https://www.danielmitsui.com/current.html
DEAR FRIENDS, PATRONS & BENEFACTORS:
I recently passed a milestone in my artistic career; it was just over fifteen years ago, in June of 2010, that I resigned from my last job working for someone else, in order to devote myself to making art as a full-time profession. Since then, I have made my livelihood and supported my family as a self-employed artist. This is not easy to do, and I am extremely grateful to all of the patrons who have supported me through these years.
The world seems very different than it did in 2010; back then, I had one child and lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago. I now live with my wife and our four kids in a house in semirural northwest Indiana. I don’t keep exact count, but I estimate that I have completed about 600 drawings over the last decade and a half. I started designing typefaces, and then writing poetry, and became a serious practitioner of these arts. I began work on the Summula Pictoria, a cycle of more than 200 Biblical illustrations. I am still working on this, as well as an ambitious project to depict the saints of the Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend. (I will share more about this soon.)
What hasn’t changed is the key to success in my line of work, which is to spend as much time drawing as possible. Original hand-drawn artwork remains the most important, and most lucrative, art that I produce. In light of this, I have been rethinking how to market my work, and I have decided to makes some changes, which are described below. This will be the last newsletter I send via Brevo; I will be using Substack to send them from now on.
Yours faithfully,
Daniel Mitsui
July 2025
NEW DRAWING: ANNUNCIATION to the BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
This drawing depicts the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, as told in the Gospel of Luke. It follows a traditional medieval composition, influenced by 15th century panel paintings by Conrad von Soest, Stefan Lochner, and the Master of Maria am Gestade. To the right, the Virgin Mary kneels in a chapel, reading a psalter. To the left, the archangel Gabriel kneels before her and raises his right hand in greeting. He speaks to her, his words written on a banderole: Ave gratia plena, Dominus tecum (Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee). She replies: Ecce ancilla Domini (Behold the handmaid of the Lord). At her acceptance, God the Father (represented by a hand in the lop left) sends the Holy Ghost (here depicted in the form of a dove) to her.
Some details in the drawing come from legends of the infancy of the Virgin Mary. According to these traditions, Mary lived at the Temple from the age of three, devoting her time to prayer and study, and to spinning and weaving the purple veil for the Holy of Holies. This is why a spindle and distaff are leaning against her reading desk. Between the Angel and the Virgin is a vase filled with flowers: lilies, lilies-of-the-valley, and rose of Sharon. The first is a longstanding symbol of purity; the others are mentioned in the Song of Songs. St. Bernard once wrote of the Annunciation that the flower (Jesus) willed to be born of a flower (Mary), in a flower (Nazareth), at the time of flowers.
The setting of this scene refers to several prophecies from the Old Testament. On the desk and its podium are carved, in Hebrew, words of the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah. In the tracery above are tiny statues of Moses (holding his shoes), Gideon (holding his fleece), and Aaron (holding his rod). This is because the burning bush, the miraculously drenched fleece, and the rod blossoming and bearing almonds were considered prefigurements of the virginal conception and birth of Jesus Christ.
The window directly behind the Virgin refers to the well-known patristic simile that Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin like light passing through glass. The honeybees that buzz around the scene also symbolize the Virgin Mary, because medieval people thought that bees were parthenogenetic. (They were not altogether wrong; male bees can indeed be conceived and born without a father.) The unicorn, depicted on the door of a cabinet in the reading desk, is a long-established Christological symbol.
Read the complete explanation of this drawing here.
NEW ESSAY: I AM NOT A PAINTBRUSH
I recently published an essay (at the Deep Down Things web log hosted by Dappled Things Literary Magazine) on the subject of art and generative artificial intelligence. Here is an excerpt:
What is particularly troubling about terms like “virtual reality ”and “artificial intelligence ”is the implication that a computer can make something that deserves to be treated like actual reality, or actual intelligence, simply by drawing on a large enough dataset, and by having an elaborate enough algorithm to interpret it in a way that is convincing to human sense perception. In other words, the implication that sufficient quantity can make up for a qualitative difference. This notion would have been abhorrent to a thinker like Thomas Aquinas; he regarded intellect as an immaterial power of the human soul, and defined intelligence as the act of that power. Intellect, precisely because of its immateriality, can reach beyond the accidental properties of things to grasp their universal forms.
There are now many people who profess belief in traditional religions and philosophies, yet do not understand these distinctions, or reject them altogether. Some are even using DALL-E and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion to make what they call “AI sacred art ”. At present, such images mostly inhabit the covers of church bulletins, and the Internet. I am not aware of them being displayed in actual sanctuaries. But where AI is concerned, everything moves quickly; each day seems to bring news that a line that seemed uncrossable has been crossed. I would not surprise me if much of what I have written in this essay will be out of date by the time it is published.
