Portraits of Writers
An October pen and ink series of portraits of Substack writers
“I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” ― Frida Kahlo
Happy Sunday.
Maybe it’s the election, or the time of year, or some other trickle-down effect to the continued growth and expansion of the wonderful writing scene at Substack. Or maybe it’s just me, the natural spiral of my thinking running headlong into my cynicism. I can’t tell any more, but there is an emptiness and a stillness here these days.
I’ve shared an overview below of the series of portraits I did in October. You can see all of the portraits together. There’s a good bit of preamble, too, for those interested in the thinking behind such a series, in the value of selfies, the benefits of a timeline, and what it sometimes takes to resist being dragged under by apathy. You can jump around:
I so very much appreciate those of you who read each week.
Amy
(Note: portions of this post have been removed since the initial mailing.)
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An October Portrait Project
It’s mid-November. It’s been a few weeks since October ended. I’m two weeks into my current project tracking morning light. Time has no buffer for catching one’s breath. It just keeps moving, visible only in the blur we sometimes glimpse, a trail of light caught in a series of long exposure photos that let all the light in before capturing a window of time as a single image, the dance of a neon bracelet or glow stick, the trail of the lights on a passing car. The visualization of time.
Before things get too far away, I wanted to do a recap of my October series. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to go back and look at a post at Instagram to sort out something I did or confirm the year or time frame of a project. Everything runs together now. I can’t distinguish between separate years even in the last six or seven. I try to keep some markers in sight. This started in 2019. This started in 2017. But how many years of this or that other thing have there been now?
There is no buffer for catching one’s breath without simultaneously losing something of the current time. The best we can hope, maybe, is that the shutter left open will record and reveal hidden details we missed while we were pausing to reflect, to look over our shoulder, and to gain our bearings.
I have slowed my world down in so many ways. It often looks like I’m standing completely still as everything moves around me. But even so, I can’t help but feel the whoosh as if I’m standing, almost invisible, inside the trails of light.
Posts and roundups help create timelines. We may think we’ve got everything on our shelves, or in files, or in folders, or in cabinets, or tucked here and there, or on memory sticks and backup drives. Our attempts to hold on grow and grow, but they are often distributed and scattered. They are chaotic. They are disorganized despite our best efforts and intentions.
Posts we make in social spaces, on blogs, or in galleries help distill our creative lives into a coherent, curated timeline.
The photos at Instagram are in order. If I scroll far enough, I can orient myself in the past. There are the ICAD cards from that year. There is the Inktober series. There was the stitch journal. There was that year’s 100 Day Project. And so on.
More selective than sprawling backups in cloud storage, my Instagram feed offers a streamlined look at my creative life in the last six or seven years.
It is comforting to be able to look back and not have to weed through thousands of other photos and screenshots. I can just scroll my creative habit. (I always encourage people to routinely and periodically scroll their feed.1)
It is always good to stop and take time and reflect on how something went, what worked and what didn’t, what was learned, what you enjoyed most, what you might do differently next time, and overall how a project felt.
It’s fine (even healthy) to care more about process than outcome. But I think it’s still good to take time after a project is over and look at the whole of something before you shelve it and move on.
For me, so often the most important part of a project is the holistic view. If we think about the recent piece on perspective, it’s really easy to see how we shift back-and-forth in this process of viewing our creative work. It is the holistic view that I find powerful when I look at my own work. Thirty-one portraits viewed side by side, juxtaposed, thin, round, angular, lined, long, short, thinning, wide, open, hidden, intense… have so much more to say and show and tell than just viewing them one by one.
I see something different when I view three portraits on a page instead of one. I see something different when I view six or ten or fifty as an interconnected set.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.2
While I say that the holistic view is most important to me, it is with the complete recognition that, day to day, I am heavily invested in each individual portrait. In that hour (or however, long it might take), the single portrait has my full (drawing) attention. I am focusing on that one portrait and the lines that go into making up that one face.
But there is always the hovering awareness that each individual face is part of a larger series, the sense that the lines being drawn are, when viewed from farther away, fitting into a whole.
I care about each one, but I also care about the many, the collective of the set.
A Series of Portraits
This year, my October series was a series of portraits. This wasn’t new or surprising or shocking or revolutionary. Doing a series of portraits has been my approach for almost all of my Inktobers, all except maybe the very first one—which I think was the year that I started dabbling in portraits.
There have been grids of portraits, pages of freeform, Tetris-like boxes on a page. There was a handmade accordion sketchbook neatly tucked between composition book covers, a string of portraits that you can unfold to view a line of women.
No two portraits are ever the same.
Sure, there have been non-portrait drawings in some of the October series. I remember a dog, a boot, and a stack of tea cups, outliers, especially in the year that I used a fairytale-themed set of prompts. After that year, I set up my own Inktoportraits prompt set each year, a series of prompts specifically to be answered with portraits. One year I did portraits paired with birds each day, a favorite mashup series that I now don’t have any idea how I managed.
Outside of October, there have been entire years where I drew a portrait more days than not.
Mostly, I draw portraits.
