photobook inspiration

yes, i turned this picture upside down to make it easier to read.

on the berlin visit, i saw the most inspiring photobooks! i noticed them on the shelf and saw the interesting stitched spines and asked about them. then we passed a couple of lovely hours, looking through them. they were so inspiring! and the photos were incredible - not your average family vacation photos, but more like a hardbound national geographic. just lovely!

and even more inspiring were the photobooks they made of a trip to morocco - five of them, each grouped by color - red, white, blue, green and ochre. just exquisite and so inspiring! i have hundreds of photos and while they're largely not the artworks that anna's photos were, it was such a great way to preserve them, rather than just paging through them on my phone or searching my computer for the right one. definitely got to make some for us. anybody know a good photobook manufacturer?

 

documentation of a creative education

i visited a friend this afternoon. she's a lovely woman in her 70s who taught textiles and all sorts of handiwork at a danish højskole for many years. she's the one who finds all kinds of looms and spinning wheels and such for me because she works at the local red cross secondhand store. she also has friends who have such things and they have reached an age where they want to get rid of them. 

we hadn't seen one another in a very long time thanks to corona, but we decided to have coffee and the season's first rhubarb cake today. it's the big prayer day and so i had a much-needed day off. i love her home - it's so inviting and everywhere, there's something quirky, interesting and most likely handmade. even the old dried up oranges in a little wood bowl next to some dried out mushrooms in the kitchen windowsill are beautiful. it's how i want my home to be. something interesting at every turn. 

she mentioned the other day that she had all of her old projects from when she went to textile design school back in the late 60s. and she wondered if maybe we in creagive, our local creative group, would want to use it to do collage or something. so she took me upstairs and she got out all these big folios from where they were stored. we sat down on the floor, opened them all up and went through them together. 

as we flipped through pages and pages of different pattern designs and fabric prints and sketches of things to weave, she told me stories. of teachers, of materials, of travels, of sources of inspiration, of the way that colors or patterns had fascinated her. i am kicking myself for not recording her stories. 

she insisted that i take all this treasure home with me - 5 big folios and several notebooks. i feel so inspired by it and i will take some of it along on our creagive trip to højer in the autumn. emmy might even come along as well and she can tell us stories. 

but i intend to go through it all carefully and photograph some of it and perhaps even work with some of it. there's a whole binder of different printed fabric samples that would make an amazing quilt. and there are some beautiful machine-stitched patterns that deserve to be framed (it's those in the photos on this post). 

husband looked through some of it with me after dinner and he was just as in awe of it as i am. she worked so thoroughly with various patterns, exploring colors and all the options. i wonder if any education today does this so thoroughly as they did back then. 

she started her education at what would later become kolding design school in 1967, the year that i was born. and all of the things she worked with seem so timeless and fresh, even today. i can't believe she didn't go on to work for merimekko or some other scandinavian design firm. even just the samples are just beautiful. 

i kept asking her if she was sure she wanted to be rid of it and sure that her family wouldn't want it. she assured me they wouldn't and that she was ready to let it go. i feel so privileged that she wanted me to have this. i feel entrusted with something special and amazing. it's the tracing of a person's creative development and a huge insight into a creative mind, as well as a glimpse of an education and a time that is surely gone. i can't imagine anyone going to such depths today. it feels like everyone wants to take shortcuts and rush as quickly to something commercial as can be.

and it was also clear in some of the assignments (because she kept those too), that they were being asked to think in a commercial way as well. one assignment was to create a fabric pattern that would work equally well for women or men. 

my friend wants our creative group to use all of this as materials for collage and some of it can definitely be that, but i think quite a lot of is far too good for that. i already feel inspired by the way she worked with patterns and techniques. for example, these sewing machine embroidered pieces can be found in sketch form and then a more complete drawing that was framed by passe partout and then in its final form, stitched with the sewing machine on fabric, also in a passe partout frame. 

so much of the work is signed and dated and we will definitely be framing some of the pieces. husband thinks we should go through it all, decide what we'd like to keep and then pay her for it. i fear she will refuse, but i think we should insist. i may have to invite her over tomorrow or sunday to go through it all again and to tell me more stories about it, which this time, i will record. it would be so cool to do some work inspired by her work and then create an exhibition - a kind of dialogue across 50 years. 

