Desert-Ed

To those of us who have spent our lives in a moderate climate–ours is moist, mild, misty, and lush–it is stunning to encounter the desert for the first time.   Pic above is a desert in Peru looking to swallow up the highway, found here.

We are here to say that people can lose their heads over this landscape, falling quickly and hard. The torrid attraction to desert heat and space happens not only to ordinary boys and girls off on a road trip (like this smitten traveller in Bolivia seen here ) but to all sorts of exotic creatures, including architects and artists.

If you want to do more than just look and swoon at the desert, if you want to live there, find yourself an architect who’s got the desert bug.  Above is called the Four Eyes House by California architect Edward Ogosta, more here .

Say “Desert house” to many an architect and you’ve got them where you want them.  Here you don’t have to worry about the zoning restrictions, the neighbours, or where to put the lumber, trucks, and tools while you are building.  This freedom, combined with the sheer harshness of the physical factors, has produced some beautiful results. Above three desert designs are by Olson Kundig Architects, Robert Stone, and Rick Joy, all found here.

Artists too have found freedom and inspiration in the desert–the flat open space must seem liberating to any artist who feels confined by the canvas and the studio. Above is Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo Texas as it looked when produced in 1974 by an art gang named Ant Farm.  See here.

The artist who in our time has set the standard for getting out of the studio, Christo, has wrapped up big things (bridges, buildings) all over the world and now intends to place a very big thing in the desert landscape of the United Arab Emirates , as reported here

And this is American artist Michael Heizer, image from here.

Mr Heizer has devoted a good slice of his life and imagination and hutzpah to creating, not a sculpture, not a monument, but a city in the desert of Nevada.  Above image from Treehugger and more from the NYT 

And if you like art and light and you don’t know what James Turrell has been doing in the desert, you need to go here now.

Above is an entry into James Turrell’s Roden Crater project found here  

But don’t go getting the idea that it is just the 1% of the artistic club, the superstars, who get their hormones and imaginations all swept up in the desert.  Lots of everyday free spirits with a gluegun and a hammer and a glint in their eye do too.

This is a portion of the life work of one Noah Purifoy, now known as the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art exhibit near Joshua Tree CA. Visit here.

Many of the freest spirits who lust for the desert end up at the Burning Man Festival every late August/September.

 

Held in northern Nevada in Black Rock Desert, it is about art and life and transportation and fire and lust and freedom and a lot more.  Only a desert seems capable of hosting such a collection of desires. Pic by Jim Bourg/Reuters via Boston.com

Before the burning, time for tea.  This image is one of many at the Big Picture site at Boston.com.

Some of the sculpture is wondrous, such as the piece shown below in this photograph by Frederick Larson of the SF Chronicle.

The desert seems to be able to accommodate and excite all varieties of humanity. It’s not just the unclothed and untamed who fall for it, but the super sophisticates who find something unexpected and rich in the plain hot flat emptiness if it.  How about you?

Mr Noel Coward, 1954 photo by Loomis Dean for Life Magazine seen here

so what’s new now?

Well among other things, this swell metal THING is apparently new.  We certainly don’t have one yet.  Do you?  It has the look of a high-end designer rocket launcher, but maybe it has a more playful purpose.  Anyway it’s new.  Found here (thanks Whafe)

At the end of any year, we are all thinking about the NEW 12-pack of months coming up and wondering what actually will be new about it.  After a fairly random stroll around the internet, we found a few things that seem pretty new to us.

This new system above is supposed to help you from backing your car into another car. That’s a good new idea, don’t you think?  It replaces the yelling, shrieking, honking, fist-shaking system currently in use in most vehicles. The new one is called the Advanced Backup Collision Intervention System, and it’s built for the newest model of the Infinity JX. Seen at the House of Japan here.

But you’re probably wondering: What’s new in nails?  Well, if you want, they can be magnetic!  So it says here.

 

You want new? origami tea bags!

Parmesan Pencils!!

Mount Fuji tissue dispensers!!!

The above 3 cool new packaging ideas are collected by Bored Panda here.  We saw them first in a scooped collection by ECAL library based in Lausanne, more of which here.

If you can’t find yourself something as new as these things right away, you can at least grab yourself a 2013 calendar.

A robot a month

This calendar wall decal is made of  black chalkboard vinyl that you can write on and erase. It is applied directly to the wall.

Both of the above courtesy of Brit + Co

 

It’s your year, go out and get it.  Don’t forget to try something new.  Be bold. It feels good.  You’ll never regret it.

Well there’s no guarantee, but you’ll never know till you try, and nothing new happens without taking a chance.  Above from a story in the Guardian here (Photo: Alamy)

Working in Pictures

How will you spend the first day back at work now that the summer holiday season has slipped away for another year?  Just having a job is a reason to feel pretty good for lots of us, when you think of the alternative.  But let’s face it, some jobs are just more photogenic than others.  Above photo found here of someone’s great Granddad looking pretty nifty at a Buick auto factory in 1930.

These guys look like they don’t mind working for a living too much, but maybe they’d rather be on a raft drifting down the Mississippi. They are Doffers (Doffers??) at a cotton mill in Macon Georgia, 1909, photographed by Lewis Hines. More here.

Women have a long tradition of factory work in North America, and people were always taking pictures of them.   These at a Cadbury’s candy bar factory in the 1950′s seem to have things well in hand.  Why no men? Maybe they didn’t trust them around all that chocolate.

This color photo of a young woman working in an airplane plant is from a recently released archive of US government commissioned photos from 1939 to 1944 now in the Library of Congress.  Flicker set here.

Here is another hard working woman.  Never mind the dishes, I’ll wash the locomotive.  See Flickr set above.