Maybe Not This Year
I considered not doing October drawing this year because I wasn’t sure I cared. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to care. These challenges are often disappointing and lonely. At this point in my creative journey, they strike me as an exercise in self-accountability more than anything else, and I don’t necessarily need that.
This year, I just wasn’t sure it was worth it to put myself through the song and dance of a daily series “just because of October.” I would be drawing anyway (in my illustrated journal). Did I need to do someone else’s challenge (Inktober) to feel legitimate? The simple answer is no.
As October approached, I wasn’t sure I cared. It scared me to see that awareness in my periphery. I hadn’t articulated it to myself. I hadn’t recognized what might look like apathy, what might look like depression, what might simply look like someone who has lost footing in the midst of larger loss, what might look like a letting go.
I do think maybe there has been some degree of not caring in recent months. I think it translates to other voices, a chorus of noise out of which both why and does it matter emerge.
I wasn’t sure I cared, and so when it came to doing a challenge that would really be just to make myself do a challenge, I just didn’t think that it mattered enough to me to do it this year. I really struggled with the idea of letting go of setting up the Inktoportraits prompt set. Having done it for several years, letting go was really hard, even though it went unnoticed in the perpetual ooze of the prompt world. (When one prompt set or challenge or creative voice falls away, the ooze just reforms, filling in the hole. People constantly shift and move on.)
Even though I was thinking about just skipping October drawing altogether and removing the pressure of the daily completion factor, I had this idea that it might be fun to draw some Substack writers.
A Focus on Writers
I was intrigued by the idea of drawing other writers, but to do this series, I would need thirty-one writers willing to be drawn and good photos.
I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to get 31 people to volunteer. At the outset, I thought I might be flooded with people who were interested in being drawn. I naïvely thought that everyone would see the post and raise their hand.
That didn’t happen.
I put out an initial post on Notes to test the waters.
My note was probably seen by five people.
Of the people who saw my note, two said yes.
I decided to see if I could get enough people to fill a 31-day series before I committed to the idea.
There was no flood. There was no giant wave of hands. But there were a couple of people, mostly writers I didn’t know, who said yes. There were poets who said yes. And so I continued to try. It was unusual for me to put something out there multiple times when the response from the universe seemed to be that I should just let it go.
It took a couple of weeks of asking for volunteers (writers willing to be drawn) to get enough people.
Then it took some time to get the photos.
The Selfie Side
I didn’t count on the fact that, for a lot of people, taking a selfie is uncomfortable. It is not something they do all the time.
It is something I do often. It is something I encourage you to do often.
There is something about a selfie, something about being able to look objectively at ourselves. I’m not even sure most of us really know what we look like.
I think it’s helpful to be able to look back and see ourselves through time. If you snap just one, great. If you snap a dozen, great. You can delete nine of those if you don’t like them in the end. Personally, I often appreciate the whole, the juxtaposition, the grid, the subtle changes frame to frame.
I draw a selfie once a week. Every Saturday, I hold the phone at arm’s length and snap a photo to draw. I started this “weekly” as part of my 50 Before 50 project, part of the journal I kept to document that year, which is now the ongoing Illustrate Your Week project. I’ve been drawing a weekly self-portrait now for several years.
When I snap a few selfies for the weekly drawing, I’m typically not trying to snap the best selfie in the world. I’m generally not even moving from the chair. (Maybe that’s more about this year. Maybe that’s more about the pervasive state of not caring.) Basically, I’m just trying to grab an image that I can draw. Whoever I am right then, in that moment, is who will end up drawn into my journal.
At other times, I do try to take selfies that show me in a better light. When I first did the 100 Day Dress project (2021), it required a selfie a day. A lot of those were of just the dress or the neckline. But there are a lot of real selfies in the record of those days (which went on many months after the official end and which I repeated again in Fall of 2023).
I am glad I started snapping those selfies several years ago and captured a different me, an earlier me. This year, as I have dramatically changed in appearance, I am especially glad to have some of those older selfies, a record of self, a reminder.
Do You Want to Be Drawn?
Interacting with the volunteers was heartwarming.
I quickly realized the vulnerability involved in sharing a photo with me (someone they didn’t know) and agreeing to be drawn.
They were trusting that the drawing would be nice. They were hoping to see themselves on the page. They were hoping, maybe without knowing it, to see themselves differently than they are.
So, every day in October, I drew a Substack writer.
And I cared about each of the drawings.
I cared a lot about each of the drawings.
I wanted to create good, nice, reflective drawings of them. I wanted them to see themselves in the portraits. I wanted to capture the likeness of each writer.
A Series Complete
Overall, I think that these drawings turned out really nice. I intended to do more… I anticipated adding text. I thought about doing something with the Substack logo. I envisioned carving a stamp and using it on each page.
I often do my October series in a grid, and I started out with a plan to draw six writers on each page. I just couldn’t manage the smallness of that this year. Maybe it’s my stiffening hands. Maybe it’s my worsening eyes.
I decided to do three on a page, and even that was a stretch at times.
