Farmer's Market inspiration

The summer youth program that I run is over and now I'm just wandering around the gardens by my lonesome to harvest what's left for the mobile markets on Saturdays. Concord grapes, yard long noodle beans, and potatoes are on the harvest lists these days. I'm also gearing up for some winter garden planning by attempting to follow a crop rotation while learning the Latin vegetable family names.

e.e. cummings

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.  

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. 

Anne Kipling

"The phenomenon of the moment is for me so incredible that it just takes over everything."-Kipling

She looks at things as much as possible without a preconceived idea of what these things look like. When she draws, the experience is always a discovery. When I look at her drawings, I feel the communion of energy between Kipling and her subject and the pulse of seemingly static environments.

Art Meets Fashion

Just found the Jcrew tumblr through this lovely blog. This spread is so inspiring, especially because I just got a new toy (Brother CS-6000i).

Christian Lacroix

This makes me want to get out my books, magazines, markers, scrap cloth and scissors.

Sharp, Duchamp, and Fuller

Brian Sharp, LA artist

Marcel Duchamp, To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918.

Buckminster Fuller's 25 Great Circles

Love the lines, colors, and patterns in these three images. Makes me want to create something abstract, well balanced, and beautiful.

Side note: Buckminster Fuller was this harvard drop out (or...he got expelled twice) who patented the geodesic dome and concerned himself with sustainability. He coined this term 'ephemeralization' meaning to 'do more with less' and said, "I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing- a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process- an integral function of the universe." I hear ya Bucky.

Cultural Maps and Drawing from Life

Lately I've been thinking about creating a series of drawings on the history of a place and its cultural waves through time, much like Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, or Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands. In these works, the illustrations, typefaces, stories and research are seamless and create worlds that I can get lost in all day. Another inspiration, Jennifer New's Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art, makes me feel better about doodling in my journals.

Maira Kalman

I love the way she uses space and color to create mosaics of activity.

Charlotte Salomon

More illustrations to muse on....

Raison d'etre

Snagged this one from ArtLunchbox and I couldn't agree more.

Also, a quote from The Accidental Masterpiece by Michael Kimmelman that I think accompanies the Jarmusch statement pretty well:

"I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it."