My space to share some thinking
Last weekend some of my pieces found new homes, picked up at the San Mateo Highlands Eichler Home Tour http://eichlerhometour.org/. Big thanks to amazing Ami who helped me out once again. We met lots of interesting people and toured some beautiful homes. Needless to say I left feeling super inspired!
I was very disappointed to have missed the launch party of the book ‘I used to be a design student’ held in London on Feb 18th. Sadly I am too far away and couldn’t just hop on a bus to Camberwell, like I used to for three years of my student life.
The authors of ‘I used to be a design student’ are two of my graphic design contemporaries, Frank Philippin and Billy Kiosoglou. I was invited to contribute to this study of 50 designers, comparing the life & work from their students days with their life & work of today. I have yet to see a copy first hand but with a selection of designers from Margaret Calvert and Ken Garland to Daniel Eatock and James Goggin, it has to be pretty fascinating reading!
‘I used to be a design student’ is published by Laurence King 2013.
On Design Week Feb 5th 2013.
I have been rather absent from this site for a while. It’s hard to squeeze these things in, in between looking after two young children and relocating from one city to another, amongst other things. I’m hoping soon things will normalise and I can once again redirect my focus towards other interests!
As our lives get organized, my daughter is attending a very nice art camp this week at LUX, down the road from where we’re staying. I was very happy to discover this rather unique place. She’s doing the printmaking workshop. When I pick her up I get itchy fingers looking at all the lovely pieces they’ve been working on. So much fun!
One of the things I kept from a magazine was this photo of a wall in a parking lot. I thought it was quite beautiful and found out more about it here. This work is by Retna as part of ‘Wallworks’ – a project inviting a select group of graffiti artists to create a series of murals in the parking lot of the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas in December 2010.
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted something. I guess I’ve been pretty distracted by various other things – ongoing projects, clearing, reorganising, reviewing, school, impending arrival of a new baby and so on. Yesterday I was throwing out some old magazines and found a few things of interest which I cut out and stuck into my sketch book. Things that interest me but I can’t always pin-point why, so I stick them in my notebook for future reference. I realised how liberating it is having a ‘physical’ sketch book to make notes in, draw and stick things down. Unlike posting things on a blog, where the desire is to share and have a ‘conversation’ about something (with that underlying pressure of presenting things that you hope will also be of interest to other people), in my sketchbooks I have complete freedom, knowing that I will be the only one to look through them. Unfortunately I’m not as much of an avid sketchbooker as I used to be, in fact more often than not these days I almost entirely forget about them. But when I get the chance to look through and review my visual thought process – in between many pages that leave me wondering why – I can always find something to inspire me. Those little ideas, little experiments, little seeds of things to come.
Preparing and cutting red leather for gloves.
Hermes is not quite my style, however today I did enjoy looking at their site – especially where they show video clips of their craftspeople working on certain products. There is something so satisfying about watching a skilled pair of hands working, almost automatically, methodically and seamlessly on something.
Some drawings inspired by an exercise found in a Mind Workout book that I was browsing recently during Aya’s piano lesson.
We just received a photo from our printer in Tokyo showing our new project in progress … I’m very excited. I’ll announce more about it very soon!
I’ve always wondered how they do it! This is a beautifully shot short documentary about the art of hand-painted advertisements. Shot by Malcolm Murray (Mekanism) for Stella Artois.
I popped into Heath Ceramics on Beverly Blvd the other day. I loved their store. It was like a breath of fresh air. Very beautifully done, with so many beautiful objects and colours everywhere. I loved the way they’d used some of their glaze tests to tile certain areas, and as well as all their lovely ceramics, they had a nice selection of books and home ware. I have to admit that I particularly fell in love with this tea towel by Enormous Champion.
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