Artists work hard and they have a deep respect for hard work.  Some, like American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler found art and mystery and beauty in the hard working factories and plants of industrial America.  Above from a great collection presented at the Detroit Institute of Art.  More here.

In Europe, Bernd and Hilla Becher have been roaming the countryside for years in search of industrial buildings–the places where hard, bone-grinding work happens day after day. Their work is in a class by itself and provokes wonder and amusement, with a fair bit of bewilderment too.  For us, these 3  images above  are portraits, and like the best portraits of people,  we keep looking.  And looking.  You can see more at Artnet here

But let’s hope wherever you go to work this week, you will face  less potential danger than the man above.  Pic from here. 

Work hard, yes, be photogenic if you can, yes.  Don’t let the work own you.  Be free.

the water’s fine

Not many of us get to have our own pool, but that doesn’t mean we don’t think about it, especially during the hot hot days of summer.  It’s part of the dream life (along with endless storage space and a fridge that is always somehow full of what we want most).  Some wonderful photographers have captured images of the dream.  Do they satisfy? or stoke the flame?

Above photo by Bill Anderson, 1957, from the Collection of the Palm Springs Art Museum included in the book and exhibit Backyard Oasis, more below.

Above pool is located in the Napa Valley of California.  Imagine starting your day with a dip in that. Photo Michael Moran, 1990, included in the now classic “Pools” by Kelly Klein, Rizzoli.  Brought to us by herself, Martha Stewart here.  

Another cool pool collected in Kelly K’s great book.  Monterrey, Mexico. photo by Mardo de Valdivia, 1985. Found  as above

Ms Klein has a new book set for release in October 2012.  Included will be the above pool attached to a house in Peru. Photo by the architect of the house and pool in Peru, Jean Pierre Crousse, as seen in Architectural Digest.

It is California, of course, that seems to have a pool in every back yard, at least in our dream life.  And dream life is real life for a lot of Californians.  A remarkable recent book called “Backyard Oasis–The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography 1945 – 1982” gives us a glimpse of the private/public life of pool-happy Californians, some famous, some just totally blissed out.

Above from the book: Silvertop – Hollywood Dawn, 1972 by Leland Y. Lee.  Just outside the frame, we guess, is a justifiably blissed out, maybe famous Hollywoodian ready to start their day.  ”Action!”

For some the Backyard Oasis extended to the local watering hole.  Preserved in this 1960 photograph by Lawrence Schiller. Find this and others from the book in this LA Times feature here.

Another photo by Bill Anderson (Edris House, ca. 1954, Collection Palm Springs Art Museum © Palm Springs Art Museum).  Now be honest, if you started your day here, would you really pack up, get dressed, and go off to do…something else?  If so, why?

To see more pools from the Backyard Oasis (and lots of other eye-catching stuff), check out this stylish site   And for more of the Palm Springs pool experience in B + W see the city’s swell daily photo site. 

We probably should pick up our towel and go now.  Pool life is wonderful, but if you let it get a hold on you, you just might find it a bit difficult to clean up your room or finish that year-end report or finalize that fourteenth-floor conference room lighting design.  So our advice is to dip in from time to time to take in the vitality and the beauty of it, and then turn around and go back to what you were supposed to be doing.

OK, but that’s enough, OK?  Hey, hey you….

danger: artist at work

Not many of us ever get to visit an artist’s studio while they’re working.  So mostly we have an imaginary idea of what painters actually DO to get the results they get. But every now and then someone sneaks in or charms their way in and gives us a look.  Above is the great Lucien Freud hard at work late at night.  Found here.

The above two photos were shot in the studio of Mr Freud’s long-time friend and fellow art giant Francis Bacon.  Upper one by Perry Ogden is FB’s studio at 7 Reece Mews, in South Kensington, London , seen here.  And the lower is Mr B’s studio as it was when he left it for the final time with his last picture just underway on the easel, a photo from the Tate Modern seen here.  Is Bacon under there somewhere?  More here.

One more artist giant of recent years, this one still painting and thinking about painting: Luc Tuymans. He too makes full use of the walls around him for, what, warming up, cooling down? Photo from somewhere on the internet.

Back in the days when artists–and everyone else–wore tights, it seems artists’ studios were pretty crowded places, with lots of artists sharing the same space.  Maybe it was real estate prices.  Maybe it was togetherness.  Or the cost of heating.

But if you got yourself a commission to paint a portrait of a swanky lady, you could just go to her place, just you, her, and the creepy guy in the weird black outfit.

Then all hell breaks loose again with the 19th century and painters like Courbet who couldn’t imagine working without a crowd.

It wasn’t long, however, until art became by choice, pretty much a solo, solitary undertaking for most of the artists whose names we now know.

Above, Kandinsky’s studio, very tidy, VERY tidy, even though he was giving birth to a revolution in art.  See here.

Mondrian was also tidy in his surroundings and also in his paintings, though again, what he was doing was breaking all the rules.  1926 Photo from here.

Then Mr Pollock came along to throw out the rule book all together–who needs a smock, who needs an easel, who needs tidy?  Photo from 1950 by Hans Namuth, seen here.

Above is Helen Frankenthaler at work.  Also working mostly on the floor.  These lovely pics by the great Ernst Haas, see them and more here 

Alexander Liberman, who was Art Director for Vogue magazine, compiled a book of photos of artist in their studios.  See some here.

One artist who made his studio wherever he happened to be was the great Keith Haring, this from a Brooklyn Museum show. 

And then there was Salvador Dali, always wanting to be noticed, but don’t you dare interrupt while he was in the middle of being a genius.  Above intrusion found here.

So the general idea may be–yes it is fascinating to see the artist at work, but beware, enter with care, and be careful what you wish for.   See other studio invasions here.