SubscribeFebruary 3rd, 2012
art hilarity
via Wooster
January 14th, 2012
just because
I love browsing photography/art sites. Today I was over at tastingrhubarb and saw this. Beautiful isn’t it.
December 29th, 2011
Austin Kleon / writing, poetry, creativity in general
Never heard of this guy before today, but I know about him now. Hah!
He’s coming out with a book in March 2012 called How to Steal Like an Artist. The linked website gives a taste of his advice.
…list of 10 things I wished I’d heard when I was starting out:
- Steal like an artist.
- Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.
- Write the book you want to read.
- Use your hands.
- Side projects and hobbies are important.
- The secret: do good work and share it with people.
- Geography is no longer our master.
- Be nice. (The world is a small town.)
- Be boring. (It’s the only way to get work done.)
- Creativity is subtraction.
The link in item 1 goes to the original blog post – which has become the book. He illustrates each of the ten points. It’s most definitely worth reading.
There are a couple of good (short) talks on video too. Try here and here.
He also does this thing with redacting newspaper articles and out of it comes poetry. He has a book called Newspaper Blackout for sale; there are examples on his website. This is my particular favourite.
December 28th, 2011
something art can do
December 25th, 2011
a new way of looking at books
as design space – literally.
peardg sent me a link to Colossal Art & Design – an article called “Carved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee“.
Awesome. Makes me wonder what he would do with the corpus of Gothic Romanticism produced in the late 19th century by British women – not to dis Horace Walpole.
December 13th, 2011
timing is everything
So I have to find work. Applied for four jobs this morning and then took a break. By way of a fb post found this:
Timing is everything.
ROTFLMFO
December 9th, 2011
oh I so hope this is true
Visit Generation WE and see what you think.
Also known as the millenials, this generation will inherit what we’ve done here. Just as I inherited what my parents did. Bleh.
Still, that is what is. What I would love to know is how the linking possibilities of the internet will change the perceptions of those that will start controlling things in the very near future. TV and broadcast media more or less established the mind set of my generation. TV, ads, movies – all the concentration on war, disaster, false images of love and piety, that’s what was aimed at my mind. But today it’s youtube, reddit, politics through humour tv, online education is blooming. So we now get all kinds of different things aimed at our heads – and unlike previous media, we have far, far more control and are the producers of those images and text – and we only watch the ads we want to 
It’s that control, the channel-less structure of the net, the peer-to-peer knowledge sharing methodologies – that’s going to translate to life/political/economic ways of doing things – just like the cold war translated to political standoffs in the current ruling parties in the US and other places.
In some really important ways, art doesn’t imitate life, it becomes life.
December 5th, 2011
awesome on a number of levels
via EG on FB – thanks
December 3rd, 2011
a lovely ode to accident and failure
via brainpickings
November 23rd, 2011
Merchantilism and art wed in a fecund union of positive attributes
I was browsing at Eideard and saw this:
Toby Atticus Fraley, Artist - new installation
oooooh – what a wonderful idea. I posted a comment over at Eideard’s site but found myself still thinking about Fraley’s installation sometime later so I thought I’d share it with you.
I went to Fraley’s site and saw some of his other work. He makes teapots. Yes. Teapots. And ceramic sculptures – clockworks. He’s also a photographer. The ones available on his website are of American landscapes. My favourite on the site when I went there is this one:
Toby Atticus Finch, artist
Partly what captures me is the Amazing Futures style of his work – the Jetson’s like quality of his vision. There’s a playfulness, and a hopefulness about it that is really very masculine (see all the boys in love in the photo below), but his vision is also very American. It however, does seem to lack the current bitter angst that pervades much of contemporary political/religious/economic life. It’s a very good artist that can create without existential loess gumming up the delicate gears of human sensibility.
Makes me want to go to Pittsburgh.
Toby Atticus Fraley, artist Robot Repair Shop Installation