The Illustrations

I’m not an artist and have no plans of trying to become one.

It felt necessary to address the illustrations that have accompanied several posts. I feel like we can have a discussion about them now that I’ve been as honest with you as I can be.

I have a handful of photographs and a good half hour of chopped up video from our trips to Alaska. I originally wanted to share them in this space, but I couldn’t quite come up with a meaningful way of doing it. I could post a gallery of all of the pictures, or I could post one at a time affixed to a post relevant to the picture.

These ideas are all fine, but I’m not sure they would enhance the stories from those trips. In fact, the more I thought about it the more I decided they might actually take away from the stories.

Nobody would appreciate the nuances of the photographs or videos anyway. I can’t say that I would be able to if I were looking at a photo album of a trip I never went on. Not to mention the picture and video quality of what I have is roughly 10 years old, and while some are well done — thanks Dale — most aren’t. Media, in general, is becoming harder and harder for us to connect with. It all seems so ephemeral, mostly because it is, but also  because we’ve forgotten how to connect with it.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone.

I thought it might work out to just write without including any visuals, but at some point — I’ve forgotten when — I thought about including the images the way I remember them when I’m not in front of them, as silhouettes/outlines/sketches. Ideally, the words would then become the colors, smells, and feelings that I associate with the pictures when I look at them. In that way, someone who was never there could hopefully connect with the story in a similar way as me without having to have been there.

I’ll continue to do the illustrations as I continue to write. All I ask is that you, dear reader (all 3 of you), have a little mercy on me. All I have is a laptop with a pen and some free crappy sketching app.

Enjoy!