Just as we were thinking we couldn’t write another thing – didn’t have a clear thought in our head – Maria Robledo sent us this photo of the crazy-beautiful flower she was balancing on her knee as she and floral designer Lindsey Taylor were driving home from a photo shoot. Somehow, it seemed like a…
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More improv fashion via Maria Robledo: Fishs Eddy‘s fab spoon dress. We imagine it CLANKING rather than tinkling like Bjork’s bell dress, and revised it in our heads to be made with thin coin silver spoons…wouldn’t THAT be something….?
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Our friend Maria Robledo sent this photo with the words “Color inspiration”. It was a two-fer gift: a virtual bunch of flowers AND a color combo we couldn’t imagine otherwise (for wall or floor or…) …that has us looking around…
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Photographer Maria Robledo emailed us a couple of images of her impromptu flower arrangements, with these words: I love making these freehand arrangments. I dont start with that intention, i start with looking at the leaf or flower as a photo then i bunch ’em together w/o thinking. it’s a surprise to me too because…
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Last year, I posted a mid-century modern folding desk that I’d used for many years, and had decided to sell. Maria Robledo bought it for her 13 + year-old daughter Isabel. Recently, I was thrilled to see Isabel’s take on the desk: full of color and pattern, and a completely different style than my ascetically…
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Another shift of view from Maria Robledo: a fish pond illusion graffiti spotted in San Francisco. The graffiti there is very different than the often cryptic signage we follow in New York. It’s still reverberates with sweet 60’s-ish light:
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Our friend Maria Robledo has an ever-improvisational way with “flower” arranging. Here, she cut sprigs of a fragrant vine from her garden and arranged them running down the center of her dinner table, placing the cut ends in shallow ceramic bowls of water to keep them fresh. Perfect. Come to think of it, jar lids,…
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Maria Robledo has a way with flower arranging, or perhaps we should say: off-the-cuff displays of just about any fresh branch, or flower or bunch of leaves. The other evening at her house, we were smitten with the huge green vase into which she’d poured a shallow pool of water; she simply floated a few…
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The other day we got an email from our friend A.S.C. Rower, President of the Calder Foundation (we know him as Sandy). It’s subject line read: “More Noise Please!” The title of a poem by the late Steven J. Bernstein, a mutual friend, was the go-ahead for ‘the improvised life’ to feature posts about Rower’s grandfather,…
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Since Valentine’s Day, we’ve gotten some wonderful emails of Valentine’s images and stories, so we thought we’d share a couple (and save the others for later). Maria Robledo made this improvised valentine for her husband, artist Holton Rower whose wondrous Pour Paintings we blogged last week. Since Holton uses clothes pins for his artwork made…
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Years ago, New York photographer Maria Robledo designed this simple, functional and really cool-looking storage for her studio. A few hours before she moved to a new space, I ran over to photograph them for ‘the improvised life’ because they are so smart and great, even though she’d emptied them out. They once held an impressive amount of…
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