Hello fellow travellers... this is another message in a bottle thrown to the sea of digital information.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Rome and got the chance to visit the Vatican museum and Barberini museum. I got the privilege of witnessing the Sixtine Chapel and a lot of other paintings and sculptures that I saw only in art books (for conetxt my mom tried to enroll me into fine arts classes at an early age but I dropped out pretty fast... Kept a lot of the books my grand-ma gifted me tho).

This will be a couple of thoughts I had (but don't really have anyone to discuss with):

-A lot of the paintings were of course, religious or bibilical in nature. I'm not a very religious person, but man... seeing the magnitude, quality and amount of work that was put into a lot of those art pieces makes me want to believe that there is a God. There was simply something divine... A sort of divine inspiration or divine touch that you could feel. A photo in a book or a PC can't really convey it.

-I'm not an artist by profession... My trade is more technical in nature and so was my career path. My approach to art is hence very technical. A lot of people think that art and beauty is subjective... But I'm a firm believer that despite style and theme, there are technical aspects that make and art piece "good", composition, lighting, color choices, readability, good anatomy and good perspective, attention to detail and just sheer amount of work... all these can be true despite the style or subject you put in your art. Of course, considering that renaissance is maybe at the peak when it comes to those technical aspects, it was really humbling and inspiring. There was no photo reference at the time and you could only get a man to pose for a couple hours maybe.... How do they remeber the references? the shapes? the colors? The lights? the feel of the textures. They were truly amazing.

-Seeing all these masterworks in the flesh, even if I couldn't spend hours admiring every painting, it made me feel a deep connection with those human souls across history... Like I'm part of a long lineage of humanity in every civilization trying to chase beauty, coolness and perfection through my craft. When you see a beautiful piece of armour, clock, map or statue... maybe at the time they didn't have the concept of "COOL" but man I could really feel that they were flexing to make the things as "cool" as possible for their era.

Anyways... I think we still have a lot to learn from the old masters, even if you just want to draw cool shit like me. In this era of digital art old paintings are for snobs, but I think a lot of the masters laid the foundational theory on which we work today that can help us make our art even more awesome and cool as fuck.

Just to prove my point here is one of the paintings I really loved.

This is A painting by Ponziano Loverini

Look at how FUCKING COOL it is, the composition, the lights, the details, the scenery, the mix of gore and beauty. It just goes so fucking hard.

Anyways... enough Rambilngs.

Raz out!!!

I'm throwing this bottle at the sea cause I don't really know who to talk to about this subject... I don't have many friends and less even artist friends, so if you dear stranger read this I'm glad to have your attention.

I'mma be real, I'm not a very popular artist, and I get really baffled (if not a little envious) by the number of clicks some people get... Sometimes it's even demoralizing when you put so much time and effort into an art piece.

Last night I was watching a video about you know... bla bla ecology and all that schtick (I'm not gonna bore you with that we've all heard it a 1000 times), but it made me re-think about a very important aspect of our current "system//society //thingymagig"... the myth of infinite growth. Basically, We put a huge emphasis on bigger number = better, you know, bigger GDP, bigger profit, bigger number of sales, bigger reduction of carbon, bigger number of people that can read but obviously it's impossible to keep growing forever in system with finite ressources... Ofc, those are easy things to measure and quantify so we naturally tend to focus on them as indicators of good, but they don't quantify the wellbeing and positive impact on people's lives.

• As an exaple, we make more GDP and are more productive/hour, but we work more, are more tired, have less time for hobbies... Or we push the litteracy rate up but by forcing it the quality becomes really low and ends up having a detrimental several detrimental effects on peoples lives (this kinda happened in my country).

Paradoxically, we chase a goal that looks good in the number but does not really translate into something good.

The same point could be made for art. 1000, 10 000, 100 000, 1 000 000... those start to be some unconceivably large numbers at the human scale, and honestly it's kind of impressive.

But nowdays with social media, Art has become kinda "disposable" in a weird way... People will look at your art for seconds, maybe click and then keep scrolling never to think about it again. Are you really really reaching your audience and having an impact on people? Or would you rather make art for only one person, and that person will hold it dear in his heart for months... if not years. Would you rather make art that bring you satisfaction on a technical and personal level, even if it's just for yourself? (this is maybe more my case)

So yeah... to summarize, are you really using the real indicator to measure the success of your art? Is there a better thing to emphasize than just fame and clout... Maybe bringing a long lasting smile and gifting something beautiful to someone who will really appreciate it and your work?

If you ever feel down and demoralized by the digital numbers... Remember that, maybe you made someone really happy and that's maybe worth more than 10000000 empty clicks.

Thanks for reading my ramblings... Raz out