We’ve just discovered photographer Maria’s Robledo’s crazy-beautiful Instagram, a trove of images that will make you SEE the everyday differently and put you right in the moment. Only Maria could have come up with this simple, curiously moving arrangements of pussy willow blossoms (which people usually just throw away once they’ve been knocked off their stem). The image shouts SPRING. It seems the perfect accompaniment to this 4-line gem of a poem by Su Tung-p’o written over a thousand years ago:
Pear blossoms pale white, willows deep green – when willow fluff scatters, falling blossoms will fill the town. Snowy boughs by the eastern palisade set me pondering – in a lifetime how many springs do we see? read more…
(Video link here.) Marina Abramovic The Artist is Present is a stuning documentary portrait of artist Marina Abramovic. She explores themes we are always mulling: pushing one’s limits, the nature of will power AND being truly present in one’s life. Here we get to see them in action as Abramovic weaves them through her art and life.
The title of the film comes from her 2010 MOMA retrospecctive: whenever a visitor entered the museum, she was present. Six days a week, 7½ hours a day for 90 days, Abramovic sat without eating, drinking or moving from her position as a series of museum visitors lined up to sit opposite her, one by one, for often incredibly moving, wordless interactions. Six days a week, 7 1/2 hours a day being present…
It is extremely difficult to be like a mountain, to create stillness in the middle of hell. read more…
One of many things we love about artist/designer/craftsman/journeyman Max Lamb‘s work is that he ALWAYS has an unusual take on the practical AND he loves to reveal his process, offering in a powerful lesson in EMPOWERMENT. This video shows him making a wood stool out of huge chestnut tree log he hauled home from Springfield Park, London. It especially interests us because we lugged home several fallen tree hunks on our trusty Magna Cart after Hurricane Sandy, then wondered what to do with them, having no access or facility with a chain saw. Fallen trees are a readily available raw material for a lot of people.
The big revelation from Lamb: you can fashion rough-hewn slabs and furniture parts out of fat tree trunk by using Steel Splitting Wedges, axes, hammers, a drawknife and a good amount of muscle and gumption.
This image of sneakers worn during the Boston Marathon is the cover of the current Boston Magazine. It was the idea of the magazine’s design director Brian Struble; the magazine sent out tweets and Facebook posts asking runners to submit images of their shoes, along with personal stories. Here’s Brian’s thinking:
To me the cover is about two things: perseverance and unity. By itself, each shoe in the photograph is tiny, battered, and ordinary. Together, though, they create something beautiful, powerful, and inspirational. Remove just one shoe and you begin to diminish, in some small way, the overall effect. Collectively, they are the perfect symbol for Boston, and for our response to the bombings.
We are constantly knocked out by the wonderful endeavors our readers are involved in, committed to, CREATED out of nothing, improvised. Here are a few from the past week:
David was interviewed by NPR. When asked what he found, out came this fab nugget:
I talked to a monk in a monastery … and I asked him, ‘You see tens of thousands of people coming through here; is there one thing that unites us all that we all have in common, whether we’re atheists or believers?’ And he said, ‘Yes, actually there is. Anyone who does this pilgrimage — or any pilgrimage — is driven by an irresistible urge to do it, and they don’t know where it comes from. And sometimes they figure it out while they’re walking, or afterward, or never.’ And, you know, the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. I set out with a zillion questions in my head, and I didn’t come back with a lot of answers; I came back with more questions. But I really do think that the question is the answer. read more…
When we were first planning ‘the improvised life’, we were inspired by this now-famous set of rules by Sister Corita Kent, artist and renown educator. They speak directly to the process of creating…ANYTHING. Here are our favorite essential rules:
Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
Consider everything as an experiment.
Nothing is a mistake. There’s no Win and no Fail. There’s only Make.
The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something…
Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
(Video link here.) This video of artist and musician Brian Eno is full of interesting ideas about the creative process. The best, to us, is right up front in the first 1:44 minutes:
I think one of the things art offers you is the chance to surrender, the chance to not be in control any longer. Now if you think about it, most of the encouragement is to take control. What we like doing —and that’s the reason we enjoy sex, drugs, art and religion— what we like doing is surrendering. They’re really all ways of losing ME. They’re ways of losing yourself.
…The biggest mistake is to wait for inspiration. It won’t come looking for you. It’s not so much creating something. It’s noticing when something is starting to happen. Noticing it and then building on it and saying OK. That’s new. That hasn’t happened before. What does it mean? Where can I go with it?
