tantillus

"You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss..."

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:43:25 -0300

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”

- Azar Nafisi

Photo

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:27:00 -0300

Photo

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 18:45:00 -0300

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 06:51:00 -0300

Photo

Mon, 09 May 2011 13:29:00 -0300

Photo

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 08:27:00 -0300

Photo

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:37:00 -0300

Photo

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 16:12:00 -0400

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 20:36:00 -0400

Photo

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 08:10:00 -0400

The Banyan Tree

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 07:56:00 -0400

Most of us remember someone who opened a door in our minds. ‘Why are you drawing the tree like that?’ queried the art teacher. I said I didn’t know but that was how I felt like doing it. He asked why I felt like doing it like that. I confessed I didn’t know. ‘You should,’ he said, ‘otherwise how can you really draw the tree?’ I still didn’t understand. Eventually I did. Of course there are also those who close doors. Making a colour composition another teacher once sharply admonished me saying, ‘We never use orange!’ She was a formidable lady and I didn’t dare ask why — even now I look over my shoulder if I use orange. I was also taught by Josef Albers (painter and colourist) who believed teaching was a matter of asking the right questions rather than giving the right answers. Not that he was exactly open minded. He used to say Matisse didn’t know anything about colour and regularly picked me out in class with his cold eye to state that the English had no taste. But by then I’d learnt what, and what not, to listen to. If your mind is too open people can throw all sorts of rubbish into it.

— Alan Fletcher, Beware Wet Paint

Photo

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 10:52:58 -0400

Photo

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:11:00 -0400

Photo

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:37:00 -0400

Donna Wilson

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 14:44:00 -0400

The result of a mystical experience like a Llama levitating by reversing his polarities.

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:09:00 -0400

Trying to explain how to ride a bicycle is notoriously difficult. The same distance lies between experience and theory in describing the design process. To my mind defining design as problem solving smacks more routine work than creative thinking.

They treat them as a personal challenge and so if someone asks how they came up with an idea you’ll probably hear what the designer thinks you expect to hear. Anything from it just popped up in the head, the result of a mystical experience like a Llama levitating by reversing his polarities or something magical like making a leopard change its spots.

For myself I try to sum up the situation, back in edgeways, and cast around for ideas in which to hang further ideas. It’s an intuitive process involving search, discovery, recognition and evaluation. Rejection or development. There are no specific rules or recipes. One might slip through a sequence of actions in seconds, sweat through step by step, start backwards, move randomly from one point to another, or do what surfers call ‘hang ten’ — get your toes into the board and ripe the crest of the wave.

However, there are three essential conditions. The first is the capability for cerebral acrobatics so the mind can juggle the elements while freewheeling around the possibilities. The second is a mind set with the credulity of a child, the dedication of an evangelist, the spadework of a navvy. And the third is sufficient motivation to kiss a lot of frogs before finding a prince. All of which just adds up to one thing. An aim to reach that condensation of sensations which — Matisse said — ‘constitutes a picture’.

— Alan Fletcher, Beware Wet Paint

Photo

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 21:37:00 -0300

"As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is..."

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:24:00 -0300

“As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill. Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas — abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken — and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”

- Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things