Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. –Rita Mae Brown These days I’m filling life with a lot more silence than is usual for me. Just a single thought or insight seems food enough for a day in the studio. And each morning begins by breaking everything apart […]
The Power of Things
My post earlier this week referenced Sherry Turkle. Here is more about her from a review of her new book, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. In this book she pursues more than the psychological/sociological implications of computers and life on line. She has extended the concept of the “evocative object” to computers as well […]
Nature, Seeing, Thinking
A few koan-like insights on art, nature, seeing and thinking: Art is not what we see; it is in the spaces between. –Marcel Duchamp . . Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, […]
Privacy
This morning I posted an excerpt on Slow Painting from a New York Times article, Yours for the Peeping. Penelope Green reports on the new trend of glass apartment buildings with little or no concern for privacy, from pedestrians on the street to the residents in the spaces themselves. I have been thinking about her […]
The Rounded Head
Francis Picabia in his studio If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirts. Our heads are round so that our thinking can change directions. –Francis Picabia Picabia (1879-1953) had a life that included a number of shirt changes. He lived in Paris at a point in time […]
Visual Cornucopia
Moroccan calligraphy, 19th century (courtesy of BibliOdyssey) I know many of you are regular readers of 3 Quarks Daily and the fascinating posts by Elatia Harris. But for anyone who may be a newcomer here, run, don’t walk your way to her latest foray into the extraordinary blog, BibliOdyssey. In her words: “One of my […]
Skid Marks: Inflection or Innuendo
In Wallace Stevens’ oft-quoted but still provocative (IMHO) poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, he captures a simple dichotomy that has served as a divining rod for most of my creative life: I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just […]
Not Entering One’s Own House
I’ve always thought of myself as a Clydesdale artist–the kind that applies sheer will and fortitude to obstacles. It must be my pioneer heritage (a epigenomic proclivity?) that programs me to just keep walking no matter what. I have ancestors who did that as they made their way across the North American plains in the […]
I am not the Backpfeifengesicht your fist is looking for
Lifelong friend Liz Razovich sent me a list of words culled from a book that I ordered for myself: The Meaning of Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod. Here’s a sample: Tingo: A Pascuense language word from Easter Island that means borrowing items from a pal’s house, one by one, until there is nothing left. […]
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Claiming the Unk Unks
I was intrigued by an article in the Summer 2007 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review titled Discovering “Unk-Unks”, by John W. Mullins. “Unk-Unks” is an engineering term that means unknown-unknowns.* Mullins, a professor at London Business School, focuses his article on entrepreneurs since he contends that the Unk Unks are the mostly likely […]