At Brand New Paint Job, artist Jon Rafman overlays the visual style of iconic artists onto rooms and objects, from a Fernand Leger Bomb to a Cy Twombly Lamborghini. We were especially struck by Rafman’s interiors which seem completely viable, while instantly shifting our view. We would love go sleep in the Paul Klee Master Bedroom, above, or go…
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At Improvised life, we’re always interested in ways to become more creative and productive. So when we came across Mason Currey’s latest book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work we were excited. Currey describes personal quirks and daily rituals developed by many of the world’s great artists, musicians and film makers. From the bizarre right through to the…
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Since we launched our Friends with Benefits subscription service, we’ve thankfully had few glitches. Occasionally, however, a subscriber writes to say that they get the KnockKnock curtain telling them they’ve used up their five free reads for the month and can’t access more unless they subscribe. But they ARE subscribed. What to do?
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(Video link here.) If you ever find yourself having to cook dinner from a mini-mart, keep in mind these 11 clever improvisations on the theme of instant ramen, an iconically cheap, vin ordinaire instant ingredient. Sometimes THAT kind of ingredients ia more challenging to improvise with than purist hi-brow ones. Our favorite: gnocchi said to have…
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Why buy rugs to roll out on your floors, when you can paint them? Why collect art when you can decorate walls, floors and ceiling, with found materials? I’m smitten by these two wildly different, improvisational ways that artists have used paint to mimic and displace art in such disparate places as a house on the…
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The other day a friend sent us this image of a homeless person lying amidst a drawn virtual room. We have no doubt it was staged by an artist (whoever he/she is) but it still has a feeling of randomness, that life could ironically set things up that way. There are the symbols of a cozy…
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Decorative painter Deirdre Newman is one of the many creative souls we’ve connected with through Improvised Life. We’re hoping to meet her in person one of these days and see what collaboration might happen (dig her faux-stained parquet floor we featured). In the meantime, we check into her portfolio once in a while for ideas. We…
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We find that as we practice LOOKING on our walks around the city, we really do cultivate SEEING. It happens automatically when we slow down a bit. Look UP! we often write, encouraging a shift of perspective. The other day, we unexpectedly looked DOWN, to find, etched in one of those massive steel plates maintenance crews…
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In a recent ramble around New York, we came upon this classical iron fence, transformed by grapevine. The fence acts like a loom or structure through which someone wove grapevine in and out to make for much greater privacy and a warmer, more organic feel. And of course, that got us looking up grapevine (which…
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We —our lives — are really a kind of artist’s canvas. When we take that view, we ask ourselves: What are we painting? Do we paint with kindness, generosity, anger, fear, bravado, hatred, curiosity…
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Photographer Virginia del Giudice has been sending us sightings from her travels in Amsterdam of random brilliant “everyday” improvisations the Dutch have come up with. Here’s a favorite: numbered tiles formed into a hopscotch grid and placed permanently on the sidewalk, for a quick spontaneous skip and jump on your way to do an errand or go…
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To raise funds for Teddy’s Wish charity auction, nineteen of the UK’s leading designers from the field of architecture, design, fashion and graphics have been invited to customise the iconic Ercol Stacking chair, a simple, elegant wooden chair that invites embellishment. We are smitten with Faye Toogood’s iteration, above, wrapped with what looks like white nylon…
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We are big fans of 99U and have found quite a few ideas that foster productivity. Some of their posts definitely do not. They got us thinking about all the “sure-fire advice” from supposed experts that we find on the internet, and how easy it is to think we’re doing things wrong. Here’s an example: “By…
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Recently, it feels like no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to erase the ominous “f” word, spelled out across my interior blackboard in capital letters: F A I L U R E. My insomniac “fail” rumination was interrupted at dawn when a photograph flew over my e-transom, jolting me out of my…
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We “awoke with a start” realizing it is full-tilt fig season when a reader wrote to say she applied our tomato drying technique to figs, which she has in abundance on her tree. Oh my. It’s fig season! What is so grand about figs is that they are perfect unadorned or paired with the simplest of foods, prosciutto…
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(Video link HERE.) This intoxicating little under-sea film by Julie Gautier follows record-holding deep diver Guillaume Néry down, down until he experiences the confusion and euphoria of high-pressure nitrogen narcosis. A little bit scary and very much lovely, this thirteen-minute journey into the depths of the ocean and Néry’s hallucinations will throw you far out of your daily…
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Spotted at Aqqindex: a very cool Rock Table by Elisabeth Garouste and Maria Bonetti. Could we chistle out notches in small boulders or interesting big rocks to hold a triangle or rectangle of painted ply or…
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Annaleen Karlsson of Annaleenas Hem came up with this DIY room divider for La Petite Magazine. It’s not a new concept, but a tried and true one: You attach hinges to two boards of the same height and width, painted or finished as you like. Our old friend Tom Booth made a two-panel screen almost the…
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Just about everyone we know is pretty ruthless when it comes to judging THEMSELVES. And those judgments can derail projects and the creative process in general, stopping us from pushing through to doing what we need to. We loves this simple practice from wise old Seth Godin.
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Last night for a short while, we could see the memorial lights from the World Trade Center streaming straight up into the sky from our terrace at the other end of Manhattan. In a moment we realized where we were in September, and remembered where we had been when the towers were struck on September 11,…
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