Two famous painters from history – Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh – were born on this day, 275 years and 168 years ago respectively. I do not have anything very insightful to say, I just scanned through each of their works again this evening, and pulled several ‘comparable’ pieces (only in rough terms of color and subject matter) to put on display here.
First we’ll start with self portraits, hard at their work. (These remind me of one of my favorite paintings)
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Churches with blue skies.
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Women in blue.
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And finally, secluded gathers behind tall trees.
It’s quite beautiful to see how unique these two worlds are. And, despite how different the subject and scene of each painting is, how clearly every work fits in to the over arching world of the painter.
Both Goya and Van Gogh really found their thing. I wonder, when I’m old and gray and looking back at my life’s work, what my thing will be.
Here’s a bonus video about a piece of Goya’s work by one of my favorite YouTube channels.
Rams, a documentary by Gary Hustwit, paints a beautiful picture of the life, work and philosophy of one of the world’s most influential industrial designers – Dieter Rams.
Kindly, organized and reclusive, Dieter Rams does not fall in with the authoritarian stereotypes of world-changing innovators – like Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison. He is generous with his time and ready to help. His demeanor is remembered by some of his former employees as fatherly. Through his 40 year tenure at the German electronics company, Braun, from 1955-1995, he gained the respect and loyalty of those he worked alongside.
Rams’ home office. Nearly everything in this frame was in part designer by Rams himself
Although his attitude and leadership differed greatly from that of Steve Jobs, they’re design sensibilities were much the same. The work of Rams is perhaps the single greatest contributor to the design of Apple products we see today.
A 1956 Braun record played, dubbed “Snow White’s Coffin,” due to its early use of plexiglass in the lidA comparison of Dieter Rams’ designed radio and the first Apple iPod
A CNN article on Rams and man and Rams the film asked the director, Gary Hustwit what if he’d asked Rams about his influence on Apple Products.
“He thinks it’s a compliment. He likes Jony [Ive, Apple’s former Chief Design Officer] a lot. But I think it’s hard for him to judge that impact because he doesn’t have a computer. He’s not on the Internet. He’s not interested in digital interfaces and user experience design and all these screens that we have to look at all day. There are no screens in his life, there’s just an old Braun television from the 1980s and that’s really the only screen in his house. It’s just not something that he’s interested in engaging with.”
Rams’ leading philosophy in design and in life is:
Less, but Better.
This leading ideal is then broken up into the now iconic 10 Principles of Good Design.
Good Design is Innovative.
Good Design makes a Product Useful.
Good Design is Aesthetic.
Good Design makes a Product Understandable.
Good Design is Unobtrusive.
Good Design is Honest.
Good Design is Long-Lasting.
Good Design is Thorough to the Last Detail.
Good Design is Environmentally Friendly.
Good Design is as Little Design as Possible.
When asked by an aspiring industrial design student what advice he had for her, Rams replied:
Sometimes, if you find yourself struggling to create a singular masterpiece – create 50 or 100 or 1,000 small, crude pieces. And the mass collective can become the singular masterpiece.
If you’re struggling to write the book, just get one sentence down today. In her book on writing and life, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott describes her own writing process. She sits at her desk, wondering what on God’s green earth to write, maybe hyperventilating a little, until she finally notices the 1-inch picture frame beside her monitor.
“It reminds me that all I have todo is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running.”
The title of that chapter is “Short Assignments.”
Lots of short assignments lead to big payoffs. Often times, quality only comes with quantity. With practice. With repetition. Or simply, with enough of the bad that it simply morphs into a giant, singular good. David Bayles and Ted Orland display this idea beautifully in their book, Art & Fear:
“[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
This project – drawing 100 of something – taught me this lesson in my second year of art school. In my case, it was finding spaceships within splotches of watercolor.
Today, I started a new quantity-over-quality project, with these 2×3 inch paintings of shapes. It was fun to paint with real brushes again, rather than my stylus and computer. And though these are not special in any way individually, I’m hoping once I fill a wall with 30 or 40 of them, the quantity will mask the crudity.
