Abbi Jacobson must be a tireless centipede. Amongst all the things she does, she hosted the podcast A Piece of Work, about modern art. The Moma and the podcasting company WNYC Studios produced this fantastic series.
Wikipedia (May 2020) tells us Jacobson is planning to do another series. Let it come.
Brainpickings, the beautifully intense mind sprout by Maria Popova. She write about books, philosophy, writers, thinking, tenderness, music, art, love, the beauty of life, and more I can safely say.
All these beautiful essays…
Started as a simple email list, the site has grown into a monumental achievement showcasing the richness of what the Internet can bring humanity.
In the format of a semi-dialog, David Hockney and Martin Gayford in A History of Pictures discuss the history and various aspects of picture-making.
Beautifully illustrated.
The most interesting thing is that Hockney seems not to have a very high regard for photography.
“… I question photography. A lot of people don’t, they accept the world looks like a photograph.
“But colour photography couldn’t get tones like those [Vermeer] as is has to rely on the dyes or printing ink. Those aren’t like paint, and never will be.”
“… I don’t know whether photography is an art. Some photographers considered themselves artists, and some didn’t
… Good photography does require intelligence and imagination but aa lot of it is very mechanical.”
Vermeer, Caravaggio, Degas, Delacrois, a few of the painters mentioned in the book that used photographic techniques for their paintings.
“Photography came out of painting and as far as I can see that’s where it is returning.”
Panoramas of death. Strange coffins with almost dead bodies. Grandchildren stand mourning alienated next to the coffin. A dog too. In the film, a cat in the polder that doesn’t seem to want to be photographed and disappears from view. The panorama that does not want to be a panorama because it is upright. A dress blows in front of the coffin, which has been placed on a touching pair of yellow bricks so that it stays upright.
Surely the best is the image of nothing, or of what was.
In the other half of Huis Marseille show Koos Breukels photographs of his son. Can’t stop thinking: what a brat.
Maria Popova announced her book, Figuring. First time in my life I have pre-ordered a book. It is arriving in February 2019. Maria Popova is the creator of one of the world’s best blogs: Brain Pickings.
Work for Money. You are in business.…Anything I have to tell you can be summed up thusly: charge as much as you can, deliver an honest value, and never work for free. Unfortunately, most designers feel such pangs of guilt about.…The secrets to getting the price you want for your work are having done the homework to know you’re asking for the right thing, the confidence to ask for it, and the willingness to walk away when you can’t get it.
The myth of the magical creative is alive and well, and it’s powerful.…A designer requires honest feedback and real criticism, and that’s not going to happen in a realm where colleagues or clients are worried about crushing the spirit of a magical being.
A DESIGNER SOLVES PROBLEMS WITHIN A SET OF CONSTRAINTS.… any design task you undertake must serve a goal. It’s your job to find out what those goals are.
information about her clients and their goals. What do they want to achieve, what is the context in which they are operating, what their financial constraints are.Figure out what the client really wants early Most clients will approach you with a wish list of desires. If they don’t you should actually work with them on coming up with one. Assign a cost and a benefit to each one.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that you are evaluating the potential client as much as they are evaluating you. Prospective clients sometimes find this surprising.…I totally encourage you to go after clients you want to work for. Let’s just be realistic about the return on this type of business development. It is very, very low.…The clients you choose to take on define you. Your portfolio needs to tell a story and each client you add to it is another chapter in that story. Make sure you’re consciously building the story you want to be telling.
If you’re here it’s probably because you bought my book and read all the way to page 18, where I promised you a screener for ferreting out whether you’re talking to the right clients or not. Well, here it is.
Selling your work directly to clients is extremely important. Not only should you be able to explain why you made the decisions you did, but you’ll get first-hand feedback on where the work needs to go next.…Look for clients who have clear goals, not detailed punch lists. This is especially true of RFPs that require you to reply directly to each line item at the risk of being disqualified from the process. You don’t want to sign up for a process that you know is broken from the start. Once you set sail on a boat you can’t convince a captain to take to the sky.
Not knowing the design language doesn’t make someone a bad client. I doubt very much that most of you could have a medical conversation with your doctor on par with a conversation your doctor could have with another doctor, and that doesn’t make you a bad patient.…It’s your job as a designer, and a communication professional, to find the right language to communicate with your client. When you say a client doesn’t “get it” you might as well be saying, “I couldn’t figure out how to get my point across. I am a lazy designer. Please take all my clients from me.”…The biggest myth ever perpetuated in the design field is that good design sells itself.
Being able to present your own work is a core design skill. It helps build rapport with the client. It puts the person directly responsible for the work in front of them. It shows them that you’re presenting that work with confidence. And it gives them an opportunity to ask questions directly of the person who did the work.
Your first job is to separate the actionable feedback from the non-actionable feedback. Sometimes clients just like to document their thought process. Your job is to sift through and find the actionable from the non-actionable.
“I once argued with a client for an hour over an issue I didn’t care about (eventually letting him win!), because I really cared about the next issue coming up. At that point, he was so tired out and savoring his victory
Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, which I will bluntly summarize like so: you are responsible for the work you put into the world.I urge each and every one of you to seek out projects that leave the world a better place than you found it. We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that.
Just as you’re responsible for the quality of a project, your project manager is responsible for getting it done on time. And with the maximum amount of profit. This doesn’t mean you’re not both thinking about those things. It means you each own your part of the project. This often leads to tension, as your ultimate goal is to do good work, and the project manager’s ultimate goal is to do the work on time. And that’s pretty much how it should work.
Perpetual intellectual curiosity is the greatest resource a professional designer can have. Barring that, an island hideaway is nice.
The Dutch subtitle of Bill Bryson’s book Shakespeare is “Een biografie” (A Biography). I read the book and found this subtitle misplaced.
The subtitle of the english original is “The World as a Stage”. How does that translate to “Een biografie”?
Bryson writes right in the beginning of the book that very little is known about Shakespeare. So little, that you realistically can not expect more from a book about Shakespeare than the description of a handful of meagre facts, augmented with assumptions, phantasies and preliminary conclusions about the life and times Shakespeare.
Bryson even admits this is the reason the book has such a modest modest size.
Some time ago now, I visited the Prado in Madrid.
There was a special exhibition on Van Dijck, called El Joven Van Dijck – The Young Van Dijck.
An incredible assembly of masterpieces. The 2 hours I had in between other activities was massively insufficient.
My winner is The Lamentation over the Dead Christ is my winner. Blood drips from the canvas. The reflection of the light on the skin. 
It is full of Habsburg Jaws. In the paintings, in the sculptures. After a while this becomes corny and funny. All of these great emporers with these
massive chins express an sickly absence of joy and compassion. If there is an emotion they express, it is one of detachment and ruthlessness.
El Greco shows he is an expressionist avant la lettre.
Velazquez is also greatly present. His monstrously large horses and people with far too small heads seems to be taken from the perspective of a child or a dwarf.
