aesthetics of joy

These mystery letters remind me of the ones my best friend Annie and I used to send to each other when we were kids during summers while we were away at camp and visiting relatives. I still keep them in a box and take them out every now and then. The envelopes are covered with stickers and PPPPPPPSs and all sorts of made-up acronyms.

The letters were sent by artists Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe to all 467 households in the town of Cushendall, Ireland to inspire reaction and discussion. It’s an odd but joyful project, to try to reach out individually to everyone in a community, forging connections between strangers. And the letters themselves are delightful and quirky, each one layered with texture and meaning and no two exactly the same.

{via Neither Snow}

There’s something joyful about an odd little piece of trivia, especially when endearingly illustrated in such child-like fashion. Learn Something Every Day presents a new fact daily, and you can submit your own facts for Young to sketch up.

In her own words:

What I am trying to express in my work are moments of everything.

Landscapes, Formations, Light, Smell, Taste…

But they are not just a reflection of a current feeling or a sudden urge.

My paintings are about particles, about the whole or arrangements, they are related, disrupted or intractable, they are left and right, above and below –

they are everything —

For me, Möller’s paintings conflate macro and micro beautifully, reminding us how similar everything looks at extremes of scale. It’s akin to the Eames’s classic film Powers of 10, which transports us through scale shifts of extraordinary proportions. I love how the forms in these paintings could be sea creatures or land masses or sub-cellular structures, but whatever they are they feel vibrant and alive. A wonderful example of how a piece does not need to be riotously colored to invoke joy.

{via but does it float}
quote from here

Painted by street artists El Tono and Nuria in Cordoba, Spain, these doors look like portals to somewhere special. And they probably are.

Cordoba is known for its courtyard gardens, of which the occupants are famously proud. I remember when I was there meandering the winding alleys, a good-natured young man a few years older than me and speaking no English insisted on leading me somewhere. I was 21 and wary, but he was headed the direction I was going anyway and so I followed at a distance. After a few minutes of walking this way, me suspiciously noting street names, him laughing at my suspicion, we arrived at a house with door wide open, framing a lush garden with an old woman sweeping the tiled floor. His home! After I greeted his mother and admired the courtyard, I was free to go, giddy and bewildered by the surprises that lay behind those foreign doors.

{via Unurth}

I dare you not to giggle while watching this short film from the People in Order series by Lenka Clayton and John Price. The film presents people in age order from 1 to 100 years old.

The drum device is pure aesthetics of joy — an exuberant bang that runs like a unifying thread through the ages. It also distinguishes them: the four and five year-olds’ delicious pleasure in generating noise is a powerful contrast with the defiant staccato of the their 96 and 100 year-old elders — pithy reverberations that seem to say, “We’re still here!” Each age has its mind, distilled into gesture and sound.

{via Mental Floss}

Last week I had a post on DeepGlamour about the glamour of glass. As a complement, I was thinking about doing a piece here that explored glass’s joyful side. Glass finds glamour mostly in the context of architecture, formed in cold sleek panes. Joy requires it to be liberated from two dimensions, let loose, tinged with bright hues, and blown to the edge of implausibility. I immediately thought of Dale Chihuly and his prolific body of vibrant glassworks.

There is so much joy in Chihuly’s candy-colored glass balloons, the coral reef-like swimming pool floor (I would have fingertips like raisins before you could get me out of that), the organic sculptures mimicking a tropical flower pistil or the frilled maw of a giant clam, and the floats that bob like dinosaur eggs among the lily pads at the various botanical gardens where he showcases his work. But while I was poking around his site, I found something that to me was even better, and that totally changed the direction of this post.

I found drawings. And these drawings, done with equal parts love and haste, made my heart race right out of my chest.

These drawings, studies on the road to art, are for me more joyful than the sculptures they prefigure. Unconfined by the persnickety requirements of a brittle, fragile medium, they are pure expressions of Chihuly’s relentless exuberance. They reveal the desire that motivates the transformation of glass from amorphous liquid to novel form.

It’s heat and human effort that mold the glass, but more than that, it is the creative energy that bleeds off these pages. After the accident that cost him his left eye in 1976 (and a subsequent surfing accident that left him physically unable to hold the glassblowing pipe), Chihuly stepped back and assumed more of a directorial role in his process. These drawings, therefore, are the most direct connection between his eye, his brain, and his hands. For a designer, this is likewise true, as we are usually the initiator, and not the ultimate maker, of our work. While we need drawings or instructions that communicate our technical intentions to a fabricator, there’s no substitute for an expression of brute emotive force that will stir something inside the maker as well.

