By Katie Inglis
I got in touch with Bridget Quinn, a sculptor of whimsical things and painter of beautiful scenes, to talk about the next chapter of her ongoing installation, the Pay Phone Revival Project, which is kicking off this weekend!
[KI] So tell me about the project you’re…
Words of wisdom from Jessi Arrington.
(Source: paulgraham.com, via putorti)
Would Leo Tolstoy, Andy Warhol, or Aristotle hold up LOLcats and other works of meme culture as art? PBS Idea Channel explores the evolution of what we consider “art” in the age of the social web.
Immensely talented Sam Spratt shares a bit about his process. For him an idea can begin anywhere, he captures it quickly in a rough sketch, and then finishes it in the studio. It’s a process that moves from free-flow to work-flow. From concept, to sketch, to rendering, to master piece. It’s adding details only when the image as a whole makes sense.
Sam’s work is incredible. His sketch is the work of an artist. However, the general process he follows applies to so many disciplines and is so powerful: a scribble deck that becomes a slide deck or a story board that becomes a film. A sketch helps you refine the overal form of things, then fill in the details.
I wanted to try out using an iPad as the initial portion of my workflow for when I’m not in my studio and then use it as a jumping off point for when I was ready to flesh it out on the desktop. So, while out and about, I doodled this spacerhino/hyena-esque creature in the iPad app, “Paper” by FiftyThree Studios (which, as I mentioned last week, is the first iPad drawing app I enjoy).
The iPad’s hardware capabilities/accuracy are a limiting factor but they prove good enough for a concept sketch to get rough ideas out which I can take home and begin to bring to life. While I wouldn’t use an iPad to sketch things out when I have access to my studio, it provides me a great place to begin to form initial ideas on the go to revisit later.
100-percent-of-the-time is a simple visual diary. Each day is summarized in colorful, rothko-esque charts that add up the impressions of the day. What a lovely idea from Brad Ovenell-Carter. Makes you think in color.
It’s always fun to discover Instagrammers who stick with a theme. Rodolfo Fuentes (@donrodomarinero) does just that. He keeps his picture frame on-hand and uses it to frame his Instagram shots just right. Take a look at some of our favorites!
Heute ein Gruss an Deutschland! This illustration was done by Oliver Jungman, a photographer and designer in Germany.
Made with Paper
… „paper“ für’s iPad. Dolles Ding.
(via madewithpaper)
![jayrosen:
Fake symmetry carries instructions for its own perpetuation.
Obama spoke to the American Society of Newspaper editors this week. Here’s what he said about fake symmetry in political journalism, after being asked this question: ”What can you say to the Americans who just want both sides to stop fighting and get some work done on their behalf?”
I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and an equivalence is presented — which reinforces I think people’s cynicism about Washington generally. [The debate over deficit reduction] is not one of those situations where there’s an equivalence. I’ve got some of the most liberal Democrats in Congress who were prepared to make significant changes to entitlements that go against their political interests, and who said they were willing to do it. And we couldn’t get a Republican to stand up and say, we’ll raise some revenue, or even to suggest that we won’t give more tax cuts to people who don’t need them.
About the part in bold he is absolutely right. And I have seen no recognition by anyone in political journalism that Obama had a point.
But appreciate how well-defended the system is. For journalists, the whole point of “they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle” is to advertise how unswayed you are by either side. If one of those sides, Mr. Obama, tries to persuade you that you’ve entered into a destructive pattern—like, say, fake symmetry—and you listen to him, conceding that he might have a fair point, then… you’ve been swayed!
But remember the reason you got into the fake symmetry biz in the first place. To show that you cannot be swayed. Therefore the pattern teaches you how to discount criticism of the pattern. It’s kind of the obverse of “the system contains the seeds of its own destruction.” Fake symmetry is a system that comes with instructions for its own perpetuation.
_______
Bonus link: Gloria Borger of CNN makes Obama’s point for him. Actually, this is an even better example.
(Photo of Obama speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors by Steve Buttry. Used by permission.)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1zgw82Jia1qzbwu1o1_1280.jpg)
Fake symmetry carries instructions for its own perpetuation.