finding surprises in your own neighborhood

a most amazing experience today. one which proves that you can still discover something which will inspire you and make you think, within 20 minutes of your home, after a decade of living here. christina saw a program on DR this week, with gardener søren rye, who visited a place called skovsnogen, out near kibæk, where a guy has put up all sorts of art in the forest around his home over some years and it's open to the public to wander through, for only the price of a free-will offering. there is a huge variety of art, from things that look like maybe stalin ordered them, to the namesake skovsnogen, which is a winding wooden snake that's painted bright yellow and which you can crawl around inside, to a brick wall that spells out HATE and which was built in 2011, before trump made a wall of hate his trademark. it was so powerful to come upon this in the forest, to able to climb on it and walk through it.

another powerful work was what i would call the ildsjæl - a golden woman's head, where her hair was sticking upright, like a flame, atop a stylized fire pyramid. She had a peaceful, beatific look on her face, her eyes closed, not the least disturbed by her position the pyre. there was a bench where you could sit and look at her. The more you looked, the more you were affected by her peacefulness with her situation. There was something of the buddha over her, with that zen attitude over what was arguably her plight. but perhaps there was a message in it that it wasn't a plight at all, but freedom and a relief. some small boys came and exclaimed to their parents, "look, mom, it's a fire person - ildmenneske." that's exactly what she was. as we walked away to leave the experience to them, i remarked the she was an ildsjæl, and gave myself goosebumps.

i had moments where i wished we had the place to ourselves. there were many cars there, thanks to an appearance this week on DR, but once you were out, walking the trails, there was decent space between people. though at times, i wished we had more time there for ourselves. and i definitely wished that some of the whining kids that were there weren't there, which made me feel a little old and crabby. but, it was because it was such a striking, intense experience, and i wanted to savor it and that was difficult when there were people crowding up from behind.

there was a huge gong out the trees in one spot. we were recording it, and experiencing the reverberations, and a family came up behind us, chattering away. we definitely wished we'd had it to ourselves.

there were two uncanny figures which were in the vein of our exhibition last year. they were so striking the forest, and only slightly spoiled by an older couple with politiken glasses on, saying, "er det her virkelig kunst," (probably in more correct grammar than that) in a very snotty way. we felt a bit sorry for them with their snobbish view of the world, unable to give themselves over to the experience, needing to hold on to judgements in the face of a world that's changing and where those judgements may be falling away and the world becoming something else.

it will be interesting to see what kind of art arises out there, after corona. maybe christina and i should try to make some, as a reaction to this experience we are in. what would it look like? it would surely be uncanny in some sense. and surprising and unexpected. and it might be frightening and anxiety-causing, but it might also be a relief and somehow freeing.

it's so hard to know the affect this whole experience is going to have, when we are right in the middle of it. but to figure it out through art and in harmony with another artist or artists, and the landscape, could be the very best way to process it - in words and paint and things which hang from the trees.

one thing that was so interesting was that there weren't any artist names or names of the works anywhere visible in the forest, you had to just experience the works for yourself, figuring out what they said to you and only you, through your direct experience of them and the feelings that they gave to you, or the echoes they sounded of your lived experience - like a little hut up on stilts that made me think of Baba Yaga and which made Christina think about whether the hut or the nature around it came first. a thought-provoking experience for both of us, but a very different experience for each of us as well.

it also seemed like a place where you'd want to go on an artist's retreat. to sit in the brutalist shelter, light a fire and settle down to some writing. or to wander among the trees, capturing the sounds of the birds and wind and the leaves. or whether you'd want to record yourself reciting a poem you'd written, or a favorite poem in the amazing acoustics of the metal ball that's all alone, unexpectedly, in the middle of a field.

it definitely won't be my last visit.

on tricking myself into writing and finally reading ulysses

a big thank you to judith for turning me on to 750words. it's a site with a lovely blank canvas (weirdly less intimidating than an open, fresh word doc), where you attempt to write 750 words per day. i tried it out for the first time this morning and got to 557 words before it told me the day was over and i would have to start a new day. this, at 9 a.m. my time. turned out my time zone was set to pacific time in california, so i cheated and pasted my 557 words (which i had written in 10 minutes) into the new day (after all, it had been friday for me all along) and continued. my stats will be a little off, since pasting it in takes a bit less time than it did to write the words in the first place, but oh well. i found it surprising how quickly i got to 750 words. maybe this writing thing isn't so hard after all?  it was just a bunch of drivel, recounting my day yesterday, so there's that, but nonetheless, it was a start.

