aesthetics of joy

Here’s something subtle, yet charming, in honor of today’s snowy day. Artist Toshihiko Shibuya adds color to snow through reflection. By painting metal disks and plates with bright colors, he creates a vibrant palette in the snow. I love the magic of this, letting the elements (in this case, snow) reveal a hidden hue. It’s very Japanese, to work with the landscape, to patiently tease out color from the interactions between forces rather than painting it thick across the top.

I was enchanted by the same color reflections when doing space analysis in design school. I used to spend untold hours hanging colored planes in boxes made of foam core so that the light would tinge just so. Based on this fascination, I designed one of the pieces for my thesis using the same idea. I don’t often share my work on this site, but this seems relevant. I designed the stools below to almost disappear when looked at head on. Then when stacked, they reveal their hidden color.

The intent of my thesis was to illustrate different essential ideas of Aesthetics of Joy in simple furniture forms. I designed 10 pieces. If you like these, maybe I’ll post more… I miss furniture design. I love creating utilitarian things that brighten up everyday life. One day, when I finish this book, I’ll get back to it. (And hopefully that will be sooner, rather than later!)

Images: Toshihiko Shibuya’s work courtesy of Designboom; mine are my own

If you like colors, I think I’m about to make your day. You’re about to meet all the personalities of the colors of the rainbow. Did you know that Fuschia’s a fussbudget and that Magenta’s a gossip? That Coral is “an absolute flip?”

Back in the 60s, a voiceover artist named Ken Nordine recorded a series of short beat poems about colors, backed by free-form jazz. The poems began as advertisements for the Fuller Paint Company, but when radio listeners began to call in requesting to hear them played again, Nordine decided to record an album of them. Once I started listening this weekend, I couldn’t stop — they’re just so delightfully odd.

Nordine spins stories like he’s letting you in on a secret. “You know how Green can be,” he says confidentially, before expounding on that color’s mercurial nature. Some stories are plot-driven, like the story of how Blue saved Yellow from being cut out of the spectrum. Others are like oddball love letters. On Lavender, with the resonant sounds of woodwinds in the background, a sultry Nordine husks: “Lady of the soft edges, tell us all. Or tell me. Where day goes with night, and what they do there.” Some colors are upbeat, like Orange, while others are slow and heavy, like Burgundy, which is depicted as a “fatly soft, softly fat” gourmand. (I laughed out loud when I heard Nordine purr, “Come, come, big Burgundy, what do you weigh?” like a sly celebrity journalist. It seems most charming when he speaks straight to the colors in direct address.)

If you spend as much time thinking about colors as I do, I think you’ll have fun with this. The tracks play like parodies, and yet there’s a soulful kind of truth to them. The music, the tone, the weight of Nordine’s voice — they’re all visceral illustrations of how colors make us feel. A dark rich color like burgundy does feel heavy. A color like coral does feel vivacious and engaging. Green is dynamic and changeable. So it’s wonderful to hear the consonance between color and attitude in these funny little tone poems. After all, the better we understand color, the more useful it will be to us in creating a more vibrant, joyful world. That, and they’re a whimsical brightener for any midweek blues — or ecrus, or olives, as the case may be.

More: Here’s the link to listen to the full album on Spotify
Image: I love this wall of color set free in Göteborg by Nelio

Via: @ayepea 

If all ghosts looked like this, perhaps we’d be less afraid of them. These colorful phantasms are the work of artist Brice Bischoff from a series called Bronson Caves. Looking at the piece above, I initially thought these had been done with explosions of colored powder, a technique that has been used in similar works. But for these, Bischoff used a long exposure to photograph dances with large sheets of colored paper. The photographs become records of movements, which gives them a dynamic quality even as stills.

See the rest of the series here, and have a colorful weekend, wherever you are!