See more of Chihuly’s drawings here.

Indian summer is the gift that keeps on giving in New York this year. Perhaps to make up for the drizzly summer, we keep getting these gorgeous sunny, mild weekend days. This Saturday I walked through the park and met my friend Emily on the steps of the Met. We set out in search of the Vermeers, which are quietly luminous and very worth the trip. But we soon discovered what felt like the real find of the visit: visible storage.

I’ve been going to the Met for a long time, since I was a child, but I was surprised and delighted to find this wonderful set of displays. It feels like you’re getting a behind-the-scenes tour, with all the paintings and artifacts crammed in together in row after row of glass partitions. The closeness of everything forces new connections, new relationships between items. Without the artful arranging, you’re free to see things in a new way. It feels a little like a treasure hunt, and was easily the most exciting part of the visit.

The roof is still open for drinks, and we arrived just in time for the spectacular sunset above. It’s always hard to believe when the blue sky turns pink and purple, and the art took a back seat for a moment as everyone turned towards the city and watched the beautiful spectacle unfold.

Sunset image, mine. Met images, pazzia.

I love the spontaneity and texture of these paintings layered over photographs by Gerhard Richter. I h0pe they brighten your Friday and that you have a lovely, joyful weekend!

Xx Ingrid

I love non-traditional street art. Yarnbombing, seedbombing, mossbombing, LED throwies — anything that brightens and transforms the urban environment really brings me a sense of joy.

So this scent graffiti by Mitchell Heinrich really charms me. Scent is a particularly interesting medium for several reasons. Heinrich says:

Scent is interpreted by the limbic system which is very closely tied to emotion and memory. This leads me to believe that interacting with people using scent can potentially be a much more powerful medium than paint since people experiencing it can’t help but react to it. The goal of this project is to realize the potential of smell as art and to explore different ways of using it to interact with people.

True, but this is only part of the story. Scent requires proximity in a way that vision does not. Visual understanding is nearly immediate once something enters our eyeline. But scent is based on the diffusion of volatile chemicals through the environment, so it reaches us in a more gradual way. It’s like vision is a sudden downpour and scent is a slowly increasing drizzle. So the quality of the surprise achieved is fundamentally different.

Also, in a chat I had a few weeks ago with Dr. Pamela Dalton at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, I learned one of the most important factors in scent processing is context. Many scents occur in multiple contexts. One example is butyric acid, a molecule that in some situations we recognize as aged cheese, and in others we recoil from as the odor of sweaty feet. Without realizing it, we constantly use contextual information to interpret scents and determine how to react emotionally to them. This fact creates some interesting possibilities for scent art. By taking scents strongly identified with a particular context — say cut grass or baking cookies — and pairing them with urban contexts that have a strong associated odor, the effect could be quite dazzling and dislocating. It could also work the other way, creating a powerful negative emotional response. But either way, it likely would cause to reflect on the environment more mundane sensory stimuli as well, and develop a clearer picture of how those make us feel.

Scent graffiti is also fleeting, and that transience is appealing. So often graffiti is not about destruction but about reclamation: the desire to form some kind of personal relationship with the anonymously-designed city that contains and constrains us. To shape this looming environment in some small way. The evanescence of aroma allows for continually shifting scent-images to alter the city, allowing a constant redesign and rediscovery of public space.

Here’s a link to an instructable on how to create your own scent spray cans. Images: attack the darkness and circulating.

{via PSFK}

Today I’m in the studio working on models for the product component of my thesis. I’m surrounded by color and fabric and it reminded me of the distinctive color blocks in the quilts of Gee’s Bend, which I’ve loved since I discovered them on a set of U.S. stamps a few years back.

Gee’s Bend has a great history. You can read about the quiltmakers here and see a catalog of some of the most famous quilts here. There are also a number of books available as well. It’s very inspiring to see a historically modest women’s craft elevated to the level of art by a community of talented craftspeople.

Quilting is a joyful art form. Not just the color and the softness of the textiles, but also the integration of memory in tangible form. Quilts often use fabric from special occasions or the clothing of children after they’ve grown up. They’re traditionally made by hand and often given as gifts. The quilters of Gee’s Bend take this rich history and unselfconsciously interpret it in a very bold and modern way.

I must say I like bright colours. I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. When I get to heaven, I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermillion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.

