In a 2008 New Yorker profile, artist John Currin said something about the process of painting that knocked us out because it is SO much about improvising, about making anything where you’re not entirely sure where you’re going: “…a big part of painting is getting used to things not looking good while you’re working on them. “…
Read More
(Video link here.) We found ourselves so burnt-to-a-crisp after an all-day photo shoot, we couldn’t write a word about the millions of wonderful ideas in our files…We were about to call-it-a-day, secretly wondering if something would come at the very last minute to be our post for tomorrow (it often does, mysteriously)… In one last…
Read More
When we are feeling tapped out and need an instant break, we often turn to the Encyclopedia of Life, a collaborative database intended to document the world’s 1.9 million species. It is the vision of biologist E.O. Wilson who was invited to share his “dream” in a moving 2007 TED talk: to catalogue species as…
Read More
A few years ago, I clipped this image from Reference Library, the always-surprising visual blog that rarely gives explanations. It said simply: “Michelangelo Pistoletto Struttura per parlare in piedi (Oggetti in meno) 1965-66 This is just about my most favorite thing.” In English, Pistoletto‘s artwork is called “Structure for Talking Standing Up”, part of a series he…
Read More
“The answer is zero. Let go of everything that can be let go of. Unaccumulate. Notice a new way of figuring out. If many places are held by nothing at all, more actions are possible. More actions are likely–all that room.” Anne Herbert’s blog Peace, Love and Noticing the Details continues to knock us out, remind…
Read More
When we need a table in a hurry for a project or a bigger-than-expected-crowd-for-dinner, we pull out a pair of folding aluminum saw horses we keep the closet. We lay on a top made out of a hollow-core door or a slab of plywood cut to whatever size we like (we’ve got a small version…
Read More
Our recent call for accessible clip/clamp ideas for securing stacked boxes (wood, cardboard, plastic) to make d-i-y clipped-together shelving got a big response, all offering the same solution: large binder clips. These cheap, ubiquitous clips seem to be the go-to solution for many niggling problems. Wine writer Anthony Giglio wrote: “I have improvised with these binder…
Read More
Looking for a way to wish our friend Maria Robledo a belated Happy Birthday, we found this clip of Wynton Marsalis and a friend improvising on that simple tune…building and building on until it became some big joy… (…at the end he says “You see all the many ways we were conversing with each other?“, reminding…
Read More