Abstract Composition 683
Abstract Composition 684
Abstract Composition 682
Abstract Composition 681
More captivating work from Jesus Perea
Ecstatic, Electric
“I have always thought Twombly ought to be (if it isn’t already) a verb, as in twombly (vt.): to hover thoughtfully over a surface, tracing glyphs and graphs of mischievous suggestiveness, periodically touching down amidst discharges of passionate intensity. Or, then again, perhaps a noun, as in twombly (n.): A line with a mind of its own.”
The Sharpening Of Nerves
“Why can’t I turn this off? No one else seems to feel this the way I do.”
“Because you, and others like you, are the nerve endings of the world. You need to be the ones who say ‘Ow!’ when the world cuts itself, so that they don’t do it again. Others are the skin on the bottom of the feet, some are hands but you and others like you, you are the heart and the never endings that must feel everything that can be felt. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I just wanted to know.”
The Carving Light
“Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician.”
— Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (1923)
Plan A, B, C, Z
“There’s the thing you plan to do, and then there’s the thing you end up doing. Most of us start off our lives with some Plan A which we abandon... switching to a Plan B, which becomes our life.”
Excerpts from THE ACCURSED ITEMS by J. Robert Lennon
as listened to on THIS AMERICAN LIFE: Plan B (May 2013 episode).
A Minnie Mouse doll you found by the roadside and brought home intending to run it through the washer and give it to your infant son but which looked no less forlorn after washing and was abandoned on a basement shelf only to be found by your son eight years later and mistaken for a once-loved toy that he himself had forsaken leading to his first real experience of guilt and shame.
Love letters seized by federal agents in an unsuccessful drug raid, tested in a lab for traces of cocaine, exhaustively read for references to drug contacts, sealed in a labeled plastic bag, and packed along with a plush bear holding a plastic red heart into an unlabeled brown cardboard box, itself, loaded into a truck with hundreds of similar boxes when the police headquarters was moved, and forever lost.
An icicle preserved in the freezer by a child, which, when discovered months later, is thought to be evidence of a problem with the appliance, leading to a costly and inconclusive diagnostic exam by a repairman.
A biscuit crushed into the slush of a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot.
The orange toboggan whisking her to her death.
The houseplant that will not die.
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Upon graduating high school decided to skip college for a music career and sailed for Seattle but marooned in Olympia for a few miserable months that emptied back out to California to a glorified file clerk position made bearable only by the design classes taken on the side in order to build a portfolio that would impress the administration enough that they open the gates to Art Center where madness was required to gain the kind of skills to land the kind of job that led to the kind of restlessness that lit the fuse to escape to Austin where things are less complicated and life is complete despite the job offer in San Francisco hanging in the air.
Daniel Lo | Into The Great Unknown
Theory of Jet Lag
“The delayed arrival of your soul. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage [...] that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical cord down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic.”
Natura Artis Magistra
Bouquet Agate / Darwin Dillon
Cell City / Nephron
All things are in the act of becoming, building, releasing, opening like a fist. Painful, while relieving. Lighting, while fading. Blooming, while breaking down. The catalyzed become the catalysts conducting the changing current. A current that finds release through one opening, or another, or another—channeling aliveness into every cell of every being. All things working in concert to stretch and move through the networks that branch out over the universal mind, flooding every channel with energetic gravity, all speed and light and love.
Meaning in the meaningless.
“A little like writing or loving someone — it doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time.”
When we create something we always worry is it any good? Is good enough?
This can be very hard to tell.
It’s a very vulnerable thing to create something and put it out into the world. I find writing to be particularly vulnerable because there is no hiding behind abstraction, though there is plenty of it in the translation… There is the thing you intend to say, then the words you use to say it, then the words that someone picks up, and then the meaning they attach to them.
A writer has to be so careful.
I enjoy keeping journals, keeping blogs, keeping things. The act of simply indexing thoughts that come up, beautiful artifacts, or other writings that fill me up in different ways—I like to keep them because, sadly, my memory is too unreliable.
So here we are. I chose to quote the lovely Miranda July who was writing about her struggles with focus, especially when it comes to creating something that may or may not be meaningful (this new little blog may or may not be meaningful). Her essay, It Chooses You, really struck a chord with me for a few reasons. For awhile now I've had my suspicions that we don't actually choose the things that happen to us—like, this might’ve the plan all along. I’m not talking “God’s plan,” I’m talking the situations, environments, things that come in and go through us, as if they were the choosers. For instance, my career. I chose to be a designer, but in many ways I feel like I was always going to do design. I was highly conscious of typography at an early age and regularly played the style of my signature. It was much more of an identity than the clothing I wore.
I've asked a few of my friends about this topic and they seem to agree although they don't think about it. Or care. And that feels like the appropriate attitude.
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Before I sign off, if you'd like to share in a few of the awesomely smart and inspiring things I've been pooling over lately...
The Great Discontent. Conversations with creative folk on the battles they've taken on in their efforts of becoming what they were always going to be.
And The War of Art. A dear friend of mine gave me this book awhile ago and I'm just now cracking it open. It's great in that it addresses resistance—which I feel greatly in this moment.
Just keep going.