Deep Looking part 2: learning to draw gave me superpowers
Deep Looking part 2: learning to draw gave me superpowers
How fall in love with a work of art
What if you were bitten by a radioactive spider one day and suddenly found your ability to perceive physical reality was immensely sharpened? What if you could, at a glance, look at an object and remember it well enough to draw it from memory? What if you woke up one day and had a superpower that allowed you to see things with such intensity that you could remember fine, exact and accurate details 30 or 40 years later?
We moderns, with all our artificial means of remembering, thinking and seeing things, are perhaps losing a set of skills that were once much more common. We think certain mental skills are a kind of magical ability or genetic anomaly that can’t be reproduced. But we’re wrong about that.
A note to our many new free subscribers: 200+/month! That is amazing! It’s very gratifying to see so many people share an understanding how important this work is.
This is a post for paid members, so there’s a paywall coming below. The Sacred Images Project is a reader-supported publication, which means there’s no annoying ads BUT also no advert revenue to keep the lights on and the kitties fed. This is a crucial moment for The Sacred Images Project.
I’m just one person doing all of it. A friend comes up from Rome about once a month to drive me to see a church or museum around Umbria and Lazio, and another friend, all the way back in Vancouver, is volunteering to do video editing. At the moment, I am putting in full time hours, 6 days a week, to do the research and writing, and that includes at least a monthly trip to a church or museum to take photos and video footage, edit and write. And for that, because the growth of paid memberships has been completely stagnant, with zero growth through March, it is bringing in less than half what is needed to cover monthly expenses. I rely on donations from patrons to make up the rest.
I launched this idea of writing about Christian sacred art in November, including original material like videos, with the aim of making these treasures more widely known throughout the English speaking Catholic world. I was banking on there being enough interest out there to at least minimally support this work. I’m not seeking riches; just enough to keep doing the work which I think is very important, filling an enormous gap in our beleaguered Christian culture in the west.
But though we have seen very encouraging rapid growth in free subscriptions, for some reason, paid memberships, after an initial burst, have been completely flatlined since the end of February. The normal rate of growth of paid memberships on Substack is about 3-5%, with 10% being considered very good. But the paid membership for The Sacred Images Project has stayed at 2% with 52 members.
I am working on expanding the work in the next few weeks and months. I’m starting podcast style video interviews next week, and am working on making ebooks available on specific topics. These will be made available free to paid members, while free subscribers will have the option of purchasing the ebooks at my shop, Hilary White Sacred Art. I’ve started creating voiceover audio recordings of my longer articles for paid members so they can listen to, rather than have to sit in front of the screen and read. And as I’ve talked about before, full scale courses in sacred art suitable for homeschooling families are in the works.
But as I mentioned above, there’s only one of me, and without sufficient income it is very difficult to see these ideas coming to fruition.
So, if you are enjoying these posts, and want to see more, would you consider upgrading paid?
The only way I will be able to keep doing this work that I think is so important, is if I can bring my paid membership up to a minimum 100 from our current 52 in the next few months. I’ve got until the end of May to achieve this before my living expenses will double. Right now I’m managing with a roommate, but that arrangement will end this summer.
(Also, Substack is telling me, as usual, that the post is too long for gmail. If you want to read the whole thing, click the linked headline and open on the site instead of email.)
In this post, we will talk about visual intelligence, the difference between merely looking and really seeing, how to look while thinking and how looking with thinking improves your perceptive intelligence overall. It’s a long one, and there’s a little exercise at the end to practice on. We’ll learn how to do “looking with deliberation, with the visual intellect consciously engaged.”
I hope you’ll consider joining us as we explore these ideas.