Winston Churchill

Art by Paul Jenkins, via But does it float. Quote via Kay Redfield Jamison’s Exuberance.

It’s Wednesday, so that must mean it’s time for some joyful art to get us over the hump, and make us forget all about the apocalypse down under.

Kimberly Hennessey makes sweet, crazy installations out of things like party hats and insulation foam. She also does gorgeous drawings that look like the sketch-filled notebook cover of the coolest, artsiest kid in school.

See more of her work here.

Squeezing brightly dressed performers into tight urban spaces, Companie Willi Dorner creates surprising living sculptures. Dorner aims to shift our perspective and cause us to reflect on the scale and structure of our environment. As much as the contrast between the rigid environment and flexible performers illuminates some basic truths about the design of buildings and spaces, I think the more interesting revelations relate to behavior.

Like the flash mobs I wrote about earlier this week, the behaviors force us to question the unspoken norms that govern behavior in a society. The positions and arrangements of the performers violate these norms in striking and significant ways. They’re too close together, they’re entwined and contorted, they’re upside down, they’re horizontal, they’re in places forbidden by law or general good taste to occupy. Encountering these behaviors reveals a second layer of structure in a city: an invisible structure formed by codes of behavior that work as well as fences or street markings to maintain our orderly coexistence. The photo below, of the blue-clad person upside-down against the gridded wall, shows this beautifully — an irreverent subversion of both kinds of order.

Something like this is a little piece of chaos, and it can be done in disturbing fashion, or it can be done whimsically. Clearly this is an example of the latter, with color a primary cue to the artist’s intent. There’s a real sense of play here, like a game of hide-and-seek (or in the first photo, sardines) being conducted in plain sight. It would be fun to witness, but I think out of anyone the greatest joy belongs the performers, who have license to indulge their inner child and color outside the lines for a day.

via PSFK

Someone turned me on to photographer Massimo Vitali this week, and I can’t stop looking at his fascinating images of Italian beach culture. Viscerally, there’s something immediately appealing about the slightly sun-bleached color palette and the way the images manage to be both peaceful and bustling with activity at the same time. It’s hard to see at this scale, but because Vitali shoots large-format, the images are incredibly detailed, so much so that he considers them to be compositions of portraits. In an interview with LensCulture magazine (audio here), he describes the role of the human element in his decision to press the shutter.

And then it comes a moment. Because in fact all the pictures are taken in a very little amount of time. And obviously, I follow stories and things. I look at the people, people that interest me and that pick up my fantasy, and I say, “Oh, what is she doing? Why is she looking at her?” and so I start to make connections, and when I see a certain number of these connections taking place, then I shoot. Because I want to, I try to have the picture as complicated as I possibly can.

His photos are actually compositions of stories, tons of little narratives distilled into light and color, and there is joy in the abundance of it, the way you can simply get lost in the contemplation of other lives in their leisure. This idea of complexity is fascinating, because we don’t normally associate it with joy. We think of joys as simple pleasures, but when we think about simple pleasures, we often fail to recognize how sensorially complex they are. We simplify a day at the beach to sun, sand, saltwater.

But the sun has a feel that is particular to a latitude, a time of day, even the melanin composition in a particular person’s skin. Sand has texture and color (different everywhere), micro and macroscopic scale, hidden stones and shells that may be jewel-like treasures. Saltwater has smell and taste, temperature, and translucent color so mottled and varied it’s like a world in itself. Before we even get beyond the setting, the beach proves to be a deeply complex pleasure. This complexity is one of the things that makes joy renewable. It explains why the same settings can trigger powerful emotions over and over again. Just like gazing at a Vitali portrait-scape, each time you return to something that gives you joy, there’s always the likelihood you’ll discover something new.

Nick Olsen describes painter Sally Benedict as “Rothko meets Twombly with Tidewater-twilight coloration.” I just think her stuff is purdy, and the perfect pick-me-up for a cloudy Wednesday afternoon.

“Sunrise” by Georgia O’Keefe. Featured in the exhibit Dove/O’Keefe: Circles of Influence at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. The exhibit traces the mutual influence and development of early American abstract painter Arthur Dove and the very famous Georgia O’Keefe.

O’Keefe’s work is usually perceived to have sensual overtones (all those unfurling flowers) but there is also a naively, viscerally joyful quality to her work as well. Dove’s work, too, speaks to me of a certain joyful spirit as well, particularly this painting.

