(Video link here.) We don’t remember how we stumbled on this video by Kathleen Hanna, a New York City-based artist best known for her groundbreaking performances in the seminal 90′s punk band, Bikini Kill, and her more recent multimedia group, Le Tigre. She made it to accompany the song Let’s Run.
We find it curiously uplifting: a loop of figure skaters falling and messing up routines, IN PUBLIC, then quickly recovering and continuing on. They seem incredibly valiant, and reminds us of Samuel Beckett’s great exhortation:
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
In a review of Leonardo and the Last Supper in the January 14, 2013 issue of The New Yorker. we learn that in his time, Da Vinci had a reputation for being a “dilatory and even unreliable worker whose career was strewn with abandoned projects.” According to author, Ross King, he was as hard on himself as we can be, moaning to his diary, “Tell me if I ever did a thing.” When the commission for the Last Supper came in, Da Vinci was juggling work on a giant bronze horse (never finished), various flying machines, and a joke book. For a genius, he was, it appears, quite human.
This from the man who painted the Mona Lisa and defined the term “Renaissance Man”!
We want to send this to all the very brilliant, worthy, endlessly-creative people we know who doubt and judge themselves mercilessly. We wonder if self-doubt is a necessary driver of the creative. Is it possible to make without losing faith, vision, heart in the midst?
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
(Video link here.) We were knocked out by this must-watch-all-of-it TED talk by Anne Cuddy, a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, where she studies how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments affect people from the classroom to the boardroom.
The gist: everyone we meet is influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our body language and physiology; as we ourselves are. The talk is full of evidence that “power posing” – acting as “as if” — is not about being fake, but about practicing and accepting a new way of viewing yourself, that can become yourself. The most powerful example is Cuddy’s own extraordinary story of how she put it into action, starting at 15.40.
Though watching the whole talk is essential, the transcript itself is full of useful nuggets: read more…
Question: When you wake up do you feel a sense of loss when you realize what happened to your legs?
Of course. But I have a different perspective for what my legs are now. Now they’re just tools, you know? If I still had my legs, I would be in line for a battalion command, and instead I’m flying a desk.
We were mulling Duckworth’s ability to shift her view in the face of daunting obstacles and find a way around them – to be SO resilient – when, as often happens, we found a similar idea resonating in our Inbox. A reader sent us this astonishing BBCvideo of Jessica Cox, who, born without arms, lives fully and richly —even flying a plane— using her feet as hands.
Both Duckworth and Cox figured out how to fly, despite all obstacles. read more…
In addition to helping out at ‘the improvised life’ every week, Dese’Rae L. Stage works two other jobs to support the website she started a couple of years ago. Live Through This is a collection of portraits and stories of suicide attempt survivors, as told by those survivors. The site is meant to give voice to the very taboo subject of suicide and in doing so, save lives. Says suicide prevention advocate and interviewee Kevin Hines:
…No person in a fight for their life is alone. There are millions of people out there fighting just as you are. Find that network. Talk about the issues.
Dese’Rae has created a Kickstarter to fund her travels across the country interviewing and photographing suicide survivors, to expand the presence and reach of Live Through This. read more…
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.
Bill and Julie got married on Valentine’s Day in 1943, 70 years ago today. He was a GI who had managed to wangle a weekend pass to marry his childhood sweetheart. From the get-go,their marriage was an improv.
“We didn’t have a minyan, the minimum of ten people required for a Jewish wedding,” Julie recalls. ”So his brother went to the local movie theater and rousted ten guys out of the balcony and promised them dinner if they’d come. For years afterward, perfect strangers would come up to us on the street and say,‘Hey, I was at your wedding!’”
Today, Bill is 95, Julie will be 90, and they’re still in love. read more…
Our friend Maria Robledo makes “stealth” valentines for her husband Holton to find. She stitched “BE MINE” onto a curtain, and arranged beaded necklaces into hearts on the carpet. read more…
We know quite a few people who are making major life changes these days, living with the question of what to do next, waiting for the path to become clear. So we were really struck, and curiously heartened, by this series of images by photographer Ellie Davies… read more…
Autoprogettazione, roughly translated “self design,” was a project and book by the modernist artist and designer Enzo Mari that gives instructions for building easy-to-assemble furniture — tables, chairs, bookshelves, wardrobe – using rough boards and nails. Originally published in 1974, it has been reprinted many times. Mari created the project because he thought
…if people were encouraged to build a table with their own hands…they would be able to understand the thinking behind it.
And if they understand the thinking behind it, just imagine what they could do…
Just leafing through Autoprogettazione makes us feel empowered to pick up a hammer. And we can’t help but think the rough boards Mari envisioned his readers using resemble – indeed could be culled from — the wood from shipping pallets.
Taking Mari’s basic approach and inspiration, many artist’s and designers have made their own iterations. We love Justin Beal‘s bed with a fab hot pink mattress, above. And we WANT Kueng Caputo’s Lampada lamp: read more…
This sketch made by Henri Matisse January 7, 1940 is the first of thirteen he did in preparation for a wondrous painting The Dream completed in September 1940. Scroll down to see great artist’s process…as the painting emerges… read more…
Having an increasingly difficult time remembering things (and SO much to remember), we were very interested to read the Guardian’s How I learned a language in 22 hours about Joshua Foer‘s successfully learning an obscure language using a learning website called Memrise. Memrise bases their language courses on three essential principles, excerpted here from the very long and interesing piece:
The first is what’s known as elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you’ll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind’s eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it’ll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote.
One of the best-demonstrated principles of memory read more…
“Rules are there to be broken” is one of our favorite operating principles. We’ve learned a HUGE amount from seeing what would happen if we “broke the rules” and did things differently from the norm. It’s a practice: questioning the rules with a big “WHY?” and then, when we have an idea, asking “Why not?” and trying it out.
Free from the weight of academic study and art history, so-called “outsider artists” operate with a certain cachet: they create in whatever form and with whatever method that moves them. Trained artists may claim to do the same, but they can become jet-setting sensations by breaking rules. When outsiders break rules, they do it without knowing that rules exist.
in the January 14, 2013 issue of 
, we heard that our friend Tom Ashcraft’s artwork was chosen to be in the illustrious 
