To assist the blogger in creating a blog in an organised manner, the designers create a widget called "labels", and you can name them yourself, and even place a page under more than one label. So, for this blog, I have separated the pieces into "Abstracts" and "Drawings", "Pictures" and "Portraits", with separate labels for specific series such as "The Artist Was Bored", "The Digital Art Gallery", and a label of their own for the "Cartoons" and the "Sketchbooks". All very useful to the librarian and the museum archivist, as it is to the tourist.
Shall I then confess that I hate these labels? My copy of Dostoievski's "The Brothers Karamazov" is not on my bookshelf alongside Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels, even though both are murder mysteries; nor is it on my Russian shelf, which is mostly 20th century, but does include Pushkin and Tolstoy, as well as a critique of the early paintings of Modigliani (the critic was an American, but he wrote the book in his native Russian and then translated it into American English; Vladimir Nabokov, by name); the Dostoievski is next to Camus, Herman Melville, Kazantsakis and Nietzsche, on my Philosophy shelf, though Sartre is not there, because he is in my French Literature section, as is Victor Serge, though Serge is actually Russian (and yes, you are correct, I often have difficulty locating particular books).
Where do I place Face 1b then, in the labeling of this blog? It is not a portrait - I made up the face entirely from my imagination, though it is perfectly possible that a woman who looks exactly like this exists somewhere in the world, and maybe I saw her, and the image embedded itself in my psyche. But it was not painted as a portrait: it was doodled in a meeting when I was, as usual, bored: plain white paper, odd shapes in odd colours, random, abstract, coloured in. At some point it began to look like a face, so I let it; and then, later, scanned it, gave it a black background, finished it, named it. So is it an "Abstract", a "Drawing", a "Picture" or a "Portrait"? Does it count as "The Artist Was Bored" even though it is not modeled on someone else's work, like all the others in that series? And is not everything in this gallery "Digital Art"? I have placed it in "Portraits", only because that is where most people looking would expect it to be placed, though in fact a "Portrait" is the one thing that it most definitely is not.
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