi Sakana on June 25, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Sketches: Blue Box XIII
Posted in anime, Art, Hobbies, tagged Blue Box, Drawing, Kouji Miura on June 11, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“Regardless how strong someone might appear, there are weaknesses. We might think of anxiety as a negative, but it’s something we all have. We get stronger if we act through it. Bearing the burden of anxiety and get stronger, isn’t it a bit like strength training?” —Hina
[While cycling to a cake shop]
Hina: Let’s disperse all stress!
Taiki to Hina: You have stress?
Hina: Stress when a friend got treated poorly.
Kyo: Me too, stress when a my close friend doesn’t treat himself well.
Sketches: Shiromi Sakana Illustrations XI
Posted in Art, Hobbies, tagged Drawing, Shiromi Sakana on June 5, 2026| Leave a Comment »
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