We’ve loved Miranda July’s work for a long time because her work always directly addressed the INSIDE of our heads, all those crazy voices and opinions and questions that take up so much space, and are really NOT who we are. Suddenly she’s become pretty famous because of the Future, her recent film that is getting a lot of attention. Despite all the hubbub, she’s still creating heartening cut-to-the-truth treasures, like this one. We want to stand on that pedestal that says “Self doubt will never devour your dreams”; we think one should be on every street corner.
This photo of artist Lucien Freud painting was taken by his assistant David Dawson in 2005 when Freud was 82, five years before he died. We see a seriously ALIVE man in an aging body, a human being dynamically engaged in his work, flying in the face of populist stereotypes of old age.
The Twin Towers have a strange presence still, a memory that intrudes into every day of my life in New York City like some phantom limb. On September 11th, while standing at my window holding a frilly pastry I’d made for a photo shoot, I saw the towers engulfed in smoke and flames; they crumbled before my very eyes. That evening in tears, I lost count after twenty-two ambulances screamed past my window, and I breathed in the acrid, unthinkable smoke.
I was heartsick, almost speechless from shock. By the third day, the relentlessness and weight of it all made me desperate for escape. Where could my boyfriend David and I find respite if only for a few hours? I imagined sitting in Babbo, Mario Batali’s restaurant downtown in Greenwich Village. But the village had become a no-mans land: there were barricades at 14th street, no cars were allowed beyond, and few people were venturing out on foot. My hope was so great I picked up the phone.
“Hey, are you open?”
“Yes, yes. We are. We’ve got just the downstairs open, for whoever can get here”.
“Do we need a reservation?”
“Just come.” read more…
After the Japanese Earthquake in March, the nonprofit Bezos Family Foundation invited children to mail origami cranes to the Seattle headquarters of its Students Rebuild program. Each would trigger a $2 donation, up to $200,000. The group received more than 2 million and doubled the donation.
Last July, a truck full of the origami cranes was delivered to the Brooklyn studio of Brazilian artist Vic Muniz. The trove contained cranes from 38 countries, made out of all manner of foldable materials: hall passes, math homework, love letters, saran wrap, candy wrappers, restaurant menus, aluminum foil, vocabulary lessons, Kleenex. The smallest was the size of a thumbnail.
Muniz created a giant 36 x 40 foot mosaic out of them for a fund-raising poster. Said Muniz:
It’s alchemic. The idea worked because everyone wanted to help.
…bits of folded paper became symbols, that raised money, that help people in need, and became an artwork that raised money that….
(Video link here.) Hans Namuth‘s Jackson Pollock 51 is ten illuminating minutes of the abstract expressionist painter at work at his studio on Long Island. Pollock’s sparse words annotates his process in real time: simple declarative statements that give wonderful insight into an original, creative mind, like the idea that reacting against someone or something can be a way of discovering one’s own voice: “At the Art Student’s League…I studied with Tom Benton. He was a strong personality to react against.”
About halfway through, Namuth filmed Pollock making a painting on glass, filming from below to view Pollock through his glass canvas. An extraordinarily intimate view.
Read more about Namuth’s experience filming Pollock at Open Culture.
For a fat, liberating dose of inspiration, check out the long riff on Mondoblogo of chairs Italian Designer Gaetano Pesce painted in the nineties for his kids.
His “Open Sky” chairs are out-there, fun, wild, loose, and awesomely beautiful… read more…
The Animators Letter Project was started by Willie Downs, an animation student who, just a year ago, was an aspiring animator pursuing a career he knew wasn’t right for him. Petrified of the risk he would be taking in dropping out of an expensive and presumably more reliable degree program to attend animation school, Downs wrote to two animators for advice. One particularly inspiring response from Aaron Hartline at Pixar said “Don’t give up!!! and sparked Willie to start his blog project, asking other animators to write letters to aspiring animators, offering advice and encouragement. Now that project has morphed into The Inspirational Letters Project.
