Francois Schuiten & The Magic of Small Databases

Francois Schuiten is a Belgian artist and illustrator whose work I found back in 2017 or 2018 during one of my late night internet rabbit holes. Like a lot of artists I stumble across, I’ve proceeded to learn essentially nothing about him and stick to re-browsing the same 20 or 30 pieces I originally found whenever the mood strikes. I contain under-researched multitudes.

I don’t feel particularly bad about it, but I’ve set a goal for myself to get more intentional with things I discover and end up sticking with, so to that end this morning I started a database where I can track the books he’s illustrated and where to buy them. Pretty basic stuff, but I’m excited to slowly gather those moving forward and share any gems I find in them.

The database idea came from an old (and thankfully still current) friend Jonathan Yagel (whose short-read Substack on has already been awesome to follow). Last week, he texted me this piece from Tom Critchlow outlining the case for making it easier to publish and follow/utilize small databases. I haven’t stopped thinking about the article since I read it, and while I don’t think I’m the right person to build something like that, I’m certainly the right person to use it.

My main takeaway from it so far has been wanting to dedicate more of myself to cataloging things I find beautiful, or interesting, or both and creating places for people to experience them in meaningful ways. For instance, rather than pasting some of the pictures mentioned above into the body of this email, I’d love to have a Stardew Valley-esque little digital space that you could walk your character around in and look at the pieces in a museum setting. Easy to type and hard to make, but I’ll get there.

In the meantime, though, I’ve included a handful of pieces from F.S. below for you to check out in case you’re interested. I’m not an art historian, and I can’t really trace connections between styles/bodies of work/etc, but I’ve found his work to be meaningful to both the writer and futurist parts of myself and I hope you find something in them as well.