Delighted to be exhibiting fifteen photographs at the Ebell - the oldest art exhibit space in Los Angeles and a National Historic Landmark.
Some things just don't work out how they should
When I get an email from the New Yorker's Cartoon editor Robert Mankoff I am always delighted. Not personal correspondence, sorry to say, but missives and meditations on his work. Never a dull moment, apparently. From their shopping pages, one of my favorites and a ridiculous image of their proposal for framing said cartoon and displaying it over my sofa.
Gluyas Williams tickles me.
Decorating hint.
Just driving
Claire Moser photograph: Shangri-la weather.
Rice Road, Ojai, looking northwest.
Read MoreWatch this... and that.
I am hunting and trading lists of things that must be watched, books to be read, places to go and music to hear. I hope it will be an eccentric To Do list driven as much by humor, an urge towards sophisticated and pedestrian literacy as by quality.
Badges of Honor
There was a delightful intersection of two of my favorite things in my mailbox this week. Fontshop sent their newsletter celebrating summer camp with some Badges to be earned - not Girl Scout, but Type Scout, or something such. I am a collector of many things, but fonts and letters are high on my list. I've toyed with my own Badges sent to friends and colleagues in the past.
Fontshop's discs are meant to celebrate their typefaces, but I think they might do very well to just honor special non-alphabetic character traits :
The pared down camp life is so appealing in print. I remember with little fondness damp and bug bites, mystery slime on many things. But I can conjure the smells of the woods and the special quiet that comes with no internet, bad phone reception and transistor radios in the distance broadcasting the sounds of summer baseball. We have spent many summers on a lake in upstate New York where the neighbors are cellists. The sounds of them practicing was lovely, even if the electric range cooking and burned barbeque was not.
It amuses me that the same word is used for that summer camp experience of timelessness (until July 4th) and for the over-the-top camp that Susan Sontag wrote about. The lighthearted vogue for the summer camp aesthetic of worn paint, canvas and loose oars is actually pleasantly campy. I am going to fill some mason jars with flowering weeds for the Fourth of July table - featuring local fabulous Korean fried chicken.
Tiny Galleries at Big Museums
We went to the Palace of the Legion of Honor this week to peer between San Franciscans at Impressionist paintings of water and boats. Not that the Monets were not delicious - they were - but I had a much more wonderful time in the two tiny galleries that were empty.
There was a small gallery of animal paintings and prints: Artful Animals. This should be a permanent fixture of the Palace. The images were serious and witty and from all across the spectrum. There was a poster from the Filmore advertising The Turtles and a funny Thirties Mabel Dwight drawing of a fish and his audience.
I loved the eighteenth century dandelion illustration of German, Barbara Regina Dietzsch. Something similar:
Probably because there was a snail lovingly drawn. I Googled Francois Louis Schmied (his illustration was of the mastodons and the flying birds) and found wonderful Art Deco book bindings and illustrations.
Ed Ruscha (with Ken Price) drew a page full of house flies.
Down the hall was another empty room with a Darren Waterston bestiary. This was commissioned by the museum Graphic Arts Council. Bravo to them.
The image I keep from the day was a small print by Henri Rivière in the Impressionist show from a collection of his Eiffel Tower images. I have a taste for the tiny even amid giants. It seems to me an image where the water is not a place but a path from these modest skiffs past the Cathedral to the giant engineering marvel tiny in the distance. I bought the book.
Birds' eye views
I went on a special tour last week to see the Wing House, designed by David Hertz (of Syndecrete fame) in the canyons of Malibu. It's on the site of the old Tony Duquette Ranch. Seeing the layers of new structures slipped into the old footprint in a spectacular location was an unexpected pleasure. Several follies scattered along the ridge survived the 1990s fire that did in the main house. Duquette was a master of the found object, though I suspect his work didn't cost as little you might think examining the components. I think he enjoyed the visual magic of making an old oil drum into a pagoda. We couldn't take photos on site, but Google satisfied some of my curiosity.
Its a delight to see this new house on the old site. Both weave landscape around pavilions made of salvage and transform industrial cast-offs into places.
747 Wing House from above. The engine cowlings are fountains between the wings and in the center of the twirl.
The road to the property
Summer is almost here
Joan's on Third has daisies up for summer!
Try GM Floral for these lovely daisies....
Little scraps of paper
I have seldom been able to keep a sketchbook for very long. I have a lovely one in my purse now filled with lists, but no drawings. I have several beautiful books, bought mostly when I'm traveling, that sit on shelves because my work would never be good enough to fill the handmade paper pages. I do use 3 by 5 cards compulsively for simple sketches and thoughts, but I don't keep or organize them. The dashed-off drawings are filled with meaning but it is hard to treat them as serious documents when they are really designed to be aide-mèmoire.
My camera - and now my phone - are usually what I use to collect thoughts, not a sketchbook. These images need to feel somewhat slight to be reminders of the meaning of that moment when I saw and took the image. I value focus but it would be very hard for me to use a tripod. For many years I didn't carry a camera, thinking that I needed to mentally record the memory and that taking the picture would interfere with really paying attention. Looking back, I don't think that was the case. I have strong visual memories of special places I went to many years ago, but when I do have a photo I find that there are extra bits hidden in the picture that I didn't record with my brain. Ravenna is more modest than I remember. The scale of the mountains in the southwest doesn't overwhelm the details of rocks closer up. The sky always seems to be threatening in Scotland. Some silly images or odd juxtapositions still amuse me.