What’s great about these letters are how easily they translate—many of the letters contain nuggets of inspiration for anyone taking a career risk or running up against a wall in their job. Our favorite is this letter from animator Austin Madison in which he comes clean about what may be the eternal truth of a lot of creative work: 3% of the time you are on fire, and 97% of the time is a messy slog. The key: persist, despite all the difficulties… read more…
(Video link here.) Here’s a glimpse of the interactive iPAD app that Björk recently created to be part of her recent album, as she tries to give create ever more dimensions in her music. Its introduction, narrated by David Attenborough, is a strange combination of beautiful, inspiring and ever-so-slightly hokey, in a good way. We like what she’s trying to do and the sentiment behind it…especially the idea of our selves as gateways:
Forget the size of the human body. Remember that you are a gateway between universal and the microscopic, the unseen forces that stir the depths of your innermost being and nature who embraces you and all that there is.
This photo of artist Lucio Fontana reminded us how central that concept of “blank canvas” is to ‘the improvised life’. Getting up in the morning, the day ahead is our first blank canvas. Each post we write starts as one as well: blank space that is pure potential; we often don’t know where it will go, but we know for sure that something will appear; it always does. That might be one of the most wonderful lessons we’ve learned from ‘the improvised life’.
A blank canvas is where all the things around us started: tea cup, computer, lamp, clothes, writing. Each moment has that blank-canvas potential. Amazing! read more…
Speaking of tinkering, while we were culling photos from Artists’ Handmade Houses for our recent giveaway, we came across a photo of Constantino Nivola’s living room in his house on Long Island (see photo below). In the back corner, partially blocked by a chair, is an intriguing light made of Tinkertoys and shiny rolled paper. OMG, Tinkertoys! Unbelievably brilliant…so we went searching the internet for more pictures of his wonderful idea. We found only this photo, in which you can barely make out a fab ceiling light made of Tinkertoys: read more…
Somewhere along the way we came across artist Ernst Caramelle‘s wonderful painted walls. They were actually installations in various art galleries: walls as artworks. We want to take them home, or the idea at least…paint some of our space in his fabulous fashion. We notice, that his color blocks can dramatically change the proportions of a room, as you’ll see from this riff of pictures we found on the Mary Mary Gallery website. read more…
One of our favorite pieces by experimental composer Fast Forward is this zen wonder, created by Fast holding a drum in the rain. (Video link here.) We asked him how it came about:
Not far from my house is a fantastic riverbed rock quarry. The acoustics down there are incredible. One day, my friend and I went to play there and on came a rain shower…a frame drum played by the heavens…
Boy, is THAT living in the moment, making the most of what is on hand!
(Video link here.) We were really sad to hear of Amy Winehouse’s passing at the age of 27. We were aware of her wild descent in the corner of our consciousness, through tabloid headlines mainly. When we read the news of her death, we found ourselves watching one YouTube video after another, trying to piece together her story. Over seven or so years of videos, the change from her early appearances at the age of twenty to later concerts is startling, as she gradually morphed from patently ladylike to crazily beehived and tattooed, as she became thinner and thinner. We saw, in hindsight, a person crashing and burning. The constant in all the videos was a look in her eyes, a mix of fear and uncertainty and…what?
In an interview, Winehouse said the lyrics she wrote were autobiographical. The haunting refrain from You Know I’m No Good is one we’ve heard echoed by many people we’ve known, who’ve struggled with addiction of various kinds, or fought simply to live in the world being themselves: to just BE without tearing themselves down: read more…
We’ve had Mary Delany lingering in the back of our minds since reading about her in the New York Times Book Review two months ago, in a review of The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock. Delany is the artist behind over 1000 beautiful botanical collages, like the one seen above, which use nothing but paper and a few found bits to recreate flowers and other plant-life in astonishing detail.
What speaks to us about Delany, however, is not just the richness of her work but the sadness and triumph in the story behind her art. read more…
for our recent giveaway, we came across a photo of 
by Molly Peacock. Delany is the artist behind over 1000 beautiful botanical collages, like the one seen above, which use nothing but paper and a few found bits to recreate flowers and other plant-life in astonishing detail.
