I picked this book up over the weekend. You know, I used to load up at the autumn Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale on art monographs, brief humor/joke books, and poetry for browsing during football games. Since the NFL has optimized its revenue by requiring almost all possible streaming subscriptions to watch a bunch of football at the casual viewer’s, well, expense–which means the casual user such as me is not watching two or three football games on Sundays and maybe another one or two during the week–well, since the financial wizards made that optimization and since a cynical viewer might think that the games are now optimized for billions in sports betting (The Bears scored how many in week one? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the over. They scored how in week two? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the under. Is it me, or are more games going to overtime or won at the last second now? And if not, does reality make a difference?), my football watching has fallen off the cliff. Still, you would not know by what I bought on Saturday, and since the Sunday night game is streaming on Peacock, one of the handful of such subscriptions scattered amongst Nogglestead that cost what cable or DirecTV did before we cut the cord–well, since it was on, I put on a bit of the Chiefs game if only to hear Friar saying, “Shut up, Colinsworth!” in my head, and I picked up this book.
As I mentioned, this is not really a monograph; although it does include a number of Ms. McGee’s works, more importantly or interestingly, most of them show stages of their development, from tracing to working region to region. And she does not put in hard outlines and then work from them; instead, she does maybe part of the head and then works out from there.
She is a local artist who does (or did–the Web site in the book is not longer active, and a quick Internet searches led to a Facebook page that was active until 2022) commissions, and she’d work from photographs, which is where the light tracing comes in. I’ve seen artists like this with booths in Relics–some samples for sale and information about how to have your own photo turned into art. The book itself might be promotional material as well, as it does include information on how to commission work.
I hope that has not fallen off of a cliff as much as it probably has with the new AI-generating tools because being able to create works like these from scratch is amazing (said the oft-attempting poetaster).
At any rate, I only made it to the half, so it will be a day or so until I complete the other book I started on Sunday night. But even without football, I’ll probably work in a lot of the books I bought this weekend. If I can find them in the stacks. Because The Life of Greece is long, and the next volume in The Story of Civilization ain’t short, either.
