Friday Goodie Bag, May 17: A fun art quiz some videos and a digital download

Much too serious around here lately

Who is this, and what is he holding? Dormition of the Theotokos church in Asklipieo, Rhodes.

We’re going to have a bit of fun today above the fold. It’s been a bit of a debbie-downer sort of week at the Sacred Images Project, what with all the apostate crazypants nuns, and monks getting thrown out of their monasteries by Freemasons and all sorts of disasters. So today we’re going to have a fun quiz using the polls option.

I’ll show you some images and give three or four options for each, and you can click on which thing you think it is. Don’t worry, they’ll all be easy ones.

Sometimes it’s just easier to do it the hard way.

Below the fold I’ve got a special treat for paid subscribers that will appeal to those with kids, especially home-schoolers; a set of digital downloads of a 14th century manuscript illustration, a magnificent version of St. Michael the Archangel, in three versions. One is a slightly colour-enhanced version of the original painting for a reference. The second is the same image with a grid applied to make it easier for you or your child to copy the image by hand, a big part of the process of learning to draw accurately. And the third is a line drawing I created from the original to be printed and used as a colouring page. I hope you enjoy them.

And for our eye-candy, I have some more exclusive photos and a few video clips I took a few months ago in the Duomo of Orvieto.

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A sacred art quiz

So, I’ll just post some pics, and then a poll following giving some multiple choice options. We’ll see how it’s all sinking in…

In a week, I’ll give the answers.

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Update: how we’re doing

(I would have made this a video, but it’s after dark here, and I look dreadful in artificial light.)

I’m going to do it again… I can’t stop myself. I want to thank everyone who has signed up in the last while to be a paid subscriber. It really does mean the world to me. I’m working pretty hard to make it something worth doing, and it’s incredibly encouraging to know you guys think so too.

After coming here 2.5 years ago I was still trying to live by occasional freelance writing gigs and commissions of paintings, and really still didn’t have a solid idea how I was going to keep going. But it wasn’t working in a practical sense. I never lacked commissions, but I knew that lurching desperately from painting to painting was just no way to achieve financial stability, let alone security. Hopes for better things in the future - at 58 you start to feel like you’re running out of time - were simply a pipe dream.

Then somehow the idea finally coalesced to use the Substack to start writing about the things I was studying; basically just sharing what I was investigating and learning about. I really want to make it clear I’m not any kind of expert, just someone inexplicably in love, and insatiably hungry for these works of art.

Since monetising in January, interest in what I was writing about has just exploded and I’m absolutely gobsmacked. Not only have I made it - in four months - to financial stability with prospects for actual long-term security, for literally the first time in my life, starting to come into view.

This graph might not look like much, especially to a North American, FirstWorldian observer, but remember that in rural Umbria cost of living is at least 70% lower than even the cheapest life over there. This is the first time since 2015 I’ve not felt deeply apprehensive and even anxious about the future. It’s going to take a little adjusting to get used to the idea of not being in danger. Not struggling just to cover expenses.

Working for myself I really wanted to learn how to do it well, do it properly, so I’ve been teaching myself all about entrepreneurship and online marketing and all that. (There’s a whole world of YouTube about it). You hear a lot from the marketing people things along the lines of "You need a product to sell that solves people’s problems." But I think this might be coming at it backwards.

I didn't have a product that solved problems, I had something I loved and was eagerly enthusiastic about, and as I got more into it I discovered it was at the same time solving problems for me. I only really got into writing about it at first because it was something I was so keen on. I found out later that there was this huge hunger for it out there in the world. I’m always surprised by the great variety of people coming here.

And once I started thinking in terms of what problems it was solving for me, analysing that, the idea started to solidify about how it might be made to solve problems for other people. For a long time I figured I was the only one who had those particular problems that could be solved with this stuff. But as people started to react to it, reliably in the same way, I started seeing it in a different way. This was something that I could actually help people with, something that would never end up becoming so toxic I would have to stop for my own wellbeing and theirs, as the other work certainly was.

On Substack Notes - our equivalent of Twitter (but much nicer) we talk a lot about how to get a Substack going, and I’d say to work out what you have going on now that is solving problems for you? You can be sure that whatever problems you have they're not yours alone. Your subset is going to be shared by millions of people. So however you have solved them for yourself is going to be useful to others.

That's the glory of the internet. You might still be a weirdo interested in some weird, obscure niche thing, but the internet expands the pool so enormously that you discover that you're not alone in this liking of your obscure niche thing. When you're in an ocean-sized pool of people, your little niche thing is going to have at least tens of thousands of people in it.

This is my work now, and I have you all to thank for it. Between being able to make ends meet doing it, having hope for the future prospects (maybe it’s not completely impossible to own a home!) and really owning the work itself, this whole things has been a complete life-changer.

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The Sacred Images Project is a reader-supported publication where we talk about Christian sacred art, the first 1200 years. You can subscribe for free to get one and a half posts a week.

For $9/month you get a weekly in-depth article on this great sacred patrimony, plus extras like downloads, photos, videos and podcasts (in the works), as well as voiceovers of the articles, so you can cut back on screen time.

Sign up here; it’s just $9/month.

Today’s featured shop item is the note book with the Hans Memling St. Michael the Archangel on the cover, which you can order here:

If you’d like to see my painting and drawing work, and maybe order a print or other item, you can find it here:

If you’d like to set up a monthly patronage for an amount of your choice, you can do that here. If you sign up for more than $9/month, you get a complimentary paid subscription to the Sacred Images Project.

More stuff behind the big green door. Subscribe to join us!

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