Friday!

Happy Halloween!
(found here)

Dear Cedric,

June 19, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Ansel

A beautiful letter from Ansel Adams to his friend Cedric, found here.

Woman with the tools of her trade.  1870’s, Japan.

National Museum of Denmark

(via kleidersachen)

(found here)

Giorgio Griffa

Giorgio Griffa

"She turned up the collar of the red anorak she had taken from the generous supply that hung on pegs outside her grandparents’ kitchen door. It was her favorite because it fitted her well and was warm and comfortable, and she liked it because the pockets were full of all kinds of things: a small but very bright flashlight; a pair of scissors; a notepad in a leather binder, with a purple felt pen; an assortment of paper clips, safety pins, rubber bands; a pair of dark glasses; a dog biscuit (for what dog?)."

--  from An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L'Engle

I love pockets (because I love collecting things). Women's clothes don't often have deep enough ones...if they have them at all.

Rangoli

"They trace wonderful patterns in white powder upon the red soil, which has previously been well swept and beaten. Their designs are but fleeting, and are carried away by the lightest wind or by the feet of men, goats, dogs, and crows. They do their work very quickly, guiding themselves in the tracing of these designs by marks which have been placed there beforehand, and are visible to them alone. Bending forward in a graceful attitude, they move the little box which contains a powder that escapes in a white trail like an endless ribbon over the surface of the ground. Complicated arabesques and geometrical figures grow marvellously under their hands. Often, too, they place a hibiscus flower, an Indian pink, and a yellow marigold at the chief junction of their network of lines after the design is completed. The little street, decorated from one end to the other in this manner, seems to be momentarily covered by a fairy carpet."

--Pierre Loti in “India”

The daily (and temporary) art of making a rangoli/alpana/kolam is no longer as commonplace as it once was in many parts of India.  These pictures are from the 1950s and offer examples of printed contrast and puff sleeve blouses of the time (Loti’s book also makes a mention of the ways in which Indian women combine patterns and colour).
A few links on the math behind the design and cross cultural similarities.

(Found via Horses Atelier)

LOVE

Love posters by Yves Saint Laurent.
I saw them at his garden in Marrakesh this weekend, beautiful.

'Love is a physical act and kindness is tangible.'

"I was having a Skype chat with my mother on Sunday. She was smiling from ear to ear, pleased that I was clean-shaven for the role I am currently playing. “I can see your lovely face,” she kept saying. She was also trying to share a bowl of peanuts with me by bumping it into the laptop’s monitor every few minutes. She has stage-two Alzheimer’s, you see. In that futile gesture, however, laid a thought. Love is a physical act. Kindness is tangible.

It seems to me that this is a concept that largely eludes many of us nowadays. We talk about the prudence of military action, of participating in the bombing of this faraway place or that. We use terms such as “surgical strike” and “collateral damage”. Anyone who is unsure about the wisdom of war is met with the response “fine then, let’s do nothing and let innocent people die”. But inaction is not the opposite of bombing, and indifference not the only alternative to war. Pointing to actively working to bring about peace as the alternative, in such a conversation, one is frequently met with a look or a comment that implies you live in some dreamworld where concepts like this exist.

Yet it is not so. To the thousands of people who volunteer at home and abroad, to the people marching to preserve a free and universal national health service, to the millions who care for their elderly relatives, to parents staying up with a child who has a fever, to my confused mother trying to feed her son through a Wi-Fi connection, love is a physical act and kindness tangible...."

Read the rest of this article by Alex Andreou at The Guardian 

RUI CALÇADA BASTOS

Rui Calcado Bastos

"There are always things that I wish were different, or I feel like I’ve made mistakes. But it’s just part of it. I don’t mind that it’s a little homemade."

- Sofia Coppola

Sunday Tune

Sunday Poem

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-- Mary Oliver

Friday!

(Found here)

Shirin Neshat, Logic of the Birds. 2001

Imperfection Pot

The Imperfection Pot was designed by Adam Buick. for The School of life.
"Inspired by the Japanese tradition of wabi sabi, which finds beauty in humble, imperfect and easily overlooked places, this Imperfection Pot was made with a free hand which has resulted in the appearance of subtle flaws. Rather than ruin it, these imperfections are the key to its charm. They encapsulate – and promote more widely in life – an attitude of generosity and acceptance."

“Go out and walk. That is the glory of life.”

From My Favorite Things by Maria Kalman via Brain Pickings.

Everything is Connected

From Sustainable Human, check it out, brilliant stuff.

Gisele Freund

Virginia Woolf (and her writing desk) and Frida Kahlo by Gisele Freund.

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core


--WB Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Friday!

Field Kallop

Field Kallop 
Works on fabric.

Women in Clothes

I'm really enjoying this book! Highly recommended...

Women in Clothes: Why We Wear What We Wear

by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton

"Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities-famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old-on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives...."

we were searching for ourselves in each other

1 + 2.  Sergei Parajanov, The Color of Pomagranates (Sayat Nova), 1968.
3.  Film still gif from Sergei Parajanov’s Sayat Nova (1968).

“To Begin With, the Sweet Grass”

Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

--“To Begin With, the Sweet Grass” by Mary Oliver from ‘Evidence’ © Beacon, 2009

Yoko Terai

(images found here)

birthstone

WOW.
Vintage Opal ring from ArtifactVintage

“I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. ”

― Virginia Woolf

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

Apparition
The moon was saddening. Seraphim in tears
Dreaming, bow in hand, in the calm of vaporous
Flowers, were drawing from dying violins
White sobs gliding down blue corollas
--It was the blessed day of your first kiss.
My dreaming loving to torment me
Was drinking deep of the perfume of sadness
That even without regret and deception is left
By the gathering of a Dream in the heart which has gathered it.
I wandered then, my eyes on the worn pavement
When with the sun in your hair, and in the street
In the evening, you in laughter appeared to me
And I thought I saw the fairy with her cap of brightness
Who once on the beauty sleeps of my spoilt childhood
Passed, letting always her half-closed hands
Snow down white bouquets of perfumed stars.

-- STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

Hello, Friday...

Esther Teichman

In Search Of Lightning by Esther Teichmann from Self Publish, Be Happy on Vimeo.

I can never get enough of Esther Teichman's work .
Sublime.