To me, the aesthetics of joy really come alive in abstraction. Removed from clear representation, emotion is carried by color, form, texture, light, and gesture. If the artist can replicate the emotional response s/he felt on first experience, or even intensify or modulate it, using form unmoored from its object, it is an enormous statement on the power of aesthetics as emotional language.

NYT: “Partners in Abstraction, Viewed in Tandem”
Thanks, Dad, for the tip

Peter Feld has the original Woodstock poster designed by Arnold Skolnick on his blog today, and it struck me as wonderful example of aesthetics of joy: celebration, music, and inclusiveness all so cleanly expressed with the bright colors, friendly type, and big, rounded, hand-made imagery. Truly iconic, joyful design that captured the spirit of a transformative cultural moment.

Skolnick is releasing a limited edition 40th anniversary version, though unfortunately I can’t find images of it, so I can’t tell if he’s altered it significantly. The article does give a bit of interesting history on the design of the poster, though, in case you’re interested in knowing more.

Let the Outside In from Caitlin Parker on Vimeo.

Oh wow. I love this weird, whimsical look into a world we usually pay no attention.

via @design_sponge

The scene in the photo above has the precious quality of a carefully constructed scale model, the meticulously crafted miniature boats floating in an inch-deep bay. But in fact, this fakeness is fake, because this is no model — it’s a real scene made to look tiny and toylike with the use of a Photoshop technique known as faux tilt-shift photography.

You can see many more examples like this on Flickr, in pools like this one, where tilt-shift enthusiasts showcase their best work. It’s especially amusing when tilt-shifters use photos with people in them, as in the one below. The people look like toy figurines, and it’s easy to forget for a moment that those are real people with names and lives, and not molded pieces of polystyrene.

It’s also wonderful when you see a familiar scene, like this typical New York City block, transformed through tilt-shift. This transformation, from familiar to strange, is at the heart of what’s joyful about tilt-shift. It’s about more than just getting the joke. Yes, there’s a moment of revelation where you discover what you’re looking at is actually a new perspective on something you know well. But jokes get old, punchlines fail to have the same impact once you know what’s coming, and yet these photos make me smile whenever I see them. I think it’s because the apparent scale shift jars us out of our customary position in relationship to the world around us. Through these distortions, we’re given a moment in which we can realize how small we are, how tiny even our biggest structures can seem, and this momentary change in perspective is liberating.

Photos, top to bottom: mellocakes, nurpax, agent j loves agent a

I discovered William Eggleston, the iconoclast whose super-saturated prints brought color photography into art world’s mainstream, at the recent show at the Whitney Museum. The retrospective is now at the Corcoran in DC, bringing him back into the spotlight again and giving east-coasters who missed it in New York a second chance to see this wonderful body of work.

What’s joyful about Eggleston’s work? The unexpected hits of color, for starters. In this piece on NPR, Claire O’Neill writes about the transformative power of his color vision:

Although he doesn’t quite understand what people mean when they tell him, “You changed the way I see the world,” the fact remains that he has. Perhaps the living legend is an accidental genius, but before his lurid color prints hit the gallery walls, few people would have found beauty in their own rundown suburban backyards. Whether or not he meant to, and whether or not he cares, Eggleston has taught us to open our eyes and see the wide spectrum of colors around us. He says he doesn’t think much about it. But a few subtle winks and a glimmer in his eye tell me he knows exactly what he’s doing.

The article makes clear this approach was born out of Eggleston’s pure joy at seeing his world in vibrant color. Looking at his photographs, the energy seems to bleed off the print, an irrepressible vitality that stretches beyond the borders and makes each image feel hugely alive. But it also suggests Eggleston has the mischievous spirit of a kind of benign provocateur. Playfully transgressive, his goal is not to destabilize, but simply to liberate art from arbitrary rules that limit us from beauty in our own backyards.

Eggleston’s subjects are not always joyful; indeed, they often have a sort of forlorn or derelict beauty that inspires sad nostalgia rather than joy. Others are wonderfully weird, with an internal tension that asks you to consider joyful aesthetic elements — symbols of childhood, fluffy clouds or cotton candy, holiday motifs—in all their bizarre beauty, almost without emotion.

But regardless of the specific elements featured, to me the body of work as a whole exudes joy, arising as it does from the mind of a man who revels in color. In the audio slide show that accompanies the NPR piece, the final question is, “Do you dream in color?” There is such savory delight in the laugh that punctuates his response: “Oh yes. Wonderful pictures that don’t exist. I would love to print every single one of them. So. . . brilliant.”

From NPR, via tipster-extraordinare: Dad