Winter

For a farmer, winter is the resting period. This winter, while resting, I'd like to cultivate the kind of calm I get from looking at these images. 

Asymmetrical Patterns

Soooo...if you take colorful images of the same or similar thing and compile them onto one canvas, you can pretty much come up with something pleasing to the eye. Found these here.  

Crowds

Throngs of people are sublime to watch, scary to experience. I avoided the stores over the holiday, but did plenty of people watching in Harvard Square and was inspired by the organic movement of crowds. 

Nothing

Although I love consuming images on the internet, in the world, in film, and through the written word, I appreciate the space for thought in a blank wall or a non-image too. So here's to Rauschenberg for celebrating nothingness. 

Pre-Revolution Russia

Russia in color, a century ago...

Cat Power

Cat Power - He War Music Video from Brett Vapnek on Vimeo.

Love the film quality of this music video. The song is good too. 

Marni Chairs

Ex-prisoners created these chairs, found via Color Collective. Check out the story here. 

Hand drawn

That's it, at the top of my 'August' list will be to draw a picture every day. Just you wait, I'll be posting originals soon enough. In the meantime, here are some loud and subdued colors, rough and light lines. 

Random

Over the last few months I've collected images and put them in a folder on my desktop to look at on days when I need to be saturated with color and pattern. These were included in the cache. I don't have credits because I am not a conscientious image thief. Let's just say none of them are mine and if you're looking at this blog and any of the images were created by you, let me know!

Reminds me of the forests, rivers, and the California calm. 

Myoung Ho Lee

Found this artist via Black Eiffel. Lately I've been studying botany, food forests, and sustainability so these photos resonate with me as I explore the magical quality of life that abounds from the soil cycle, photosynthesis, and pretty much all other processes that support existence. 

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Can't wait to see this film!

via Caron Callahan

Ahhhh!!

Jenni Sparks

I usually shy away from Hipster sludge-esque aesthetics but Jenni Sparks' colors captured me. Also, the 'once more with feeling' reminds me of a 75 year old piano teacher whose fingers resembled weathered sticks. She often used this phrase whenever I played 'Traumerei', probably because that song sent me into a daydream.

Ryan Peltier

This guy conjures the bizarre and the beautiful with his textures and slightly grotesque figures. I love them! Reminds me of Edward Gorey-meets-Christian Lacroix on the set of Children of the Corn. 

Gotye

Can't get this one out of my brain lately. 

Story of a Country

India, A Brief Journey from Jordan Marzuki on Vimeo.

Relocation

Some animal photos

Just a couple of researchers dressed as pandas, putting a baby in a basket.

Dream house

Cabin Porn

If I'm here in Massachusetts, with a yard, over this next year, building a greenhouse with used windows is on my to-do list.

Ryan McGinley

Walter Niedermayr

A Letter

From John Steinbeck to his son. (Snagged this one from the lovely Estelle)

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

Snippets

Random quotes found in random journals, not my own words:

All of life, and not just childhood, is an ongoing process of disillusionment, of trading innocence for knowledge.

How is it that a certain narrative comes to define a person's life?

As morning wasted into noon...

She learned to read the clouds.

What the best writers and scholars do is to help us cherish the times and places we are made strange to ourselves, when our heads are split open by the paucity of our definitions and we are rendered helpless by the limits of our knowledge. There are we most human; there do we learn empathy; there do we begin to reach and expand.

Light

The first photo is a still shot from a film called 'Heaven'. I saw it a few months ago and when I try to think of something beautiful, the last scene of this movie pops up in my mind. It's one of those scenes that leaves your body vibrating for hours afterwards. I don't remember which website the second photo came from but I'll give credit when I figure it out. When I think about a live/work space, the plants and windows and cushion look pretty ideal.

Sarah Lippett

Fantastical home.

Tristram Landsdowne

Home.