I had lots of ideas for how to unify the series. Usually I box the portraits. Usually I do something in the frame surrounding the portraits. Typically, I add the number or a word. This year, I thought I might at least add each writer’s name or the name of their publication. (I still thought I might do that in the two weeks since the series ended.)
Maybe I just didn’t have the energy this year. The portraits were the primary objective, and I did them. I enjoyed them. I tackled the photos given to me. There were times I would like to have guided writers to send me other photos. There were times I worried I didn’t capture the likeness.
But every night I drew one of the writers who had volunteered.
Most of the people were not writers that I knew before this series. I enjoyed getting to know these writers by reading some of their posts and then studying the image they gave me and drawing them.
I know not everyone loved the portrait that I drew. I had to grapple with that throughout the month because I could feel it when it happened. I know for some people being drawn in pen and ink (and black and white) doesn’t have the same resonance as a painting. It may not have been what they expected.
But as a series, I’m happy with how it went.
Logistics
I worked in Micron for this series.
October is the only time of the year that I use Micron. I draw in fountain pen for all of my other work. I enjoy the month of Micron as a diversion. It offers me a different level of control, and I enjoy the silvery tone of a pen that is running low on ink. (I do use a specific tip size, and I used up all my pens this October.)
The paper is Strathmore Bristol, 11x14.
I sketch in pencil and erase after inking. I did find my pencil near the end.
A Next Series, Maybe
Someone in this process commented on the lack of diversity in the series. While that was not by design or intent, I don’t want to overlook the reality of that. It basically boils down to reach, to who did or didn’t see my post and the posts that were shared by others who were trying to help me get thirty-one volunteers.
In my current post-election mindset, I have been really missing and thinking about the fact that I don’t have local friends, support, or community. I am seeing other people and marginalized or threatened communities coming together. We are all going to need our communities (and friends) in coming days.
In light of everything that is going on right now, I really want to get to know more people in the trans community and read more of their writing. I want to connect with trans writers who are writing about life the way I do (and the way the readers I continue to read each week do), life unfolding.
I have no connections, but I am thinking about a series of portraits that focuses on writers from the trans community.3
The Writers
Thank you to all of the writers who were a part of this series! Individual publications are linked below.
Nan Tepper, The Next Write Thing
Leah McCullough, The Creative Mystic
Dick Whyte, Forgotten Poets
Katrina Anne Willis, Surrendering to Sappho
Anyakara, Shraddah
Emily Kaminsky, The Creative Convergence
Jonathan Potter, Potter Poems
Francesca, Singing the Tune Without the Words
Elizabeth Beggins, Chicken Scratch
Esmé Weijun Wang, Reasons for Living
Lucy Wadham, Light Up My Life
Kim, kōtare
Amy Gabrielle, Amy Gabrielle’s Substack
X. P. Callahan, Diary Poems
Andrew Horan, Centenary
Jess Greenwood, Joy Luck Club
Linda Epstein, But That’s Another Story
Jane R. Shore, School of Thought
Holly Starley, Holly Starley’s Rolling Desk
Paulette Bozeman, Because Life is Messy
Laura Babcock, leapphrogdesign
Kortney Garrison, One Deep Drawer
Kayla Mauriello, Banana Feels
Marya Hornbacher, Going Solo at the End of the World
Prajna O'Hara, The Salty Crone
Glyn Lehmann, By Nature
Marta Lane, Living with Big Dreams
Justus, Grizzly Pear Jr.
Deborah Witte, Pancake Musings
H. A. Titus, Tea and Tales
Tania Tyler, Sacred Environment
Paula, Unapaulagetic
Jodi Sh. Doff, The Long Goodbye: Dementia Caregiving
M. Ocampo, M. Stories
Weekly Bits and Pieces
Widowed—Almost Five Months In (partially paywalled)
Made It?
Thank you for reading along! I always enjoy your comments and invite you to chime in. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.
Mirror, if you’ve drawn a selfie in the last month
Camera, if you’ve snapped a selfie in the last week
Paper bag, if you are the anti-selfie sort
Fuzzy, if (overall) you trust people; prickly, if (overall) you don’t
Up, if things have improved for you this year; down if they have not
__Day__ of the week you most enjoy reading at Substack; daily, if you read throughout the week
Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!
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Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.
Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.
Note: the podcast website will be going away soon. I will be canceling it in the next few days. It is an expense I need to cut. I will be moving the files to Substack, but it’s a partial solution. Basically, everything will be broken and a mess.
Generally attributed to Aristotle.
It wouldn’t be a daily series. It might be more sporadic. But I am considering it, even as I grapple with whether the idea is counterproductive.
Cheat sheet for the "words" people are using in their replies. (Depending on how you get to the comments, it can be hard to see the text at the same time.)
Mirror, if you’ve drawn a selfie in the last month
Camera, if you’ve snapped a selfie in the last week
Paper bag, if you are the anti-selfie sort
Fuzzy, if (overall) you trust people; prickly, if (overall) you don’t
Up, if things have improved for you this year; down if they have not
__Day__ of the week you most enjoy reading at Substack; daily, if you read throughout the week
Great line: “it’s fine to care more about the process than the outcome.” Amy, this is true in so many places in our life.”