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Living a life well lived must surely include coming to an acceptance of your own finitude. Including an acceptance of what cannot be and what cannot be done. Of the time that there will not be to fill. Of the countless paths that can never be taken. Serenity must include an ability to register the ever-spiralling possibilities and snippets of other not-yet-imagined lives and to be at ease in our connectedness to what others have been and done but that we will never do ourselves.

I think here of how difficult it can be to make a decision, the agony in wanting to make the right choice, knowing all the while that “right” is impossible. There’s an oft-unspoken effort to avoid regret in that agonizing. But that effort represents a kind of paradox: the anguish exists because regret is inevitable. To live is to regret.

More than that, to live well is to care for your regrets, to accept their role as teacher and guide. In Madeline Miller’s Circe, the witch-goddess speaks one evening with Telemachus, son of Odysseus. They have confessed their sins to each other: he of the murders he committed at Odysseus’s command, she of how she created Scylla, the monster who torments sailors. Telemachus says:

“Her name...Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.”

“Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?”

It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.”

“It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said.

“Yes.” His voice was sharp.

“It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.”

He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said.

“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”

Miller, Circe, page 373

Wisdom arises from foolishness, from errors and wrongs. From regret. Do not let anyone take your regret from you! Do not dishonor it by flinching when it shows its face. It is both what made you who you are, and a tool for weaving a different world.

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Realising this exhibition was closing soon, I popped down to London’s National Portrait Gallery to see the work of a painter whose technical ability I’ve admired since art school.

Before I start, a note about the images. Some people find Saville’s work disturbing. With respect for this, I’m predominantly using details to illustrate the painting techniques I love, with a handful of complete images at the end.

In the early 1990s, I would occasionally buy The Times, because it had the best arts supplement. It was there that I first encountered Jenny Saville, photographed with her monumental degree show painting Propped.

I think most people encountering her work just saw these raw, honest paintings of large women, and of course I saw them too. But what really struck me was the exceptional quality of the brushwork. At that time, this figurative work embodied everything I sought in abstract painting; it just happened to be contained and shaped by the human form. I became a Saville fan from that moment, primarily because of her brilliant mark-making at scale. I saw her as a painter’s painter.

As James Putnam notes in his essay, The Art-Music Connection and The Album Cover as Art, that same Times supplement also caught the attention of Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire from Manic Street Preachers, who were searching for something to represent the raw and anguished themes of their forthcoming third album:

“…they were inspired by Saville’s paintings, which they saw featured in a newspaper supplement. Although Saville was initially reluctant for her art to be used as a record cover, she relented after having a phone conversation with Edwards about anorexia and reading his related lyrics to the song 4st 7lb. She then agreed for him to use her image of the triptych, Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face), which depicts an obese woman in underwear. By painting this raw, unflattering image of a body at such a monumental scale, Saville questions societal norms about beauty and the traditional idealised representations of the female form in art. Like the album’s music, it challenges the viewer, or listener, to confront upsetting realities about the human condition. The band went on to use another Saville painting, Stare, for their album Journal for Plague Lovers (2009). This provoked controversy as it depicted a child’s face with red marks on it that some retailers thought to be potentially disturbing, so they censored it by packaging it in a plain slipcase.”

I don’t want this to be about the two paintings made famous by Manic Street Preachers, but it’s an interesting connection. Not only did we both discover her work in the same supplement, but it was The Holy Bible that shifted my attention from Saville’s technical ability to the subject matter, giving substance to the themes she was exploring. A couple of years later, I finally saw Propped at the controversial Sensation (Charles Saatchi’s ‘shock of the new’ collection — Hirst’s shark, Quinn’s blood, Emin’s tent, Harvey’s Myra and so on) in 1997. Living in London at the time, I witnessed the explosion of YBAs, some of whom frequented the same bars as us.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is a major retrospective at the prestigious National Portrait Gallery, presenting three decades of Saville’s work in chronological order. Her paintings represent an ongoing dialogue with the history of figurative art while delivering the thrill of seeing and feeling something entirely new. The show has been immensely popular — most days booked up well in advance — and on my visit, the accompanying catalogue was completely sold out.

The first painting is Hyphen, depicting Saville and her sister in extreme, almost fisheye closeup, seamlessly connected. Immediately, the quality drew me inches from the canvas — perfect expressive brushstrokes and bold interjections (she used a huge scraper, nothing so subtle as a palette knife at this scale). The sharp lines are reminiscent of Euan Uglow’s geometric style, the first of many great painters I’d be reminded of during my visit.