i'm finding that reading and writing go hand in hand. i knew this, but i think what with obsessively reading the news on my iphone since mid-2016, i'd gotten out of the habit of reading books. i've been fixing that thus far in 2020 and i've already read four books. i'm currently reading hemingway's moveable feast, which contains a lot of advice about writing. i've also joined a book club through the library. we will read just one book - james joyce's ulysses. i took a semester-long course focused on just that book and wrote a 25-page paper on it without finishing the damn thing, so i decided that now is the time. it's one of those you probably should read. but already i can feel myself thinking i have to read a bunch of other stuff first - like i really should refresh homer's odyssey before i begin. and maybe dante's inferno too. and that would lead to goethe's faust, wouldn't it? where will it end?

just get reading already.

zen koan inspiration

the friend i stayed with in arizona had a small collection of amazing little zen koan 'zines from the 70s. they were done by paul reps. on the front, it says you can send away for a bag with all six for $3. they were so amazing, i had to photograph them.  i had vaguely heard of zen koans, but never worked with them, what with my inability to meditate properly and all. i can see the attraction - an enigmatic phrase to ponder in silence, what could be better?  i have a couple that have always stuck with me, though they are not official buddhist zen koans, i think they have a koanesque quality. one is a quote from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: "reality is frequently inaccurate." and from my favorite 20th century russian author, andrei bitov, "unreality is a condition of life." funny, i think they're related. maybe when i try the 15 minutes of meditation tomorrow morning (for the sake of my brain), i'll ponder those. i also feel inspired by paul reps' art, to dig out a typewriter, work with them and a little bit of payne's grey. do you have a personal zen koan (maybe you didn't even know it was one) you ponder when you have a moment of stillness?

another successful drink & draw weekend

i had a little weekend getaway with a few friends. one of them has moved over to fyn (the island between us here on the "mainland" and the big island where they keep copenhagen) to an idyllic little village and opened a gallery and B&B. so charming! and she's got a beautiful studio, where she showed us how to do the monoprint technique she's been working with of late. we used "china paper" - a thin, but surprisingly strong paper that can take a lot of layers of paint and texture.

so much fun. we each chose a color palette and after a walk, to gather bits and bobs from nature, we settled in to work. we used a variety of techniques - painting with acrylics, using gel pens, printing with feathers and plants, slowly building up texture on our pieces.

i found myself working with mustard yellow, teal, payne's grey (it looks quite black in these photos) and a peachy color that i mixed, plus the odd metallic gold accent. it was interesting how we were each drawn to a specific palette that i'm not sure any of us consciously knew we had in our heads.

some of my pieces worked and some didn't. some worked for awhile and then stopped working. it was an interesting process and one which i thoroughly enjoyed, but never really felt i had control over.

through it all, we laughed and drank some wine and enjoyed some good vegetarian chili, told stories, shared and laughed some more. we had moments of silence, deeply concentrating on our work, and then more laughter and sharing. it was that kind of powerful feminine medicine that you just need once in awhile.

i was surprised by the direction some of my pieces took - these two got rather dark after i became inspired to use a bit of dusty grey pastels on them, giving them a very different look than my other, bright pieces (underneath, the palette is the same). and some of my old favorite helleristning motifs came out from somewhere in my subconscious. it felt right, like moments of flow always do.

here's the end result of one of the others - i think you can tell that she's actually educated as an artist.

this friend did two rounds of the small sheets of chinese paper, with very different color palettes. she felt the second round went much better than the first. but sometimes it does take warming up when you're learning a new technique.

and our hostess, who had been working with the technique for some time, made some beautifully textured, multi-layered pieces. beautiful to see the individual ways our creativity manifested itself, expressing something utterly unique, using similar materials. magical. we definitely need to do this more often.

the maker movement comes to denmark

last week, i went to the made celebration, a maker exhibition put on by roskilde festival in a cool old warehouse building in roskilde. it's pretty cool that the maker movement has come to denmark and tho' it's a bit more techy in its danish incarnation than i had thought about it before, it was very interesting.

