(Video link here.) A writer we know confessed her method to us: when she was blocked, she just lay down and read something completely unrelated until she fell asleep. It’s like shutting down a computer. When she woke up, she’d usually be able to continue her work.
OMG, we do that too! We were SO happy to hear it, our nap breaks always having come with soupçon of guilt, as essential as we know them to be. When you’re doing creative work, sometimes the answers – or results – just come slowly, and you need to get your focus off them.
This video is another “retreat” we found useful. read more…
My brother is a huge Bill Murray fan so recently having had the “experience” of working with him I asked him if he wouldn’t mind signing a Birthday card for him. Inside he wrote, “grab this day by the neck and kiss it”…my new mantra for life.
WOW!!!! Yeah. Perfect mantra (whether Bill Murray actually said it or not.)
And now here’s the quote we clipped, Murray talking about his teacher Del Close (more WOW!): read more…
Lately, readers who have seen our ongoing, increasingly obsessive postings of people leaping – an obvious and beautiful metaphor for taking a leap – have been sending sightings on the theme of leaping and jumping. This morning, Cynthia Allen alerted us to the fab Jumping in Art Museums.
Sometimes, while visiting art museums and galleries, people get so excited by what they see that they have to jump for joy. They send photos of their Art Jumping to me and I post them to share with the rest of the art-loving world.
These are people jumping for pure joy, which great art can give in one big, often unexpected dose. It made people like Katie from Saginaw, Michigan jump for “The Divers” by Fernand Lèger at the MoMA in NYC (above) and read more…
If you look closely at this image, you’ll discover that it is composed of the Buddhist Prayer for Peace, each letter cut from the Methodist Hymnal. It is the work of artist Meg Hitchcock, who letter-by-letter, cuts up sacred texts and reformulates them into others, creating a compelling and transcendent fusion. read more…
On Ikea’s impossible-to-translate blog, Livet Hemma, we found this image of the two-toned fabrics European Ikeas are selling. We’re not crazy about the color scheme but love the idea: why not overlap vividly-colored tablecloths or large swathes of cotton or linen to make a color block table? Unhemmed ends are CHIC.
At Pinterest, we’ve been creating collections of images – boards- under specific categories like Lighting, Storage Solutions , Art and Artists, Food and Cooking – even Shipping Pallets!. They allow you to navigate ‘the improvised life’ through its images, so you can poke around our vast archive in freer, more organic way. When you see an image that interests you, you can click on it to go right to the original post, to find information, commentary and more images. For example, if you’re looking for storage ideas, just stroll through our Strorage Solutions board, or for a morning lift, check out read more…
We are smitten with this room divider featured a while back on IkeaHackers: it is a rather visionary transformation of a simple material by Marloes van Heteren of SOLUZ and Remco Wilcke of CUBE Architecten. Clear glass Ikea rectangular vases, in two sizes, were painted white inside, to make reverse-painted glass, a compelling material we posted some time ago. They are used as “bricks”, staggered with light shining through, and cemented with strong transparent glue.
The effect is of a curiously light wall that can be made in a variety of shapes to define a space, read more…
After photographer Beatrice da Costa sent us her virtual flowers in an email, we went poking around her website. There we found a trove of images of interiors, each, though uncaptioned and mysterious, holding some cool and inspiring idea, like the extraordinary choice of wall colors, above.
We are smitten with this corrugated tin ceiling… read more…
(Video link here.) Sue Anderson, an ‘improvised life’ reader, sent us this GREAT video of artist Chuck Close‘s powerful, simple, forthright words-to-live-by from an ongoing CBS series “Notes to Self”. It’s well-worth suffering through the 30-second commercial for its memorable four minutes of pure wisdom (don’t bother with the last minute of news anchor blather). In the course of the video, Close outlines eight perfect rules for living…as true as we’ve ever seen: read more…
When we saw the cover of this week’s New Yorker, we laughed out loud. THAT’S US!! we thought. We may be making a Pollack-esque painting inadvertently on the side of the house, but we’re DEFINITELY out of control and off balance. We’re juggling too much while trying to hold up our pants and keep from falling off the ladder.
The clear message: We need some time off. So ‘the improvised life’ is going quiet for a week or so until we get our bearings,our health, and a mighty ‘improvised life’ project (which we’ve been working on for months) on track. (In other words, we’re gonna try following our own advice!)
Stay tuned! (There’s a lot stored in our attic/archive that we bet you haven’t seen!) We appreciate your bearing with us.
This morning, a friend alerted us to the great flash site jacksonpollock.org where you can make your own Pollockesque action paintings with clicks and whorls of your mouse. We found it strangely relaxing, like some high-brow video game; it took our mind totally OFF what we’ve been worrying about to follow (our own) unexpectedly wild movement of color on the screen. read more…