Obama spoke to the American Society of Newspaper editors this week. Here’s what he said about fake symmetry in political journalism, after being asked this question: ”What can you say to the Americans who just want both sides to stop fighting and get some work done on their behalf?”
I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and an equivalence is presented — which reinforces I think people’s cynicism about Washington generally. [The debate over deficit reduction] is not one of those situations where there’s an equivalence. I’ve got some of the most liberal Democrats in Congress who were prepared to make significant changes to entitlements that go against their political interests, and who said they were willing to do it. And we couldn’t get a Republican to stand up and say, we’ll raise some revenue, or even to suggest that we won’t give more tax cuts to people who don’t need them.
About the part in bold he is absolutely right. And I have seen no recognition by anyone in political journalism that Obama had a point.
But appreciate how well-defended the system is. For journalists, the whole point of “they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle” is to advertise how unswayed you are by either side. If one of those sides, Mr. Obama, tries to persuade you that you’ve entered into a destructive pattern—like, say, fake symmetry—and you listen to him, conceding that he might have a fair point, then… you’ve been swayed!
But remember the reason you got into the fake symmetry biz in the first place. To show that you cannot be swayed. Therefore the pattern teaches you how to discount criticism of the pattern. It’s kind of the obverse of “the system contains the seeds of its own destruction.” Fake symmetry is a system that comes with instructions for its own perpetuation.
_______
Bonus link: Gloria Borger of CNN makes Obama’s point for him. Actually, this is an even better example.
(Photo of Obama speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors by Steve Buttry. Used by permission.)
Fascinating review and stories from @mortpersky.
MORT PERSKY
on the art of the newspaper column.Photograph by Ralph Schoenstein via Smithsonian.com
John Avlon, Jesse Angelo, and Errol Louis
Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columnists
Overlook Press, September 2011. 432 pp.
A mere 60 years ago, at the front end of my love-hate affair with the published word, I went to work for my first “real” newspaper, an actual evening daily willing to pay a salary-like sum for my dubious services. The paper was the Herald in Augusta, Georgia. It subscribed to a feature service called NEA, which sold columns and other stories in a one-price package deal that the Herald and many other papers seemed to find irresistible. Unlike its à la carte rivals, whose wares were typesetter-ready, NEA delivered its viands neatly laid out on printed pages that made them look more attractive to editors.
That extra dash of typography meant somebody had to clip the stories chosen for print and paste them onto sheets of copy paper — a quaint necessity of the day — before writing a headline and sending the lot to the composing room, there to be set in type once again.
That somebody — often me — could be counted on to have scissors, rubber-cement pot, and a deskload of soft-leaded, blacker-than-Hitler’s-heart No. 2 copy pencils at the ready. Which is how I came to be thus accessorized for my first meeting with the work of James Earl Breslin Jr., whose writing accounted for roughly half of the most interesting stories in NEA’s sports section, the Green Sheet. I had no reason to wonder about the fellow’s age then, and besides, he was in New York and I was in Augusta. Had I known he was 23, but a couple of years older than I was while gluing down his columns for the linotype operators, I might well have considered dropping out of the game then and there.
Jimmy, you see, had already fast-tracked himself into a job that required more than mere reporting and promised greater rewards. He was very nearly a columnist already, all but freed from the tedious requirements of “objectivity.” In Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columnists, a new and important anthology, the great Russell Baker describes it this way: The objectivity code “forbade a reporter to write of, say, Senator Blattis: ‘Lying as usual, Senator Blattis declared today …’” Baker concluded, “This obligation to assist in dignifying inferior men … made you feel as though you were nothing more than a megaphone for the convenience of frauds.”
And that is why, like the young Jimmy Breslin, Baker made it a priority to become a columnist as quickly as possible, succeeding so famously that his op-ed essays ran in The New York Times from 1962 to 1998. For Jimmy, NEA’s many papers supplied a nationwide wall on which his talent could grow like a trumpet vine. He’d gone from a 15-year-old copyboy at the Long Island Press to 25-year-old pro still honing his talents under NEA sports editor Harry Grayson, and preparing for … who knew what? What he became was the columnist’s columnist, perhaps the best ever, still writing at age 82 in a time when newspapers themselves are in their own twilight.
(Source: lareviewofbooks)
(Source: justlittlethings)
