#29: Oil Painting, Books, and Good News
Dear reader,
This week’s donation goes to Pratham Books, a publisher in South India that creates storybooks in several languages and formats, to help children discover the joy of reading. If you’re based in India, you can volunteer with them as well.
This year, the winter has been hanging around the doorstep, refusing to leave, enticing us to huddle up and watch more Netflix and eat more sweet things. I’d fall into that trap, but thankfully grey cold mornings have a painterly quality about them. So naturally, the only thing to do is paint. My medium of choice over the years has been watercolour - but lately I’m taking to oils. There is a regimen to it that I don’t find with other mediums as easily.
Acrylic is too moody, watercolours too pristine. Oils allow for a delicious mess, that can always be rearranged. It’s like painting with buttercream. For months, I’ve been stuck with the idea of pomegranates. The weird shape of them, their cute little crowns, the seeds that look like rubies and blood at the same time. Usually, this is how inspiration strikes: some ordinary thing will pop into my head and make its presence felt for weeks. At some point, it will show up on my paper or canvas or piano keys. So, it showed up on a little canvas panel, on a rainy weekend morning:
With any creative practice to work sustainably though, you need a good frame of mind. The idea of a tortured artist is a concept that works for an occasional masterpiece, but I don’t think practice ever hurt anybody. Hence, good frame of mind > stereotypical rage-and-alcohol-infused art. But that’s tough to maintain when media is always fear mongering. So I spent this last week only consuming content on all the incredible things happening in science:
Huge If True: One of my favourite journalists from Vox launched her own YouTube channel, covering optimistic stories in tech. You can find videos on topics like F1 racing all the way to nuclear waste. Also, a value-packed interview on how she launched one of the fastest growing YouTube channels ever.
We’re blurring the line between imagination and reality. Sort of. Check out exactly what’s going on in Quanta Magazine’s 2023 Year in Biology.
The Eiffel Tower is tall. The Burj Khalifa’s tallest. But this interesting architectural wonder is one of Kuwait City’s cityscape icons - and also a water tower.
Your brain on nostalgia (it’s all good!)
See ya next week!
Kaav