- Angela Gair’s The Beginner’s Guide: Acrylics (New Holland, 1994)
I have a distinct memory of telling you all about this book but can’t find any digital evidence. So, I’m writing posts in my dreams, am I? What struck me is the amazing range of effects you can get with the same medium. I didn’t know you could water it down to make like watercolor. Things about masking, fine points on techniques. I didn’t know such detailed studies went into impressionistic broken color effects. “Alla Prima” is rapid one time and done with confident strokes. To improve, you do another, not fix the first. - Takahiro Kurashima’s Poemotion ( Lars Müller Publishers, 2011). Here’s a good description of the monograph of moire animation. Each title like flatland, or birth of form or dna.
- Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned at Architecture School (MIT Press, 2007) has all kinds of applications to poetry, for example, regarding process, which he speaks to a few times, but point 29:
Being process-oriented, not product- driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop.
Being process-oriented means:
1 seeking to understand a design problem before chasing after solutions;
2 not force-fitting solutions to old problems onto new problems;
3 removing yourself from prideful investment in your projects and being slow to fall in love with your ideas;
4 making design investigations and decisions holistically (that address several aspects of a design problem at once) rather than sequentially (that finalize one aspect of a solution before investigating the next);
5 making design decisions conditionally—that is, with the awareness that they may or may not work out as you continue toward a final solution;
6 knowing when to change and when to stick with previous decisions;
7 accepting as normal the anxiety that comes from not knowing what to do;
8 working fluidly between concept-scale and detail-scale to see how each informs the other;
9 always asking “What if . . . ?” regardless of how satisfied you are with your solution.Beautiful lucid prose and examples for understanding architecture better as well.
- Pearl Bailey’s The Raw Pearl (Harcourt, Brace, 1968) is a diaristic look at her life philosophy up to that point. 3 years later she did a second autobiography Talking to Myself, a cookbook then later on Between You and Me: A Heartfelt Memoir on Learning, Loving, and Living (1989). I haven’t read the others but would like to. She gives an interesting view on growing up in turbulent times in the U.S., singing at clubs as the daughter of a preacher. Singing where she wasn’t allowed to enter the main room or to stay in the white-only hotel.
What struck me is her prevailing insistence on accepting people as they are. Even one of her ex-husbands who broke down her door at 2 a.m. after separation and pulled a gun on her. She just ordered him to sleep in the other bedroom because it was late and he needed rest. He was a binge alcoholic. Odd little things, like her closest female friend called Peet and her Pearl’s nickname was Dick. She organized the book by nodes such as the kids and the dogs, or her troubles with her ex, her love match with her third husband who never spoke to her but hello but they felt a connection so when he asked to speak to her alone 4 days later she said I know what you’re going to say and my answer is yes. Then they, him Italian, and her Native and black, got married. She once got a call to come collect an abandoned child which she then took as her own. A second she adopted through an agency and a third was her step-sister who she raised for a while. Her father had children like a staircase, each one taller than the next.
One of the next stacks:
Most mind-blowing among them is Punctuation; Art, Politics, and Play by Jennifer DeVere Brody which I may have read in part before but it was when it came out in ’08 and I’m doing a cover to cover. Consider this tidbit: That language purity is political right wing, and a normative sentence, punctuation, spelling and grammar is a colonial force coming out the lineage of power goes to those with the most weapons. Sentence fragments, on the other hand, is post-colonial refusal of those forces. I may have heard that before but I didn’t get it before.