Via designboom

I spend a lot of time looking for joyful things to write about — but sometimes they just manage to fall into my lap. I arrived back from Japan to a note from Emmanuelle Moureaux, a Tokyo-based French architect who works with colors in stunning ways. (I’m particularly enamored of this design above, for the Sugamo Shinkin Bank in Shimura, which she describes on her site as a “rainbow mille-feuille.” Isn’t it just exactly that?) It kills me that I missed seeing her work in person there, but I thought she’d make a great “Joymaker” profile, and she kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions. As you’d expect from looking at her work, she has a deeply thoughtful, intentional approach to working with color. Here’s what she had to say.

How do you want people to feel when they encounter your work?
“Color” is the concept of all my works. With colors, I design new concepts, new atmospheres which will give emotions to people. I use colors in order to give emotions.

What is the role of color in your work?
I use colors as three-dimensional elements, like layers, in order to create spaces, not as a finishing touch applied to surfaces.

When I first visited Tokyo, I was shocked by the city brimming with colors. Bright colors overlapping and intermingling with each other, buildings with different volumes and layers of electric cables forming the cutout sky. To my eyes that grew up in a town made of stone, they appeared beautifully like a painting. I want with my design people feel emotion as I felt when I saw the beautiful colors of Tokyo.

I also feel in the city of Tokyo a sense of layers (buildings with different volumes, electric cables, signboards… overlapping like layers in the space). This layered structure of Tokyo gives me the feeling of depth.

These two elements (colors and layers), inspired by Tokyo, are the basis of my design. “Colors” and “layers” are expressed in a concept I develop in all my projects, the concept of “shikiri”, a made-up word literally meaning “dividing (creating) space using colors” in English. The colors, detached from two-dimensional walls or other surfaces, seem floating in the space and structure it. For example, in the Sugamo Shinkin Bank / Niiza Branch, “squares of colors ” floating in the space structure it, giving it its form and depth. For the Tokiwadai Branch, “leaves of colors” play the same role.

Ed. note: I absolutely love that so many of these projects are banks, places we think of as dry and corporate. (And pretty much the last place you’d expect to find a rainbow!)

“Shikiri” is a colorful partition series, inspired by the Japanese traditional sliding screens. Sliding paper or wood partitions used in the past in all the Japanese houses have almost disappeared now. I feel sad to see these very functional and beautiful Japanese traditional sliding screens fading away now days, so I continue to bring out the essence of the old, and turn them into something modern and practical, which still can be used today. I am trying to reintroduce them in a different way with the concept of “Shikiri”.

If you were a color, what color would you be?
Multicolor : I never use one color but always combine several colors.

What are some objects that symbolize joy to you?
Color palettes (Pantone etc…), color samples (color acrylic, color textile…)…  Everything which has a lot of colors in the palette makes me happy.

What is one project hiding in your sketchbook that you’d love to build one day?
“Shikiri house”: its concept is defined so I would like to build it. Also, there are very strong relations between the products I design (better to call them “mini architectures) and architecture. Stick chair, shibafu table are designed as buildings. Puzzle box too. Toge would be the structure for a building…. So I would like to realize them in a big scale.

I could only post a small fraction of Moureaux’s joyful work here — there are so many more vibrant works on her site. See more here. Incidentally, her thoughts on Tokyo color mirror my reactions to the place, which I posted last week. See here, if you missed it.

Images: courtesy Emmanuelle Moureaux

I came across this polka-dotted house on Pinterest and it just made me smile. I had to a do a bit of digging to learn more about it, but managed to find it in an April 14, 1952 issue of Life magazine. The house was the work of Emery Jernquist, who had painted his Warwick, RI house black, but then decided it looked too somber. Says the article:

He and his family painted the house black, then decorated its walls and white chimney with bright-colored polka dots—and it looked just fine. At first people were skeptical but, as he answered their questions politely, Jernquist conducted a private poll and came up with a confident statistic. Seventy-two percent of the critics, he says, like the dots just as much as he does.

Not sure I can vouch for Jernquist’s approach to research, but I’m definitely with the majority on this one. It’s a lovely reminder that what we find joyful is pretty much timeless, a reassuring thought. For more dots, which are ever on my mind these days, check out my pinboard devoted to them.