Standing really close, the paintings become great fleshy landscapes. This is most evident in Trace, a close-up of a back where the bra strap indentation marks resemble tracks or paths describing contours — echoing the exhibition notes for Hyphen that refer to “landscapes of the flesh.” Trace reminds me of how I approached painting mountains at art school — as if viewed from low-flying drones hovering so close that the land’s edges disappeared from view. My tutors frowned upon anything related to landscape and dismissed my approach, but looking back, I realise I was onto something. I digress, but then again, it felt like I was looking at these paintings as that younger, wide-eyed version of myself.

Saville typically paints eyes and hair with a flat technique, reserving the expressive thickness and sensual bold gestures for flesh and facial features. This approach is particularly striking in the Red Stare Head studies II and IV. Up close, mouths transform into pure abstraction, and everything becomes an abstract expressionist landscape. With any painting, I could frame a portion with my phone and evoke everything I love about a great Peter Lanyon painting. Here’s a quick example comparing a section of Lanyon’s Thermal with a detail from Saville’s Red Stare IV.

The main Stare, the one on the cover of Journal for Plague Lovers, is stunning. Bolder, more confident; that jade background. More brutal, perhaps? But it’s not a painting about abuse; the young woman has a port-wine birthmark. One eye holds me, while the other is glassy and glazed, looking slightly off into the distance. There’s a haunted quality to her expression, but it’s not trauma; she’s just a young girl with a birthmark. I know this, but I also know that when an artist presents such an image with ambiguity, they intentionally invite multiple interpretations.

The next room shifted tone, featuring mostly drawings in charcoal and pastel. The layers of iterative drawing were breathtaking, with some composed of swirling loops that reminded me of Cy Twombly’s rhythmic, expressive style.

More recent work in the last two rooms challenged me. I struggled with the traumatic Aleppo, not because of its subject but because of its pastel and charcoal blur reminiscent of Francis Bacon (an artist I’ve never liked). And I didn’t connect with the religious iconography and formal figure drawing of Pietà 1.

The final room delivered a shock of ultra-saturated colour — though this seems a natural evolution when you consider how many years Saville has spent looking at fleshy pinks. I noticed a wide variety of styles, including compositions that used a collage-like approach. Several intimate head portraits seemed similar to one another, each featuring what appeared to be oversized eyes, pixie noses and full lips (but this may accurately reflect the sitters).

On closer inspection, three of these paintings offered more. Chasah has featured in several press reviews, but up close, I discovered something that reproductions had not revealed — the dark skin is rendered with many small, almost impressionist marks in an array of colours. I then read the accompanying description and learned that during this period, Saville had drawn inspiration from Monet. I also better appreciated neighbouring pastel work Prism, with its orange marks buzzing like neon. And Messenger features a stunning rainbow of colour pouring from the cheek that made me wonder if Messenger was actually Prism.

Another work I struggled with was Drift, one of the poster images for the show. It seems to lack the qualities I love; the face composition feels almost amateur in its strange unreality. While it appears vibrant at first glance, closer inspection reveals the colour is almost muddy, with small and less engaging marks. I felt similarly about Rupture, though its painterly strokes were much more exciting and expressive, reminiscent of Arshile Gorky (a noted influence).

Of course, this is all down to taste. I’ve always been very particular about the kind of painting and styles of application and mark-making that matter to me. Saville rightly explores her influences and seeks to expand and evolve her practice. While a few paintings here don’t quite do it for me, the vast majority most certainly do.

Two women nearby were enthusiastically discussing the exhibition when they suddenly engaged me, perhaps noticing how intently I was studying the surfaces. “All the women here today are so excited about this!” they told me. “These are real women!” I’d been wondering about this and remain curious about how different women feel about Saville’s representation of women. One of them mentioned the male gaze in art, but I was prepared and told them I’d first learned about that from Cindy Sherman — and with that we were all briefly best friends. I reassured them that many of us men appreciate Saville’s work, and they reassured me that they knew that. We all agreed about how impressive the paintings are up close.

As we parted, I told them Saville has been my favourite modern painter for thirty years, and smiled to myself — grateful that I still feel something when I spend a little time with extraordinary paintings.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting was at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 20th June to 7th September 2025. All photos of Saville’s work in this post are my own, taken at the exhibition.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello, I'm Jack. I was born, raised, and live in west Michigan, US. I live in a quiet (aka "boring") suburb with my lovely wife, our dog, a few tropical fish, and a sea urchin named Lurch.

