I’ve been a fan of Georgia Russell’s beautifully delicate cut paper work for some time now. How wonderful to see her new work featured on designboom.

It’s fascinating to me, as a multidisciplinary designer, how artists can be so focused on one technique and find such depth and breadth in that medium.

Russell is constantly evolving her distinctive scalpel work into new realms.

JR

Fantastic winner of the 2011 TED Prize. Amazingly powerful image making with local people around the world in their communities. If Creative Data can come anywhere close to this, in terms of future landscapes and environment, it will have achieved what I set out to do. Help people see their own world in new ways.

Use Art To Turn The World Inside Out

Follow the Inside Out Project on Twitter - @InsideOutProj

Goethe

Loving this post HOW TO STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST by @austinkleon

So much excellent thinking crammed into 10 precisely crafted points, each of which hits a creative nail squarely on the head. Thanks to Seth Godin for highlighting it in his recent post: The opportunity is here.

A few of my favourite excerpts:

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of previous ideas.

You have a mother and you have a father. You possess features from both of them, but the sum of you is bigger than their parts. You’re a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors.

Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by.

So my advice is to find a way to bring your body into your work. Draw on the walls. Stand up when you’re working. Spread things around the table. Use your hands.

Step 1: Wonder at something. Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.

Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “There’s only one rule I know of: goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

As Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

In this age of information overload and abundance, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s important to them.

This should be worth a listen too:

How to steal like an artist, a conversation with Austin Kleon

Lucy + Jorge Orta’s Amazonia show is quite breathtakingly gorgeous. I was lucky enough to be invited to the Frieze breakfast at The Natural History Museum this morning to celebrate the Orta’s work. It was wonderfully revitalising way to start the day.

The exhibition coincides with the International Year of Biodiversity and documents the Ortas’ expedition to the Peruvian Amazon in all its vibrant multicoloured glory. This multimedia exhibition (sculptures, photography, ceramics, film, drawings) is a positive celebration of the beauty of the Amazon rainforest and a stark reminder of what we stand to lose in this age of the 6th mass extinction.

There were some powerful quotes dotted around the walls of the exhibition - this was one of my favourites:

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with live & respect.” Aldo Leopoldo, forester & environmentalist (1886-1948)

There were also some beautiful posters that the Orta’s are giving away for free, but in doing so ask for a donation to the ongoing conservation of a hectare of Amazon rainforest they documented in their photographs. Rather though provokingly they ask: “What price would you pay for Amazonia?”