The encroachment of generative AI into the realm of traditional sacred art is particularly scandalous because traditional sacred art is meant not only to represent the real world of substantial things, but also to connect that real world to a higher spiritual reality. As I wrote eight years ago in my lecture Heavenly Outlook, the perspective that sacred art adopts is that of the prelapsarian Adam, or that of the assumed Virgin Mary. It attempts to show how the world looks when seen from the aspect of Heaven.
Hildegard of Bingen wrote something beautiful and profound concerning music, which I think can apply to all art. She said that humans carry within themselves a dim memory of Eden. The reason that a melody appeals to us is that it is like a distant echo of the voice of Adam before the Fall. Art, whether musical or visual, is connected to our nostalgia for Paradise. Art, and sacred art especially, makes people better by drawing them closer to that beatitude. Ultimately, art comes from something higher than us, something that our fallen selves cannot fully comprehend. No computer program bears within itself the half-remembered dreams of Paradise, and therefore no computer program can comprehend the true source of art, even a little.
“AI art” attempts to build a bridge between a virtual world of pure quantity and the world of human sense perception, not between the latter and the higher reality of beatitude. The question it “asks” of its art is not: “Is this true, good and beautiful” but rather: “Is this what the person typing the prompt probably wants as an answer?” This represents an ontological shift downward, away from God. At its very best, it attains a level just shy of where real art begins.
Read the entire essay here.
NEW TYPEFACE: LUX COMPLETE
Lux is my original typeface based on medieval manuscript versals in the Lombardic style and icon inscriptions. Its new complete version is intended to be the largest set of matching display capitals and symbols in this style.
It total, it includes five unique Latin alphabets; three sets of Arabic numerals (one with archaic number forms); five Greek alphabets, one of which has matching characters for Coptic; Hebrew alphabets with and without tagin; and the letters invented by Hildegard of Bingen for writing her Lingua Ignota.
It has the special characters and diacritical marks needed to write nearly all European languages that use the Latin alphabet; monotonic and polytonic diacritics for Greek; Roman and Greek numerals; religious symbols; contemporary and historic punctuation; rare and archaic letter forms; and mathematical, astronomical, astrological, and alchemical symbols.
The typeface is available here.
MARKETING CHANGES
In 2010, when I first became a full-time artist, I had a weblog, an e-mail newsletter and a website that I coded myself — that was enough to start a business. My website didn’t have payment buttons on it; people who wanted to buy prints e-mailed me their orders, and sent me cheques via post.
I soon found myself too busy with commissioned work to maintain my weblog. Some years later, when I noticed declining print sales, I started another one hoping to draw wider attention to my work. It only attracted a tiny fraction of the readers I once had. Assuming that the conversation had mostly moved to social media, I created Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts for my business in 2017.
While these did introduce some new patrons to my work, I found that they required more time and attention than I had expected, and even more so as time went on. I don’t want to disparage social media too much, since I have seen artists — good artists, whose work I respect — use Instagram and YouTube very effectively for marketing. But I came to realize that the algorithms that govern these platforms favor those who use them in the way they were designed to be used — and that never will be me. Indeed, it seemed that the artwork and writing that I was most eager to share widely got the least engagement.
Those who know me well will tell you that I basically hate computers and resent having to use them at all. I don’t think I stand much chance when competing for attention against users who really embrace the new media, or who are willing to pay for greater reach. And now, all human creators are foundering in an ocean of AI-generated slop. I have concluded that whatever marketing benefits social media confer are not worth their cost in time and effort, and have deleted these accounts.
For the same reason, I have decided not to pursue my plan (which I have talked about in this newsletter before) to start making video content on YouTube. For a long time, I though this would get better engagement than pictures or writing alone. But the problem remains — I am not someone who is likely to gain the favor of the algorithm. Even though I think I could produce very interesting videos, I doubt many people would see them who weren’t already familiar with my work.
Instead, I want to spend as little time online as possible, and to bring my marketing back to basics. I want to keep my website more up-to-date; there are many drawings that are still missing descriptions. I want to explore non-Anglophone markets. I want to put more effort into my Patreon, and to figure out new benefits to offer there. I want to send my newsletter more regularly, and more often. I am switching from Brevo to Substack for this, since this will create an archive of previously sent newsletters — making something like a new weblog in the process.
My plan is to import the subscribers to my current newsletter directly into Substack. If you don’t want to receive the newsletter in its new form, you can unsubscribe now, and your e-mail shouldn’t transfer to the new platform.
