art ideas reading

Where Do You Focus?

I’ve been reading Twyla Tharp’s “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life” as part of my Year of Creative Reading. I’m not ready to report on the book as a whole because I haven’t finished it yet, but I do want to cover a topic brought up by Tharp in Chapter 3. Tharp discusses an artist’s creative DNA, which includes an artist’s preferred focal length. She says, “All of us find comfort…

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observations

What Plant Is This?

In front of our house is a large bed of perennial plants and flowers, mostly lilies with a couple of hostas, some violets, and chives mixed in. When I created the bed a few years ago, I thought of it as a rain garden, a place for water to fall off the roof of the house and flow into a space that would soak it up. Grass would never properly grow in that spot, on…

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olio reading thought fodder

Olio – June 22, 2015

Olio: a miscellaneous collection of things My recent online reading has included some good news, some bad (very bad) news, and a parable. Let’s start with the good news. Stress is often referred to as a bad thing, and it can be. However, if you look at it the right way, your body can deal with it much more effectively than when you think of it as a bad thing. Check out this article on…

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design observations thought fodder

Spelunking Online

Spelunking is the term used for exploring caves. Urban explorers in London have been spelunking in the underground structures of the city and documenting what they find because most of these areas are off-limits to the public. People love mucking about in hidden places. On a planet that seems to have had every square inch explored, what might there be left to uncover? As London’s urban explorers have found, human beings have created hidden and forgotten…

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reading

YOCR #11 – Orbiting the Giant Hairball

You’re not going to believe this. I have actually read a book that is on my original list of Year of Creative Reading books. Crazy, but true. One of my hopes for the list was to use it to find books that I might not find on my own. What with the shift of bookstores to an online environment, it’s a lot harder to find books using serendipity. Now we’ve got to use lists (normally…

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