For a reserved culture, the Japanese certainly aren’t shy about color. Everywhere in Tokyo you find pops of the brightest hues, on doors and signage, traffic cones and taxicabs. The color comes in broad swathes and little bursts. Sometimes it’s functional color, telling you where to go or what to pay attention to. A big, bold color system like the one above makes an incredibly complex train system effortlessly navigable by non-Japanese speakers. At other times it’s purely joyful, a gratuitous flick of the paintbrush, a little dance of neon whose only purpose is to make you feel good.

Where along the way to becoming a civilized society did we lose color? This is the question I’ve been asking myself since the trip, as I’ve tried to understand the differences in how Americans and Japanese use color in our environment. Seriously, in the West our relationship to color is utterly dysfunctional. In office cubicles, condo complexes, subways, highways, sidewalks, malls — the contexts we spend most of our time in — the palette is a monochromatic blur of industrial taupes and dingy greys.

It would be wrong to say there’s no color in our urban landscapes. But look down a highway or in a city center and take notice: where do you see it? In the ads, of course. We damp down our rooms and streets so that the billboards can pop out, ensuring we can’t miss their consumerist banners. We are stingy with color where it could benefit the collective good; we are profligate with it when it’s a conduit to corporate gain.

In Japan, it is as if everyone understands the value of color, and adheres to a code to use it in a sensitive yet exuberant way.

This “book bar” at the Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama (one of the absolute don’t miss spots if you’re planning a trip to Tokyo) strikes me as a perfect example of relevant, natural color, harnessed in a delightful way.

These to-die-for lamps in the lobby of the Claska hotel are a perfect example of thoughtful color use. It’s so Japanese to put the color on the inside, where it isn’t aggressive and where the light can bring the color alive with its soft glow. More pops of color below (a few of which couldn’t help but make their way into my suitcase): the gallery at the Impossible Project, lighting from the amazing Danish flower shop Nicolai Bergman in Aoyama, a Patricia Urquiola chair in the roof garden at the Tokyu Plaza shopping center, colorful washi tapes at Tokyu Hands, colored pencils at stationery mecca Itoya, and joy stickers from Kiddyland.

The taxicabs! We spent an inordinate amount of time taking pictures of taxicabs, with their vibrant colors and playful stripes, checks, and patterns. They look like giant toy cars driving around the city. I can’t complain, living in a city that paints its taxis cheery yellow, but I do think there is something about the Japanese taxi palette that is really charming.

I saw dots everywhere in Tokyo. The joy of polka dots is probably another post entirely, but I loved seeing these various spots around the city. My absolute favorite was happening upon the red and white spotted packages of Tsumori Chisato outside the store (bottom left), ready for pickup. Can you imagine receiving one in the mail? How boring an Amazon box seems by comparison… On the bottom right is work by Koichiro Kimura, from his quirky and amazing gallery space in Aoyama.

It was also fun to stumble upon a Tokyo installation of Damien Hirst’s dots exhibit in the new Hikarie center. I had seen them at the two Chelsea Gagosian galleries earlier this year, but seeing them in Japan, they just seemed so perfectly at home. I love how even the exhibit key (bottom left) has a charming quality to it.

Images: mine and Erika Lee’s

Glasgow-based artist Jim Lambie creates installations out of vinyl tape that make spaces come alive with an intense energy. Tracing the contours of a room’s perimeter, his work seems to magnify the lines of the structures, surfacing patterns from static-seeming architecture. It’s almost as if he’s liberating the movement from the space, giving it voice through color.

The kinetic force of Lambie’s work may stem from his origins in music. He has said:

You put a record on and it’s like all the edges disappear. You’re in a psychological space. You don’t sit there thinking about the music, you’re listening to the music. You’re inside that space that the music’s making for you.

This is true about music: it’s something you inhabit rather than something you regard. It’s also true that music has an inherent movement, a temporal thrust, a pace and vibration. Music, with its long oscillations, jostles the air around us, scatters its molecules and sends them pinging against our eardrums. We don’t see it, but music transforms a room into a thoroughly kinetic space. Lambie’s color similarly fills the space with vibrations.

