Member-only story
A Basic Lesson: Faces
Let’s Dispel a Myth About Ability.
[CONTENT DISCLAIMER] The information contained in this article will broaden your art horizon and make you a slightly smarter person than you were five minutes before you read it. If you aren’t comfortable with acquiring new knowledge, you should stop reading now, head to the beach, bury your head in the sand and wait for the tide to come in and drown you…
I’ve often tried to engage in small-talk with people over the years, not that I’m really any good at it. I don’t care for sports, I can’t stand gossip, and I’m not really interested in hearing about the fifty thousand ways your cat/child/pet cockroach is cute or adorable. I’m interested in four primary things — Art, History, Literature and Music. And when I try to discuss these things, as I understand them, in the diverse forums where one tends to find abundant, mindless small-talk, it usually doesn’t go very far.
By which I mean to say that it’s somewhat defeatist in trying to have a higher-level, involved, intellectual discourse with people who are primarily concerned with college football, raging against their boss, and knocking back a case of beer-flavored piss to pass the time. That’s my damage to sort out, however. Even a master as skilled as Hemingway once observed “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his…