I was a paperboy, fast food worker, and ditch digger long before I started creating software for a living. My first programming project was a Laboratory Information Management System (L.I.M.S.) for a local environmental testing lab. This was in 1992. I was learning as I went, using a Macintosh RDBMS environment called 4th Dimension. I continued as a solo software developer for a couple of years.

In 1995, I cofounded the web design firm "Fusionary Media" with my two partners. Fusionary grew to a team of around 15 people. We built some very nice websites, software, and mobile apps for companies like MLB, GM, Steelcase, etc. This went on for 25 years, until we sold the company in 2020. I've been "retired" since then, but I miss working on things with people, so we'll see.

These days I spend most of my time with photography, blogging, and reading.

I enjoy tinkering with tech of all kinds and exploring what different software tools can do. This often means completely upending my workflow in order to shoehorn some cool new toy into it. I call this a "hobby".

What's the story behind your blog?

Which one? 😂

In the late 1990s, when the internet was still new and exciting, I wanted to tell everyone about everything. I was learning to create websites, so starting a blog was a great opportunity to do both. I created a couple of proto-blogs in 1998 and 1999, but those have been lost to time. My current blog at baty.net began in August 2000, 25 years ago this month. Everything before 2021 is archived at archive.baty.net. I don't delete old posts, although I probably should.

My early posts were mostly Gruber-style link posts. It's sad that so many of those original links are dead now. Eventually I started sharing more details about what I was doing and thinking about, rather than just linking to other things. This continues today.

I sporadically maintain several other sites/blogs. Other than Baty.net, there's also a "Daily Notes" blog at daily.baty.net, but lately I've just been rolling that into baty.net. I recently started a photo blog using Ghost at baty.photo. Ghost makes posting images easy, but I haven't decided if I'll continue.

I keep a wiki using TiddlyWiki (since 2018) (rudimentarylathe.org). I don't even know what it's for, honestly, but I keep putting stuff there when I don't know where else it should go.

My dream is to have only One True Blog, but that's been elusive.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Honestly, I don't really have a creative process. Nothing deliberate, anyway. My posts are mostly journal entries about whatever's on my mind. What usually happens is that I'll read someone's blog post or I'll try some new tool, and share my thoughts on it.

I used to write (bad) poetry and would love to compose longer, thoughtful essays, but that never happens.

More often than not I publish things long before they're ready. It's as if I'd never heard of proofreading. I just fix things later. If I had to make everything perfect first, I'd never post anything.

I write my posts in whatever text editor I'm infatuated with at the moment. 90% of the time, that means Emacs, the nerdiest possible option.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I prefer a tidy, pleasant environment. Usually, though, I sit at my desktop computer (an M4 MacBook Air and Studio Display) in my messy basement office. I just start writing whenever I have something to say. My wife thinks I have some form of auditory processing disorder, so I rarely listen to music while writing. It only muddles my thoughts (even more than they already are).

I do find that things come easier for me when I'm surrounded by books. They inspire me.

Once in a while, I'll draft posts longhand with a nice fountain pen or on a manual typewriter, but I'm lazy, so that's pretty rare.

If I had my way, there'd be a giant window in my home office, maybe overlooking water. Currently I stare at a bare wall, which is probably not ideal for creative inspiration.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I change platforms so often that it'll probably be different by the time anyone reads this, but I'm currently using Hugo to render a static website.

My static sites are hosted on a small VPS running FreeBSD with Caddy as the web server. I use Porkbun for domain registration and management.

For creating new posts in Hugo, I have Emacs configured to create properly formatted Markdown files in the correct location. I write the posts in Emacs. When finished, I run a little shell script that builds the site and uploads it to the server. I don't use any fancy Github deployment actions or anything. I just render the site locally and use rsync to push changes.

I've used nearly every blogging platform ever created. I've even written several of my own. Each platform has something I love about it, and when I start to miss whatever that thing is, I'll switch back to it. And so on. Sometimes moving to a new blogging platform gets the writing juices flowing. Sometimes it's just something to do when I'm bored and don't have anything to say.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I would love to be the type of person who started a WordPress (or whatever) blog in the noughts and never changed anything. So many of my posts have bad links or missing images due to moving from platform to platform. It's frustrating for both me and my readers.

