Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
Today is the Vernal Equinox. It caught be by surprise this year but that fast-changing light might account for how unsettled I’ve been feeling in the last week. But the forsythia and the hyacinths are out and I even saw an apricot tree in bloom yesterday–I think it’s really happening.
(Textile Pattern for Kimono, Shin Bijutsukai ca 1900-1902, Japanese design Magazine)
(Charles Sheeler, Spring Interior 1927, oil on canvas)
(Per Adolfsen, Twins 2022, colored pencil, chalk)
I was clicking through a blog of cool ephemera and saw the image above and something about the perspective and how it floated in space and the general early 90s vibes nudged part of my brain. “Wasn’t there a show on PBS in the early 90s where a guy drew on glass and made a big mural of stuff floating in space with lots of perspective?” Reader, there was.
Who remembers Commander Mark and The Secret City??? I could only remember his catchphrase–“draw, draw, draw, every single day”–but that and “PBS drawing teacher” was enough to get me to Reddit and from there to YouTube.
Drawing on glass was the COOLEST thing to Young Me:
And the RUSH of serotonin I got when I saw that big mural again! I might need to try making my own weird secret city again.
Well, here we are, rolling into the dark season. Over the last 17 years (my god) of blogging here, I’ve gone from truly dreading it to being mostly OK with it. Medication helps a lot, of course, but so does realizing that the seasons passing are “not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return.”
So here are some vibes for Fall (and don’t forget the classic vibes of September 21).
I found this artist on Instagram and her work might have been custom made in a lab to appeal to me: Big cats! Feelings! Bright colors! You can shop for prints and that awesome sweatshirt on her site, or just follow her on the ‘gram at @fiorenza_art.
Good morning from a totally normal, low-stakes Election Day in America! HA! Hahahaha! If you have already voted, please join me in looking at these arts and pretending we are in them, instead of waiting for whatever fresh hell today will bring.
Wouldn’t we like to live in these vintage illustrations for Heidi?
Just frolicking with our goats, not a care in the world.
Wouldn’t it be nice to just be sitting on a rock with your BFF?
Wouldn’t we all like to be lounging somewhat angrily in an apple orchard, maybe thinking up spells and definitely wearing velvet?
Wouldn’t it be great to be waiting for our magic boat to take us to our magic city?
Magic Boat Party 2024!
Thanks to Austin Kleon, I now know that Roger Ebert kept a sketchbook for years. There’s a post about it on Ebert’s old blog and it made me want to go buy a blank notebook (and also miss his writing style):
“…everyone can draw until we are told or convince ourselves that we cannot. We start out drawing everything we see until that day comes when it is pointed out that our drawing of a dog, for example, looks nothing like a dog. Then we begin to believe we cannot draw.
[…] Begin with a proper sketch book. Draw in ink. Finish each drawing you begin, and keep every drawing you finish. No erasing, no ripping out a page, no covering a page with angry scribbles. What you draw is an invaluable and unique representation of how you saw at that moment in that place according to your abilities. That’s all we want. We already know what a dog really looks like.”
(Image up top is one of Ebert’s, again via Austin, with more to look at here.)
When in Escalante at the arts festival and plein air painting contest, one might as well buy some art and an outdoor painting, right?
A little oil painting of some tumbleweed in bloom against an Escalante fence.
A block print of an aspen forest that reminds me of the drive over Boulder Mountain.
Now I just need to figure out where to hang them…
Last week I had an idea to search Etsy for “vintage paint by number” and look what that got me:
(I’ll tell Toby it’s a portrait of one of his ancestors.)
And my friend Kara pointed me to the work of Stasia Burrington, where I found this print called “Tangled.” I had to buy it–it has Japanese kites and the artist described it as “about relationships and sticking out your neck.”
So, despite thinking I needed to branch out, I have two more Asian-influenced things to frame now. I might as well embrace it and just call my decorating style “chinoiserie,” I guess.
I’m almost ready to hang art on the walls in the house, but I have one problem: Ninety-nine percent of my art is prints of Japanese woodblocks. I don’t want the place to start looking like the Asian Art Museum of San Fransicso, so I’m considering an abstract painting for above the fireplace. Or more accurately, I’m considering plagiarizing someone else’s art and making my own abstract painting for above the fireplace.
I am in love with a couple of sold paintings from Michelle Armas–I think her use of color is right up my alley and if I had a couple of thousand dollars to spend on art, I totally would spend it on her art. But I could also buy a canvas and some acrylics and not exactly COPY her, but maybe make my own abstract painting in the style of Michelle Armas.
The sold one that I love, “Rosalia.”
Another sold one, “Wise Math.”
What do you think? Do I enter a gray area of taking someone’s intellectual property? Would mine just look amateurish, because there’s a reason hers cost so much? I have her 2011 calendar, so I could always just wait for the year to be over and frame that. But prints of paintings just aren’t as shiny as real paintings, with their real brushstrokes and gobs of paint.
(It’s a first-world dilemma, that’s for sure.)