3D printers were a big part of it and there were several stands where people were printing all sorts of things. this little 3D printer was in the maker spirit itself, as it was in a kind of handmade box set-up. it seems the price of these things is coming down. i suppose soon we'll all have one.

this maker fest had a very wide conception of the maker movement. this booth was promoting some really creative uses of minecraft, the computer game. some danish municipalities have even been using it for involving citizens in the planning of new housing developments and such. building various suggestions and ideas in minecraft before building them in reality. pretty cool thinking.

this was more my conception of the maker movement...a station where people could use sewing machines to repair or sew something new.

the same area included tools and soldering irons, so people could also repair electronics and such.

and here was a traveling bike repair shop, where you could use the tools to repair your bicycle.

this workshop area gave me the idea that husband should have a day or two each week where people could come and share his workshop. he'd get so much of talking with them about what they were working on and they'd get a space in which to make or fix things, which they might not otherwise have.

at this stand, you could make a transfer for a t-shirt or bag. it was kind of a plastic material that you could melt onto the fabric. it was so busy, we didn't try it, but i'll admit this was more along the lines of the maker movement as i saw it before i attended the event.

i think because it's denmark and because there were municipalities involved, there were a lot of community-minded stands - shared workspaces, places where you could use tools and spent time in a public space with other makers. pretty cool and i got lots of inspiration for our local kulturhus.

it was a rainy day outside, but someone had even tried to come up with a concept for a kind of modern sweat lodge, so many ideas were being tried out at the event.

we didn't go to the workshop part of it, but there were workshops and someone made this table. with husband's perfectionist eye, i think it's a good thing he wasn't with me. but it would be a perfectly good table in the garden, don't you think?

what does a creative workspace look like?

i've been pondering what makes the physical surroundings of a workspace creative. because it strikes me that just filling it with creative people doesn't necessarily do the trick. i've been pondering this for awhile and have collected quite a lot of inspiration on a couple of pinterest boards - kulturhus and stationen (co-working). interestingly, some of the first photos i pinned were of a workspace in LEGO's project house, several years before i ever started working there. the space looks amazing - with light, open spaces, bright colors and even includes a slide.

it's a light, bright open space and you can look down upon it from above. but even in most of the photos, there aren't any people working in the space (that could, i grant, be because the photos were purposely taken when hardly anyone was around). the photos represent a common area, and what they don't show is that they are surrounded by a traditional open workspace filled with normal office desks (which can raise and lower, of course). they also don't show the noise factor and the fact that if anyone actually uses the slide, it's quite disturbing to those working around it.

there are small meeting rooms overlooking the space. this meeting room, while colorful and (of course) filled with danish designer furniture (arne jacobsen 7 chairs and a peit hein super ellipse table), looks pretty small and cramped to me. and what about the distraction of looking down on the bustling workspace below or having those below be able to look up? does that promote or hinder creativity?

the cabinets there are filled with LEGO in all sorts of shapes, colors and sizes where the designers go to get the materials of their creativity. these cabinets are found in many areas around the company and there is something delightful about having all of those creative materials at hand.

this couch looks inviting and like a great place for an informal sparring session or impromptu chat. however, it's right above the big space below and it feels like everyone would be able to hear your conversation. this could be bad if you're discussing something confidential, but it could just also be quite disturbing to those trying to work below. especially as conversations in LEGO can take place in many different languages.

and stepping back a little bit, you can see that there's another informal workspace, just beside this couch, where it's even more obvious that the spaces are potentially more disruptive to work than facilitating it.

interestingly, every aspect of this area was thoroughly thought-through and deemed to be very creative and to promote creativity. all of the intentions were in place. but, in my opinion, it just doesn't work. it's too open, too many desk-laden areas are adjacent and it's too disruptive to getting work done. but i don't necessarily have any answers as to what would be better. i have an intuition that it involves getting rid of outlook and powerpoint as the main tools of people's work. and i also have an idea that it doesn't involve big, open spaces, but little, enclosed cavelike ones, to which people can retreat and do solitary, intensive work and then re-emerge and engage with others. i'm not sure precisely what that looks like. but i'm pretty sure it doesn't involve noise-canceling headphones for the entire department.

i suspect similar amazing-looking, well-intentioned spaces at google and various co-working places are equally not conducive to creativity.

i've got this book, on the evolution of workspaces, on my order list.  and after i published this, i came across this article on how etsy tackles the problem. and then i came across this one, which i think has some great ideas.

what do you think an ideal creative workspace would look like?

tho' it's totally unlike me to use someone else's photos, i did in this post. all photos came from here.