Drawing for the count

A student in Jeddah has started posting her sketches of the old houses in Al Balad. The carved wooden balconies, the coral stone, the doorways half in shadow. She began because she wanted to share what she saw on her walks, and because a few friends asked.

Now there is a number under every post, and another at the top of her page.

At first she barely noticed them. Lately she checks them before she checks anything else. She has noticed which drawings do well, and she has started making more of those. Fewer doorways, more sunsets. Fewer slow studies, more quick ones that look good on a small screen.

Two quite different things can look identical from the outside. One person draws to say something and to find the few people who care about it. Another draws to beat yesterday's number, or the number of the girl two accounts over. Same pencil, same street, same posts on the same feed.

Neither is wrong. Plenty of people find real joy in climbing a count, and there is nothing shameful in wanting to be seen. But the two pull in different directions, and they ask different things of the work. One asks what is worth drawing. The other asks what will be counted.

What makes this hard is that the second one rarely announces itself. Nobody sits down and decides to chase the number. It simply grows louder each time she looks at it, until it is quietly choosing her subjects for her.

The drawings will tell her which game she is playing, if she looks at them closely. It is better to choose that deliberately than to discover one day that the count has been choosing.