While I object to the comparison with Pollock, I feel sympathy with Jonathan Jones of The Guardian when he writes in 2008:

Like Pollock he pours colour and line in ways that liberate energy and suggest the inner structures of the cosmos. Above all, Lambie is a pure artist – his art is totally self-sufficient in its worth and power. It is distilled energy, concentrated life. Marvellous stuff.

Right now I’m steeped in the study of energy – photons, pulsations, valences, spectrums – and thinking a lot about movement at all scales, from the quiver of electrons to the whirl of the planets. But it all comes back to aesthetics for me: how we feel this energy through our senses, and once felt, how it affects us. Lambie’s work is just poppy and irreverent enough to seem like play, but that hides its power. This is potent stuff: bracing, fervent, and vital.

Via: Bjorn’s Randoms

Further to my post a couple of weeks ago about the power of color to enliven, check out this story of Jim Cotter, a widower from Glouster, Ohio who decided to fix up his town by painting buildings with bright colors. (CBS has disabled embedding, so click here to watch the short clip.)

Could there be any clearer illustration of the impact the things around us can have on our lives? I think Bonnie Shifflet, owner of a restaurant painted bright orange by Cotter, says it best when she says of the paint job, “It just did something to me.” I love that this started with one widower and has become a movement that the whole town has joined in. And that it went from one fire hydrant to twenty buildings. This is what inspires me about joy — its contagiousness. A piece in the Columbus Dispatch notes:

[Cotter] has reason to be hopeful. Not long after the project started, the owners of a hair salon on High Street saw what was happening in the neighborhood and had the store’s walls power-washed.

They plan to paint next.

What small action could you take today that might start something much bigger? How could you make it visible so others, even those you don’t know yet, can join in?

Source: Ohio Widower Paints the Town to Make it a Brighter Place, CBS News
Image and quote: Coats of Kindness, Columbus Dispatch

And thanks, Dad, for the tip!

Friends, I’ve missed you! I hope you’ve had a lovely spring. Mine passed in the blink of an eye through the rounded shape of an airplane window (and the haze of Allegra). I’ve been on the road this spring (and allergic to it)! Back now, and trying to unpack the virtual suitcase of inspiration gathered in Tokyo, San Francisco, Miami, and upstate New York. There’s a lot in there, and I’m processing. (In Tokyo alone I took over 2000 photos!) Sit tight – there’s good stuff coming.

In the meantime, let’s have some color. All the talk of the fashion pages this spring has been that color is having a moment. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we are having a moment with color—basking in pure, saturated hues. Have you been into J. Crew lately? You need sunglasses! It’s no cure for our perpetually dismal economic situation or the many geopolitical troubles we find ourselves in, but it does make the city feel brighter, more optimistic. As a prototypical black-clad New Yorker, I can say it’s been a nice change. Walking out in a kelly green sweater with a hot pink scarf feels so abundant and absurd it just gives you something to smile about.

The thing we forget about color is how alive it is, and how dynamic our relationship is to it. Just seeing a color is an energetic act. I’m reminded of Victoria Finlay’s description in her book Color: A Natural History of the Palette:

The best way I’ve found of understanding this is to think not so much of something “being” a color but of it “doing” a color. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering—or dancing or singing—the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe—in such a way that when the light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and reject the red—meaning paradoxically that the “red” tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red.

Color is not an entity, but a performance. We see color because of the light from the sun (or other source) that bounces off an object’s surface towards the light-sensitive cone cells in our eyes. As the light’s photons reach a colored surface, they excite the electrons on that surface, which absorb some of the wavelengths, while the others ricochet outward. And when a few photons of those reflected wavelengths reach our eyes, the cone cells in our retinas with the relevant pigments are stimulated. The energy absorbed by the pigment sends a signal up the optic nerve, and our brains register the sensation of color. We’re not detached witnesses to color; rather, we are part of the experience of it. Some molecules of our being are aroused by color, some cells are stirred into an electrical excitation—literally “turned on.”  Putting it simply, when we have seen color, we have absorbed some small transfer of energy from it. Is it any wonder that we feel energized by its vibrance?