We went to a stealth dinner party this week and met a couple celebrating thirteen years of marriage and three delicious children. They are on the cusp of buying grownup furniture and we were talking about decoration between Buster Keaton and LA stories. They used to live near the Japanese enclave on Sawtelle and I mentioned Tomato Bank and my beloved Robot store - which they knew better than I did. During their put-together years of decorating the only art they had bought were post-it notes sold at the Giant Robot Gallery for about ten bucks each. Something fabulous and oddly valuable about these ephemeral scraps of paper capturing an intrusive or impulsive thought!
Sometimes I get bored in meetings. An homage to my friends in high school who thought the most biting critique was to call someone a FYY.
Austin Kleon is my hero
There was a wonderful site, 20x200, which I used to prowl. It's in limbo now and I hope it returns. It showcased art that I characterize as "with a shrug." It has some meaning and discipline and doesn't (present tense, hoping for the best) take itself too seriously. I found Austin Kleon there a while ago and began to check his blog during dull phone calls. His holiday wish list was filled with good ideas and his sketches amuse. And I do like art that plays with language.
Kleon published a book a year ago (Steal like an Artist!) and as a stealth fan I ordered it early. It was such an easy wealth of information that I gave them out like candy at Christmas. Later, of course, I realized that people might have taken my offering in the wrong light - I was neither recommending theft as a way of life nor criticizing the recipient's lifestyle modus operandi. But, with apologies, I really love the book. And he is working on a new one - covered in a morning talk he gave called Show Your Work! - which I enjoyed enough to think about moving to Texas. To be watched with a cup of coffee and feet on the table.
Playing with a copy of one of Kleon's pithy thoughts and some clear resin for a different project....
Loving Largo
One has to get out sometimes. Largo at the Coronet feels like a hidden pleasure, but of course it is an institution. Wednesday night Jeff Garlin had a fireside Conversation with Marc Maron and it was heavenly to be a fly on the wall. There was almost no mention of Marc's celebrated Highland Park cats, but other distractions were debated. I liked Marc's shoes immediately and he held forth about them toward the end of the evening. A delightful discussion of combining meditation with medication has given me some new ideas for the common afternoon lull - incorporating the well known anti-depressant effect of caffeine with the pleasures of stove-top espresso. Maron mentioned once in his really terrific podcast that you can roast coffee beans in an popcorn popper but I do not think I will bring that to the new ritual.
Architecturally, the Coronet is one of the most intimate and warm places to see performances in Los Angeles, and with a history that feels tangible. The building makes a modest backdrop for music and spoken performances. The entry and courtyard give you a transition from the street to the theater: the outdoor space is lively and the lobby is quieter. The decor (if you can call it that) doesn't change and I wouldn't want it to. I've heard Ricky Jay interviewing David Mamet (or the other way round), great mandolin playing, Jon Brion with the power off. It feels private. Some performances are unpolished and fall flat and I don't care.
My vintage espresso maker. Not so easy to use, but I love it.
Hand drafting
As a follow-up to thoughts on handwriting....switching to Archicad for drafting. Feeling wistful, but no hand wringing.
Sketches for rebuilding a porch
Handwriting in the digital age
I still draw with a pencil when I'm thinking about a building or design. I have a love/hate relationship with Jet Pens and reading a physical newspaper. I am facile with design on the computer but when I put pen or pencil to paper I have a shorthand that is impossible with a keyboard or a mouse. I can look at sketches years later and remember not just which lines were tentative or critical, but also remember conversations I was having as I worked or books on tape I was listening to. In working on my portfolio recently I was flooded with memories of Bleak House looking at a fifteen year old church design.
The pens and pencils on my desk. I am in love with Fine, Medium and Broad Pilot Envelope pens - not in small part because all the text is in Japanese. They are expressive and dry fast. And do work beautifully on envelopes.
John Maeda on Paul Rand
John Maeda is a RISD person and an MIT person. He's written an homage to Paul Rand which is poignant and important. Paul Rand was a Brooklyn, Parsons and Yale person. He was a graphic designer - IBM, Westinghouse, NeXT, the old UPS logo that designers defended vociferously in print when the company tossed it out. Rand wrote and illustrated Sparkle and Spin with his wife, Ann, a delicious book about words for children that I have adored since it was bought for me for $2.95 when it was published.
http://creativeleadership.com/2011/05/06/the-language-of-art-by-paul-rand/
John has reprinted an essay that Rand wrote but never published. He tries to use the language to squeeze a lot of thoughts in, so it reads slowly. "Art is primarily a question of for, not content," is almost shocking for those of us who studied art with a heavy dose of Marxist theory thrown in. So his pervasive interest in words and language ties in with his thinking about art - words matter. Vocabulary is often the key to understanding a new subject. For me, too, when I use my right brain I have trouble hunting for language to talk about what I am doing.
Maeda is also interested in language. His teeny Mispeller application:
Paul Rand inscription to John Maeda from his post.
My copy of Sparkle and Spin open to tintinnabulate.