The other day, Kerri Smith’s blog featured a potent bit of a Guardian interview with Dave Eggers, about his writing process: “I procrastinate worse than anybody. Writing is so hard. I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing. …Writing is a deep-sea dive.…
Read Morerilke + rodin on the virtues of snow days…
…an excerpt of a letter from Rilke to Rodin on the power of time off: “I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity? Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation…
Read Moreis creativity the enemy?
A few weeks ago, we wrote about the artist Tom Sachs, whose amazing studio was featured in The Selby. When Todd Selby asked Sachs “What are the ten rules of your studio?” Number Ten was: “creativity is the enemy”. It is also the subject of an artwork Sachs created. Then, a reader wrote us an…
Read Morerecharging y(our) inner batteries
We know quite a few people who are working so hard these days, under the constant pressure of all there is to do, that they can’t seem to stop until they hit a wall: they get cold and need to go to bed, or find themselves sitting in front of a computer trying to write…
Read Morereal life is messy
Periodically we like to feature the messy workspaces of artists as a reminder that being creative often means making a mess…We see it as an antidote to the shelter-magazine vision of a nice neat life that has infiltrated our heads over the years. To take the idea a step further, we thought it would be…
Read Morewoodpile as art
Alastair Heseltine is a Canadian artist who makes art and objects by interweaving wood (he especially loves willow). We were knocked out by his woodpile and by his artist’s statement; we don’t know when we’ve seen one that said so much in so few words: “I am a sculptor working with mixed media relating to…
Read Morevacation for a minute
This picture is of the salt flats in the amazing Mojave desert in California. If you didn’t know it, you’d think it was a sparkling sea: a perfect visual antidote to March (which is going on way too long)…. It was taken by Morgan Satterfield, during a road trip/break from her blog The Brick House,…
Read Morebig think illuminates
(Video Link Here) Sometimes I indulge in really wrong-headed notions about how other people work and live. It goes like this: THEY do things easily, neatly, brilliantly all the time; and I’m really untogether and slow, and waste time and am weak and undisciplined because I take naps and … Big judgments. This way of…
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