Blog | The Work of Jarrett Fuller

I’m really excited about James McMullan’s new series for The New York Times, Line by Line. The series is about “rediscovering the lost skill and singular pleasure of drawing:”

Drawing, for many people, is that phantom skill they remember having in elementary school, when they drew with great relish and abandon. Crayon and colored pencil drawings of fancy princesses poured out onto the sketchbooks of the girls, while planes and ships, usually aflame, battled it out in the boys’ drawings. Occasionally boys drew princesses and girls drew gunboats, but whatever the subject matter, this robust period of drawing tended to wither in most students’ lives and, by high school, drawing became the specialized province of those one or two art geeks who provided the cartoons for the yearbook and made the posters for the prom.

I’ve been thinking about drawing a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about how I don’t drawn near the amount I used to and I didn’t like that but I’ve also been thinking about how drawing, in many ways, is much closer to our original language. As kids, we draw before we write. In history, pictographs came before letters and alphabets. So why don’t we draw much anymore?

Milton Glaser also points out: 

Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.

I want—need—to start drawing more. I’m excited to go through Mr. McMullan’s series. Part two is already up and it called “The Frisbee of Art.”

Colin Greenwood of Radiohead has written an interesting piece on the band’s decision to release In Rainbows digitally with a pay-what-you-want model back in 2007. Three years ago, this was revolutionary. Now, in 2010, countless bands release projects with this format and there are even sites dedicated to releasing music under this idea. The band has recently completed their next album and are currently deciding how they plan to release it to their fans. With this in mind, Greenwood says:

I am optimistic that if you make good work you can secure the patronage of your fans.

This reminded me of a thoughtful email I received recently from Asthmatic Kitty, the record label of Sufjan Stevens. Stevens has also recently completed a new album, though he will be selling his through more traditional distribution methods. He’ll be releasing his project on his site on October 12 digitally for $8 and on CD and LP for $12 and $20 respectively. Asthmatic Kitty sent an email to Sufjan’s fans stating they have reason to believe Amazon will be releasing the record at a significantly lower price like they did with Arcade Fire’s latest. Regarding Amazon’s release plans:

We have it on good authority that Amazon will be selling The Age of Adz for a very low price on release date, not unlike they did with Arcade Fire’s recent (and really terrific) The Suburbs. We’re not 100% sure Amazon will do this, but mostly sure.

We have mixed feelings about discounted pricing. Like we said, we love getting good music into the hands of good people, and when a price is low, more people buy. A low price will introduce a lot of people to Sufjan’s music and to this wonderful album. For that, we’re grateful.

But we also feel like the work that our artists produce is worth more than a cost of a latte. We value the skill, love, and time they’ve put into making their records. And we feel that our work too, in promotion and distribution, is also valuable and worthwhile.

I’d be interested in seeing a graph of some sort showing how much people payed for In Rainbows or what the average person paid for it. I stand by the idea that good worth deserves payment. I hope as an artist, my work is worth something to the viewer. I’m hoping I’m making good work that is securing the support of whatever fans I may have.

I like Radiohead and I like Sufjan Stevens and I want them to keep making music I can enjoy. Even when I pay for it.

I practically demolished this article on beauty from Arthur Krystal. It sort of a half review of Umberto Eco’s book History of Beauty and half rumination on what beauty means. The history part, of course, was interesting, but it was the second half of the article that really got me excited. The definition of beauty proposed here is about a perfect a description I’ve read:

“Beauty” seems suited to those experiences that stop us in our tracks. Whether it’s a painting called Broadway Boogie-Woogie or a scherzo by Paganini, the beautiful is conducive to stillness. It doesn’t excite us, or necessarily instill in us the desire to replicate it; it simply makes us exist as though we’re existing for that very experience.

I like that a lot. Beauty stops us in our tracks. I’m not sure if it doesn’t excite us, I’d like to think it does, but I think we are often too overwhelmed by what we are experiencing that maybe we can’t even process emotion. All we can do is stop and admire and take a deep breath.

Beauty is everywhere; it’s just not omnipresent. One can find it in the line of poetry, in a line of prose; it may be in the faces of people we see for an instant, and it forever in the face of Charlie Chaplin at the end of City Lights. And yet when we try to account for moments like these, words seem a poor choice for language. Perhaps this vulnerability to beauty, as well as our inadequacy in explaining it, stems from the fact that beauty is fleeting.

Again, brilliant. Stanley Kubrick said “The test of work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to describe why it’s good.” I love that. My favorite art, movies, books are my favorite not because of technical proficiency but because I experienced beauty. Because it affected me on a deeper level. It stopped me in my tracks and I just sat there. Deep breath.

Trying to describe beauty with words just doesn’t seem sufficient. Critiquing and dissecting robs it of what made it beautiful in the first place.

None of us exists in a state of perpetual delight or wonder, and even the most exalted works of art and nature do not always affect us with the same intensity. Indeed, the paradoxical question arises: If beauty were not temporary, would it last? Beauty may, in fact, exist only because it disappears, because it offers a glimpse of redemption in a world where such redemption is just an idea. That’s why we spend so much time talking about it. (If we existed in a state of grace, talking about grace would be irrelevant.)

Holy wow. Read that again: “Beauty exists because it disappears. It offers a glimpse of redemption.” Beauty brings light to dark world. Beauty provides hope amidst a broken world. It’s in those moments where we are stopped in our tracks when we are reminded that we just might be okay.

Deep breath.