Our favorite painting of late is Holton Rower’s ‘6ac6g’, which, for a blessed few weeks was right around the corner from us at Pace Gallery. It caused quite a stir and has recently been written about in Art and Antiques with good reason; it is BEAUTIFUL. We walked over several times to visit ‘6ac6g’ – happy…
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One of the pleasures of meeting Sebastian Nurmi and his wife Ülle when we were in Finland was the quick tour of their home on Bovik Farm. It is an amazing combination of charm, style, warmth and REAL…
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On a trip to Finland a couple of summers ago, we visited the extraordinary Bovik Farm, where Sebastian Nurmi and his wife Ülle tend to indigenous breeds of cattle and sheep. We found many reasons to be knocked out – not only by the beautiful house and land, but by Nurmi’s story of a profound and…
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We are big fans of davidope, a designer and amazing gif artist. We just found this beautiful gif on his tumblr DVDP, “his visual Chinatown”. …offered as a sparkly break in your day… Related posts: (green) porno break! (+ porno house gift???!!!) vision break: a dress that makes music… movie break: harpo’s artful improvisation weekend…
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We stumbled on this crazy-great painted floor artist Matthieu Lavanchy on the very out-there/interesting 2thewalls by New York designer Keehnan Konyha (Slide show of his apartment here; we couldn’t find any actual info about him.) + (Warning, 2thewalls has been likened to “falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland”. It’s easy to get lost looking…
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Here’s one of our favorite pictures from “Can Do”, a riff about the nature of invention from the great Maira Kalman’s New York Times Blog “And the Pursuit of Happiness“. It’s of the inventor Nikola Tesla “who talked to pigeons and worked with electricity while calmly reading a book.” We see it as a picture…
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Tina Roth Eisenberg of SwissMiss designed this swell Tattly, temporary tattoo. Just the message we need… We’re going to try writing it right on our hand… Related posts: body as artist’s canvas to-do list tattoo tattoo you!: making your own temporary tattoos emergency medicine
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We love this oddly wondrous arbor/sculpture made of orange and yellow folding chairs, from Beijing Design Week. Folding chair as impromptu building material… via Atelier Related posts: thinking about structures from the inside out ‘create your own’: building block system for your own inventions cardboard office + furniture (+ where to buy cardboard) citizen architect…
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(Video link here.) This week I’ve been contemplating the challenge of saying yes. I was sent a TED Talk in which Sasha Dichter discusses a neat experiment: for a full month, every time he was asked for something, he said yes. Dichter works in philanthropy, so cultivating personal generosity and connecting it to his work has…
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Charlies McFarlane sent us the photo of a makeshift gym, taken by a reporter embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan in 2010. They made due with what they had to devise a bench, and weights. It came just as we were researching alternatives to going to the gym, being resistant to the mindlessness of machines and…
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One of our favorite things to do is walk around the the city checking out the ingenious anonymous improvisations that appear randomly in our sight lines. Lately, we’ve been seeing some great makeshift bike carriers, like these refrigerator shelves that have been affixed to the backs of bikes which appear to be meant for food…
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We’ve done several posts about Pasti-Dip over the years; it’s a paint-like substance you can dip an object into to give it a sealed, rubbery surface. We’ve seen tools plasti-dipped to make them more grippable, and flea-market cutlery to give it a modernist chic, even bookshelves coated in rubber paint via the great Max Lamb.…
Read MoreAfter reading yesterday’s post “What is Failure?”, a reader alerted us to the compelling TED talk, “On Being Wrong” by Katherine Schulz, a”wrongologist”, who studies what it means to make mistakes. Schulz has some interesting ideas about where “feeling right” and “being wrong” intersect; it’s worth listening to whole 10 minute talk to follow the flow.…
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One of our readers, Pippin, recently sent in us a photo she’d found on flickr, with the following message: “someday (someday) i’m going to put canvas on a wall as wall paper, and then just paint stuff on it—layer after layer. an experimental wall.” We love the idea of an experimental wall whether it be…
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We’ve long been a fan of using the flowers and seed pods of farmer’s market vegetables and herbs for our flower arrangements. But we hadn’t thought of dill weed flowers until Terry Bordenave sent us an email: We subscribe to a new, small CSA in northern Vermont (Deep Earth Farm) and in one of our weekly…
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We took a walk with a new friend the other day. Our conversation focused largely on the turning point we both found ourselves in in our lives (like many people we knew), and the new paths we envisioned taking. She said didn’t feel she had much courage or taste for risk-taking. In the course of…
Read MoreOur apologies for the ‘Our Friends with Benefits‘ PayPal link getting wonky, which a reader alerted us to last weekend. We hope it didn’t pull you into PayPal hell. It’s fixed now. Thank you all who returned to subscribe or made single donations. We deeply appreciate your support. –The Management …more of Davidope’s beautiful animated…
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via French by Design Related posts: role model: lucien freud, 82, painting ‘without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible’ advanced style: doing your thing at any age
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Cara de Silva sent us a compelling and very timely story she spotted in the New York Times. “Back to the Land, Reluctantly” by Susan Gregory Thomas is about how the 42 year-old Brooklyn mother of three, having found herself divorced, flat-broke, with a dwindling livelihood, figured out how to “live off the land” from her urban garden…
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It took us a while to understand just what exactly “Occupy Wall Street” is. The ongoing demonstrations and occupation of various sites around the country seem to have no agenda or demands, but the movement is enduring and growing. It was unlike anything we had ever seen before. Who are these people and what do…
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