John Cleese on optimising the creative mind.

1. Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)
2. Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)
3. Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)
4. Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)
5. Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)    

This is a wonderful excerpt from a lecture John Cleese gave in 1991. He is excellent on the subject of being prepared to sit through the discomfort and uncertainty of not knowing the answer immediately, encouraging us to play with the problem for as long as possible to achieve the most creative results. Time has not aged his sage advice one bit. The eternal quest to achieve the full potential of our creative selves is a timeless subject.                          

Via: Brain Pickings 

“I want to write about things that I care about. And hopefully other people will care about them too.”

I just spent a wonderful lunch hour at the RSA listening to my amazing cousin Ellah Allfrey, deputy editor of Granta, in conversation with Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, the brilliant writer of Half of a Yellow Sun and now the just published Americanah. 

They talked engagingly about the enjoyment of love stories, the politics of natural african hair, the discomfort people feel in discussing race, and the importance of embracing your own cultural language.

“People so often have much more access to realities that are not theirs.” 

Ellah concluded her interview by thanking Chimimanda for the generosity of her answers, but this writer wasn’t just generous she was searingly honest in every response - often pausing to double check that she had said exactly how she felt about a subject.

I particularly enjoyed her retelling of a conversation with a Norwegian friend of hers, who queried whether she was not just a writer but also a social engineer. Chimimanda didn’t see this as an accusation as much as a compliment and proudly embraced the idea that in talking about her work she is also trying to change the world around her for the better.

She delivers such powerful statements, which undoubtedly come from her core beliefs and yet are delivered with utter charm, a gorgeous smile, and a lightness of touch that is filled with humour. Plus, just take a look at those kick-ass shoes!

“I want the whole world to be full of fierce feminists, and to be passionate about natural hair, and for Nigeria to rule the world. Oh alright, Africa.”

I’m looking forward to reading Americanah, which Chimimanda describes as an unapologetic love story that is “very happily unsubtle.” She cheerfully admitted to being inspired by the ultimate romantic literary archetype of Mills & Boon, which she devoured as a teenager. Dismissing the difference between genre writing and literature she said, “It’s either well written or it isn’t.” And with adamant finality, “Love stories are important.” Full stop.

If you haven’t seen Chimimanda’s forthrightness in action I urge you take some time out of your day to watch her TED talk. The Danger of a Single Story.

This photographic series gives new meaning to the phrase ‘becoming one with nature’. These portraits of elderly citizens enveloped in nature seem eccentric at first glance, but become deeply moving with further contemplation. The project, by Norwegian photographers Karoline Hjorth & Riitta Ikonen, is called Eyes as Big as Plates. 

The first part of the project was produced in Norway in May 2011 “produced in collaboration,”  they say, “with local senior heroes, sailors, retired agronomes and 90-year old parachuters.” The second group of portraits was made in Finland and “presents Pohjois-Karjala seniors through references of familiar characters and protagonists of Finnish folklore, infused with the participating local seniors’ own stories and personal relationship to folklore, myths and imagination.” 

Now Hjorth and Ikonen are working as artists in residence at Recess in Red Hook, Brooklyn. They have also recently submitted a proposal for the rehabilitation of the Rockaways post-Hurricane Sandy.

Eyes as Big as Plates - Rockaway Call for Ideas from Karoline Hjorth on Vimeo.

Thanks to @KresseWesling, of Elvis & Kresse, for sharing this wonderful work.

Excellent and empowering words from all the beauty and rustic hotness that is The Yard. An visual amalgamation of my dream life that someone else has kindly put together for me - and for many others of such aesthetic persuasions I’m sure - some of which I’m living some of the time and some of which I wish I was living more of the time.

The Yard is a sort of Tumblr version of the ever aspirational Toast catalogue. And if I follow good internet etiquette and trace these words back to their original source we get to Hello I am Marianna. 

