Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it. What are you working for, posterity? We don’t know if there is any posterity.
Nobody knows anything 9:39pm on April 29, 2020One of the more agreeable symmetries in design work is that consistency and laziness often lead you to the same solution. If software developers have a crucial lesson for designers, it is to exploit this situation to the fullest extent possible, then use the saved time to get into bread baking or something.
Frank Chimero · Redesign: Gardening vs. Architecture 11:22pm on January 30, 2020Learn to draw. If you don’t, you’re gonna live your life getting around that and trying to compensate.
Saul Bass- Advice to Design Students – YouTube 9:12pm on January 22, 2020It’s hard for me to throw anything away without thinking about how it can become part of some work I’m doing. I just stare at something and say: Why isn’t that art? Why couldn’t that be art?
A brief appreciation of John Baldessari – Austin Kleon 12:53pm on January 11, 2020“When I think I’m teaching, I’m probably not,” he said. “When I don’t think I’m teaching, I probably am.”
A brief appreciation of John Baldessari – Austin Kleon 12:51pm on January 11, 2020I write nonfiction because I don’t understand life well enough to make things up.
Your Life Is Not a Story – Human Parts 12:33am on January 4, 2020It’s easy to forget that we only ever see facets of other people, never the whole (not even in marriage) — and in those facets what we’re mostly seeing is some aspect of ourselves.
Your Life Is Not a Story – Human Parts 12:29am on January 4, 2020Little children love the dandelions; why may not we? Love the things nearest at hand; and love intensely.
The garden in your mind – Austin Kleon 12:01am on January 4, 2020If plants grow and thrive, he should be happy; and if the plants which thrive chance not to be the ones which he planted, they are plants nevertheless, and nature is satisfied with them. We are apt to covet the things which we cannot have; but we are happier when we love the things which grow because they must.
The garden in your mind – Austin Kleon 12:00am on January 4, 2020Grant yourself the superpower of making “art” wherever you go, and see how that changes what you perceive. Art is everywhere, if you say so.
Declare it art – Austin Kleon 11:03pm on November 22, 2019He said that unconditional acceptance was “loving someone into existence.”
The lesson of grace – Austin Kleon 7:15pm on October 5, 2019No one is coming to the rescue. We have to save each other. Every day, in small and great ways.
robertogreco — Brit Marling in a message to fans on late capitalism, collectivism, and change: “We have to save each other.” 11:30pm on September 27, 2019You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) directed by Joe Talbot 11:50pm on August 20, 2019And years from now — years after this moment — they’ll be sitting together at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, laughing at something on the radio. He’ll tell her, out of the blue — for the first time in years — that he loves her.
And she’ll feel tears in her eyes in an instant, in a gorgeous swell of grateful relief in her belly, knots unfasting she’d forgotten were even there. And he’ll tell her that for him, it’s a choice. Her, Thomas, the house, their life together — it’s all a choice. And he’ll take her hand and he’ll say that for him — for Benjamin — there is no “fate”. There is no “meant to be”. There is only ever what we decide. And that for him, that’s not depressing. That actually, the constant possibility of something other than this is the only thing that makes this mean anything.
And he’ll say that even now, outside the front door, the world is pressing possibilities and people and places up against the wood and the glass, but that he doesn’t even care because here, out of everywhere, is where he chooses to be. And she, out of everyone, is who he wants to be here with.
Watch It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later — Daniel Kitson 11:02pm on August 19, 2019The beginnings of articulating taste are almost always through discovering what you don’t like.
Negative self-definition – Austin Kleon 1:45pm on July 18, 2019The most ridiculous thing about living is that childhood is its own eternity and then suddenly you’re an adult.
‘Synecdoche, New York’ review by Lucy • Letterboxd 8:46am on July 2, 2019[Ideas] are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in.
It’s not inside you trying to get out, it’s outside you trying to get in – Austin Kleon 1:21pm on June 7, 2019The younger girl begins to sag under the weight of all the waiting and the lateness, the way small children do.
The Lasting Legacy of ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ 7:39pm on May 19, 2019Follow the rules exactly unless you come up with something better.
Art + Life Rules from a Nun – YouTube 1:50pm on April 11, 2019“Time goes too quickly” is a belief system. Like all belief systems, the more you believe that it’s true, the more true it becomes.
Ask Polly: ‘Time Moves Too Quickly!’ 7:24pm on April 8, 2019