The brighter the color, the more light being reflected, and the more energy that is transferred. So our moment of bright color is a moment of exuberant communication between our garments and our eyes. I think it’s plausible for there to be unintended effects. Who knows? Perhaps you need less caffeine when your deskmate is wearing fluorescent yellow. Or that a bright blue desktop background is as good as a breath of fresh air. Color is more powerful than we realize.

Radiolab has a brilliant episode this month pondering color. Highly recommended. My favorite segment ponders the rainbow from the perspective of animals with a far broader range of color vision than us puny humans. (Go mantis shrimp!) Jad and Krul engage a choir to “sing the rainbow” — very synesthetic, and if I know you, it’ll be up your alley.

Some other color links that have been burning a hole in my inbox:

• The Color Run: 5k race meets Holi festival. Emerge looking like you’ve been through a spin-art machine. At the rate these races have been selling out, you know the organizers are onto something here.
• Color Forecast: Why read a weather forecast when you can read a color forecast? Measures the color of clothing of passersby and gives you a window into “trending” colors. Available for Paris, Milan, and Antwerp.
• Nippon Colors: A gorgeously designed site showcasing traditional colors from Japan.

Thanks, RW, for the Radiolab tip!
Images: J Crew, the Color Run

Joymaker is a new series spotlighting people who seek to create joy in their work.

It takes a kind of joyful madness to hand-apply 100 lbs. of raspberry jam to a gallery wall. And that’s exactly what attracted me to the work of Naomi London, a visual artist based in Montreal, who tries to bring a voice for joy and play to contemporary art. London uses joyful forms, visual metaphors, and textures (such as polka dots) to give her audience a sense of delight.

I’m fascinated by the shiny, sticky surface of this enormous red wall. While a red wall might typically take on a violent or alarming quality, the material makes it totally disarming, even childlike. I wonder if it stayed sticky throughout the installation, and slightly fluid, shifting its mottles in a slow gravitational creep towards the floor. Or whether it stayed firm, drying like a giant fruit roll-up. I didn’t ask Naomi these silly questions, but I did ask her some others:

How do you want people to feel when they engage with your work?

I’m very interested in the notion of play in art. I’m hoping that when people see the Jam Wall they can appreciate the unexpected beauty of the colour, as well as the playful absurdity of using this material.

Can you talk more about this connection between joy and absurdity?

I associate absurdity very much with play, and play is joyful. Other connections include humour in the absurd, e.g. the odd rhymes and tongue twisters of several early Dr. Seuss books. I find that there is pleasure in being in a ‘non-logical place’ in your head, which is how I think of the absurd. It’s about the unexpected, fun, and delight that can be felt when exploring things that deliberately don’t make logical sense, but are full of wonder and joy. There is an importance in the purposelessness of the absurd, which is something that makes is joyful (to me) and thus also linked to play.

What is the role of joy in your work?

I think that joy, beauty, humour and play have been underrepresented in contemporary art over the last few decades. I’ve been interested in trying to address joy and happiness in my work for past ten years or so. I’m currently working on a sculpture installation project in homage to my mother, (who died just over two years ago). Even though it is a memorial work of sorts, I hope that it still somehow evokes a sense of joy.

I’m making a series of balls which are made exclusively out of fabric inherited from my mom. (She was a talented seamstress and made almost all my clothes during my childhood.)

What one object most symbolizes joy to you?

I think I’m torn between seeing the first tulips in early Spring and my favorite large white mixing bowl that I use when I bake a cake.

What’s inspiring you right now?

Colour, and the unexpected use of saturated colour: chartreuse yellow + green, fire engine red, brilliant orange.

What other designers, artists, or creators should Aesthetics of Joy readers know about?

There is an interesting website run by a researcher/academic in Rotterdam:  The World Database of Happiness. The layout of the site is dry aesthetically but I think that its wonderful that the subject of happiness is being studied in this way.

I like the work of Franz West very much. Another artist whose work I really like is Ana Rewakowicz.

You can see more of Naomi’s work here. (In particular, make sure to check out Polka Dot Wall, a site-specific installation I find very joyful.) Images courtesy of Naomi London.