I suppose what I'd do differently is pick a process and stick with it. Maybe focus on writing instead of tinkering with themes and platforms and such. Blogs are simple things, really, and overthinking everything has caused me nothing but trouble.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I'm running my static sites on a small, $5/month (plus $1 for backups) VPS at Vultr, so it costs very little. I pay another $5/month for Tinylytics to watch traffic/views. So I'm in for around $11/month.

The Ghost blog costs $15/month at MagicPages.

One other cost is domain registrations, which adds up to maybe $50/year.

I have no interested in trying to make money from blogging, even if it were feasible.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I hesitate to recommend specific blogs, since that means leaving out so many others. I'll just pick a few at random from my RSS reader. Most of the blogs I follow are by people writing about their lives and interests. I'm less inclined to follow Capital-B Bloggers or industry-specific blogs these days. I'm interested in people, not companies.

• boffosocko.com - Typewriters!
• 82mhz.net - Publishes lots of great links every week or so
• lmno.lol/puddingtime - Thinks like me, but is a much better writer
• johnpweiss.com - Meaningful essays and short stories
• joanwestenberg.com - Tangential to tech industry, on a tear, and nailing it
• winnielim.org - Great example of someone simply writing about life

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

May I just suggest to anyone reading this, if you're even remotely interested in starting a blog, do it! 😁

This was the 107th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Jack. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

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At first, by the look of its contents, you take it to be some sort of radical underground paper from the 1960s—but those dates on the spine. Clearly, this is something else altogether.

It would seem to qualify as a zine: bound together is set of single eight and a half by fourteen sheets, each folded into a simple, four-page booklet. Any given issue at most just two colors. You quickly fall down a rabbit hole of research after discovering that it appears to have been a zine produced by and for workers at the Swan Island shipyards during World War II.

You spend hours at the Oregon Historical Library trying to track down anything you can about what it was, where either came from, or even if anyone still alive today remembers it at all.

You write up your findings late that year, in 2003. You revise them early in 2004. You revise them again in the middle of 2006, and yet again late in 2011. Each time because you’ve come across some small, new thing. It’s more than a decade before you find more, and you revise your findings in the middle of 2023 and again early in 2024.

Shortly afterward, having returned your scanned archive to public availability on the web after more than ten years, along with your written findings, you decide it’s time at last to contact the historical society about donating the originals. Fatigue prevents you from keeping to that commitment for more than a year.

You notice that this month’s IndieWeb Carnival is on “second person birds”, and you wonder what in the world anyone will manage to do with such a surrealist prompt. Previous ones such as “digital relationships”, or “impact”, or “self-expression” seemed easy. Then it comes to you: while the relevance might escape people, you think you know exactly what you should write. You think it will work, but you never know. Will it even matter if no one else can spot your interpretation?

You write up what you can, and then email the historical society librarian saying you’re finally ready. You agree to meet at the library the following Thursday.

That day, you have restless sleep and morning insomnia. You somehow successfully manage your way through your morning routine two hours earlier than usual in order to head out to the appointment.

It’s the twenty-fourth anniversary of an attack that led your country to lurch dramatically to the right and invade a country that had nothing to do with it, and you watch as the shooting death of a nazi the day before is being used to give yet another heavy pull on the Overton window thanks to a cascade of valorizing and lionizing hagiographies from both Republicans and Democrats, leaving you dangerously close to becoming a doomer because you can’t see where we can go from that.

You take the transit trip into downtown Portland, walk the last several blocks. You have to ride up in a small, older model elevator which pokes your claustrophobia, but you meet the librarian you’d been emailing, and give them The Finger. It feels weird to do, after twenty-two years in your care.

Unable to schedule your third Hepatitis B shot until next Wednesday and already downtown, you put off your blood draw and your EKG in favor of heading to the zoo for the first time since May because, as always, the fatigue. You grab The Whole Bowl on the way because it’s your go-to restorative when you need to push through a long day far afield from home. You have to take a shuttle bus part of the way because the light rail tunnel is being renovated, but you’re determined now.

You wander the zoo for as long as you can, before everything begins to feel slow and heavy. You go check out the three new goats, although you don’t yet know who’s who. You haul yourself back up the winding path, catch the shuttle, transfer to the light rail back to North Portland, hop the bus back to St. Johns. You make a quick grocery errand, head home, and take out the bins.

You finish writing this post, push the update, upload it to your blog, then email Sophia a link to your contribution.

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