Thanks to Hiut Denim’s Scrapbook Chronicles for a reminder of The Yard’s goodness. Though I’m less grateful for all the afternoon procrastination that was this gift’s wrapping paper.

Thanks Hiut Denim and David Hieatt for sharing your Creator’s Code. Tis always good to be reminded of the important things at work.

I’ll just swap in the green tea for coffee at #10

Sign up to Hiut’s Scrapbook Chronicles newsletter, for more of where this goodness came from.

Thanks to the wonderful @garancedore for writing about this beautiful Narciso Rodriguez perfume ad, which I have loved for a long time. I never thought to write about it, until Garance did that for me, but its power as an image of strong yet vulnerable femininity in today’s airbrushed, surgically enhanced, glossy world, is still striking to me. 

Now there’s added interest because… and I hadn’t seen it yet, so I’m rather excited, there is a new ad with the same model, Carmen Kass, in the same spirit, by the same photographers Inez and Vinoodh. It’s fascinating that they decided to go for something so similar to the 2003 image. As Garance says:

“It’s hard to decode all the layers in such a successful ad. I’m dreaming that one day I’ll have a tryptique (I’m sure they’ll do another one someday and she’ll be just as beautiful) of all the shots together. I’d put the first one in the middle, I think. Because it still hits me just as strongly today.”

Garance Dore

This quote comes from a fantastic long read interview with Sam Abell - the photographer who features in my last post, talking about his quest for the right image. In this interview Abell talks about how he relates his photography to storytelling. A subject close to my heart. After the quote above he goes on to say:

“There’s an artist names Saul Steinberg who called himself a writer who draws. When I read that, I thought it described me, but I don’t draw, I photograph. So I’d describe myself as a writer who photographs.”

This rings a bell for me, as I often describe myself as a designer who writes. It’s interesting that Abell thought he could have been a writer, but chose to focus on photography instead. Later he says he was drawn to designing his own books, as the optimum form in which to combine his photography and writing skills. This is the direction I think I’m heading too.

Abell remembers the advice an influential high-school teacher gave him when editing the school yearbook. 

“Tomorrow you’ll see the yearbook. There’s much to be proud of, but you will only see the mistakes. Two things: Learn from them and don’t talk about the mistakes to others.”

The teacher went on to say:

“Sam, you can photograph, and I know you love doing that. But you can also write and you can design, and some day I would like for you to do a book that you write and photograph and design.”

I’m now going to pretend that advice was meant for me too.

Lastly, one of my favourite ideas of many in this interview with Sam Abell is  the ‘Moon List’. I let Sam tell you about it…

“Every full moon, my wife and I construct something we call the ‘Moon List’, and the Moon List is about 25 questions that have evolved over 10 years or so to reconstruct the past 30 days since the last full moon. And one of the categories on the list is “story” - ‘What’s the best story you’ve heard this month?’ And so we write down a synopsis of that story.”

I think that’s one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard. Thanks Sam Abell. You are an inspiration.

Via: Story Matters

Thanks to @bferry for sharing this wonderful interview with the National Geographic photographer Sam Abell. I hadn’t seen his work before and it really is stunning.

But even more fascinating than the final shots, for me at least, is this interview with Abell. It’s a wonderful reminder about the journey of making that rarest of things these days - a truly valuable photograph. 

In our digital saturated world of insta images, it’s too easy to forget how capturing the right image, at the right time, for the right reason, is a 50/50 adventure of persistence and luck. 

Thanks to Sam Abell for sharing his passion for the process of creating images and reminding us that behind every great photograph is a really great story. It’s a lifetime’s work.

A profound Japanese proverb from an unexpected source: Buttercup herself, Robin Wright, interviewed in yesterday’s ES Magazine. Got me thinking, it did.

The sad beauty of pollution. William Miller’s photographs of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn find epic galaxies of detritus on the surface of the water. Looking at these images, I feel a strangely conflicted emotion of love for the vision and hate for the reality of what the vision is. 

Via: It’s Nice That