As a spring snow storm sweeps through the midwest, it seems fitting to post these wondrous snow paintings by artist Simon Beck along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France. He creates the beautiful geometric patterns, some as large as 3 soccer fields, by plodding through the snow in snowshoes for hours at a time. How long the transient artworks last depends on the weather, although Beck often redesigns patterns as new snow falls; sometimes a work will go unfinished. Beck’s motivation seems entirely improvisational:
The main reason for making them was because I can no longer run properly due to problems with my feet, so plodding about on level snow is the least painful way of getting exercise. Gradually, the reason has become photographing them…
(Video link here.) A couple of years ago, we wrote about the discovery of a trove of photographs by Vivian Meier, who, while working as a nanny in Chicago and New York during the 50′s and 60′s, was secretly photographing the cities’ street-life during her time off. It was not until years after her death that her enormous body of photographic work was found, quite by accident, in a battered trunk bought at auction.
Maier was private, eccentric, and determined in her pursuit: a true artist committed to her singular vision, which she quietly funded through her work as a nanny. Her work is an evocative and incisive record of a time long gone, and of a truly improvised life. She is a fine role model for those doubting the possibility of leaving anything meaningful in the world because they are constrained to take paying work they don’t love. Viviane did what she loved ANYWAY, in her spare time, and left a signifigant legacy behind.
Here’s a trailer for a film about the astonishing story of the discovery of her work and her mysterious life. We can’t wait to see it.
(Video link here.) This slightly rough, illuminating 4-minute TED talk is by Philip Henson, an artist who developed permanent nerve damage that made it impossible for him to make the fine drawings he loved; his hand shaked so much he could only draw squiggly lines. When his neurologist asked “Well, why don’t you just embrace the shake?” Henson decided to try it, and began experimenting with different methods of making art that didn’t rely on being in control.
I went from having a single aproach to art to an approach to creativity that has competely changed my artistic horizon…I realized embracing a limitation can drive creativity.
I wondered if you became more creative by looking for limitations.
Gradually the embracing of limitations led Henson to explore the idea of destruction. read more…
Henrique Oliveira uses old plywood, fencing recycled from dumpsters and landfills from his home city, São Paulo, shaped around PVC forms.
Henrique’s breakthrough occurred when he was a student at the University of São Paulo, where for two years the view from his studio window was a wooden construction fence. Over time Oliveira began to see the deterioration of the wood and its separation into multiple layers and colors. One week before the final student show opened, the construction was finished and the worn out plywood fence was discarded. Oliveira collected the wood and used it in his first installation
When we walk through park or woods, we secretly imagine how we would surive there if we had to. What kind of shelter would we devise with what is there? It’s kid thinking, really: of forts and snug secret places, combined with our love of shelters of all kinds. Artist Elle Davies made that fantasy real in The Dwellings, a series of photographs of structures created “using a variety of traditional and improvised building techniques… from materials gathered from the forest floor.”
Our friend John Wellington is an artist whose controversial work has been called “classical, claustrophobic, fetishistic, beautiful, vulgar, architectural, humorous, morbid, decorative, and sexual.” He renders deeply personal imagery using Old Master techniques in unique ways and teaches his methods at the New York Academy of Art where he is an Adjunct Professor, and at his Manhattan studio.
For more than thirty years John created, copied, ruminated, lamented, critiqued, elucidated, explored and most importantly, drawn in sketchbooks. Recently, he created IDOLS DEMONS SAINTS, an iBook for iPads based on his sketchbooks. It is a kind of visual journal and art manual that offers insight into John’s creative process and the complex Old Master techniques he uses, from sketch to finished work.
IDOLS DEMONS SAINTS interests us for many reasons. First, we’ve learned a great deal from being able to see John’s process of painting; even though we are not painters, understanding his thinking helps us in our own work. The first page of the sketchbook, for example, lists principles useful in any creative endeavor.
is a stuning documentary portrait of artist Marina Abramovic. She explores themes we are always mulling: pushing one’s limits, the nature of will power AND being truly present in one’s life. Here we get to see them in action as Abramovic weaves them through her art and life.
after Hurricane Sandy, then wondered what to do with them, having no access or facility with a chain saw. Fallen trees are a readily available raw material for a lot of people.
and a good amount of muscle and gumption.
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