Van Neistat, filmmaker and older brother of Casey Neistat, released the first videos on his brand new YouTube channel – a series called The Spirited Man. I was ecstatic to see this, and even more so when I watched the videos. Then watched them again. And again and again and again. And fell in love with them.
It is hard to say what I love so much about this trailer and this series. The handmade quality in a world of digitally created and pixel-processed work? The moments of silence and peace in a sea of noisy and hype-based media? The clear and ever-present lack of social media and current trends? All of this. All of it. And so much more.
But what struck me the other day watching it again is that this trailer is simply a celebration of the things that make Van unique as a filmmaker and a human. He celebrates the ways he is different. He celebrates what makes him spirited, and encourages others to do the same.
I wrote down “celebrate what you love” in my notebook, then, curious, typed it into Google. Immediately, I found this beautiful TED Talk, from a former National Geographic photographer that plucked so many of the strings in my mind and heart that I had just tuned.
Here are a couple of my favorite moments, quotes from Dewitt Jones:
“I just decided that if I had a choice between a world based on scarcity and fear, and one based on possibility… Then man I was choosing possibility. And no matter how dry and desolate, no matter how bleak and devoid of possibility a situation might seem – if I could just celebrate the best in it… I could find a perspective that would transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.”
“Celebrating what’s right is not a perspective that denies the very real pain and suffering that exists on this planet. Rather, it’s a perspective that puts those problems into a larger, more balanced context.”
The world becomes a more beautiful place when we are actively working to celebrate it.
“No matter how strange a situation that I walk into, the first thing I’m gonna ask is, ‘What’s here to celebrate? What am I falling in love with?”
Find what you love – anything you love. Write it down, think about why you love it, and celebrate that thing. That’s something I’m going to strive to do in all my work moving forward – it’s something I can’t get out of my mind.
Tom Sachs, a New York-based sculptor, gave a interesting TED talk on creativity and standards. In it, he said:
“Authenticity also demands endurance. Do it for a long time – whatever it is. Two years, it’s just an interest. Do something for five years, and it’s a hobby. Do something for 20 years, and you begin to build a sense of mastery and the holes in your position on the thing become too small to be of any consequence.”
The problem is that I’m constantly distracted. Distracted from my book while I’m reading. Distracted by that idea I need to jot down, or text that I’ll forget to send. Distracted from hobby to hobby, focus to focus. From season to season to season.
How do I attain mastery over any single thing when my lens of attention is constantly shifting?
Leonardo Da Vinci, famous for his mastery over so many varied things supposedly uttered these final words before his death:
“I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.”
Of course, that is ridiculous. Leonardo was one of mankind’s greatest artists and thinkers – yet he too felt this sense of impending failure. Honestly, I don’t know how to reconcile that contrast. That a man we revere for what he created and gave to the world, himself felt unfulfilled.
For now, as I ponder the quandary of Leonardo Da Vinci’s happiness, I suppose the only thing to do is continue in curiosity. To look every more intently for the beauty the world has to offer, so that I may add to it in whatever small bits I can. And, of course, to take David Sedaris’ advice from his book, Calypso:
I was toddling around the living room tonight, having closed my laptop for the sake of my eyes not melting out of their sockets, when I heard a cheer from the open window. My street is full of bars and restaurants, and as spring has started to emerge, the weekends have gotten louder and louder. I glanced out of the window and caught a glimpse of a TV on in an upper room across the street, and what looked like a basketball playing. I wonder if the Bucks are playing right now… I flipped on the television, and found myself dropped into the middle of a 90s crime drama. I started changing the channels, looking for tall dudes in green, when I landed instead on an old grainy image of a man painting against a black backdrop.
Of course, I know Bob Ross. But I realized in that moment that I’d never actually sat and watched Bob Ross paint before. I’d seen images and short clips forever, but I’d never sat with him. So, having very little inclination to do anything else, I leaned back and watched. And listened.
And felt that this was exactly what he was meant to do. He seems to really love painting – and to love to share painting. And if he doesn’t, what does it matter? It made me want to paint. And certainly it made countless others want to paint as well.
I have recently started watching the Apple TV+ original show, Ted Lasso, starring Jason Seduikis. It tells the story of a young college football coach from Kansas who is hired to coach a English Premiere League football club with no experience, and practically no knowledge of the game.
While the plot of the show revolves around the Richmond Football Club, the story concerns the impact of Ted – endlessly optimistic, kind, thoughtful and generous – on those around him. It is not a story of a protagonist changing, but of a protagonist changing those around them. Here is a great video that describes the nuances and specifics of this sort of story – called the “flat arc.” In that video, the narrator says:
“One of the reasons we enjoy stories, is that they reassure us that we can change. But movies with flat arcs assure us of something else: that we can change the world around us without sacrificing our beliefs. These are stories about good people. Inspirational heroes that spend their lives spreading a positive message in the hopes of radically transforming the people around them and the world at large, for the better.”
Reading that paragraph, and watching this show, I am constantly reminded of the character of Jesus. The story of Jesus’ life is a flat arc. Jesus’ character does not change, he does not go through a transformation of belief or understanding. There is a not a lie about himself he believes at the beginning of his story that, by the end, he has learned to dismiss. He is constant. And the story of his life is one of changing those around him, and the sacrifices he makes to do so. It is a change of circumstances, not a change of character.
Ted Lasso is an excellent embodiment of how we can live like Jesus in a modern world. Ted is a force for good. And sure, I’ve always wanted to be a good person, and wanted to be a positive force in the lives of those around me, and wanted to treat others and treat life as Jesus did. But reading an ancient text – or even watching a show or movie that depicts the life of Jesus – does not put a crystal clear image of how I can be that Christ-like ‘force for good’ in a modern world.
Ted Lasso shows me how I can immediately change my attitudes, actions and words in today’s context, to match the spirit of Jesus. And it does it through a beautifully written, funny, sometimes raunchy piece of television.
“Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on only one thing: my paintings, and everything is sacrificed to it – you and everyone else. Myself included.”
This is a quote from a letter Pablo Picasso wrote to a lover, discovered through this video about the daily routine of the artist.
It seems quite a dreary way to live, but effective. Isolating, but inspiring. Like so many things, there are positive things to glean and add to my own life, and things to leave behind.
This afternoon I was listening to an NFL podcast. At the top of the show, before getting into the normal swing of things, the host took a few minutes to give a tribute to a fellow sports writer that had just passed away the week before recording. At the end of it, he said “I loved him. I loved reading him.”
It struck me – that in a world of sports writers, the columns become the people. The words and paragraphs shape the personality and perception of the individual behind them. I think we do this subconsciously every day, but I’d never heard the idea stated so clearly and frankly. I loved reading him. The writer was made up of his words. He was his writing. That was his legacy and his being.
When I think about musicians or directors or artists, their work becomes their personality in my mind.
This evening, I watched Never Ending Man, a documentary following Hayao Miyazaki, the famed founder, writer and director of Japan’s Studio Ghibli. It was a fascinating watch, as Miyazaki is, himself, a fascinating man. He wears a white apron in nearly every shot of the film, at home and in the studio, and there’s more often than not a cigarette hanging lazily from his mouth, tucked into his top lip and wobbling as he talks.
The films starts with Miyazaki’s announcement to the press that he will be retiring from the movie industry – only to see him quickly return to work on a short film, then hint at the launching a feature film near the end.
There were several quotes from Miyazaki that stuck out to me… I want to share them here.
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“Self satisfied people are boring. We have to push hard to surpass ourselves.”
“I’ve got things I want to do, but don’t feel I can. I want to create something extraordinary. I just don’t know if I can do it.”
“You’re drawing people, not characters.”
“I don’t like the word ‘challenge.’ I just trudge along. Forward, always forward.”
“I just sketch anything that catches my attention.”
“All important things in the world are a hassle.”
“When I’m tired, my pencil escapes.”
“What a bustling world, full of strange wonder!”
“If we’d tried to please, we’d be long forgotten.”
Hayao Miyazaki was born January 5, 1941, in Tokyo, Japan. He just turned 80, and is about halfway through the making of what he says will be his final feature film. He is making it for his grandson.
