May 25th, 2009, 3 comments
Artist Jorge Colombo drew the image that graces the June 1st cover of The New Yorker magazine with Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone app. Virtually "finger-painting" an image like this onto a tiny iPhone touchscreen seems insane and inconvenient, but Colombo has good reasons. The New Yorker reports:
He discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.)
Drawing on the iPhone also offers the artist anonymity. Colombo stood in Times Square for an hour drawing this image on his iPhone and no one gave him a second look. Unlike if he had been painting with an easel, passersby just assumed he was checking his email.
Surely sales of the Brushes app will go through the roof this week as aspiring artists scramble to replicate Colombo's work. Of course, Ken Rockwell was right when he asserted that it's an artist's eye, patience, and skill that makes a good image, not the tools he or she uses. See a video of this drawing come to life below.
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February 13th, 2009, 5 comments
Anyone who makes things for a living should watch author Elizabeth Gilbert's 20 minute talk at the TED conference this month (full video below). Gilbert published the mega-Oprah-bestseller Eat, Pray, Love which is soon to be a movie starring Julia Roberts. In this talk she explains one way she's found to quell the anxiety that comes with following up after a big commercial success. Namely, she's gone back to the ancient idea that creative inspiration is an entity separate from us, which speaks through us: the muse, as it were.
It's not a popular idea these days.
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January 21st, 2009
Happy Presidential inauguration, Americans! Frontline's whole "Dreams of Obama" series is well worth watching, but my favorite part is the post-Harvard Law chapter, where Obama turns down a coveted and potentially lucrative job opportunity to follow his heart back to Chicago.
Abner Mikva, Federal judge 1979-'94; Obama mentor; offered him a clerkship after law school which Obama declined:
One of the reasons I was sort of surprised that he turned me down was at that time I was what was known as a feeder to the Supreme Court. The justices included Justice [William] Brennan and Justice [Thurgood] Marshall and Justice [John Paul] Stevens and Justice [Harry] Blackmun, all of whom would frequently take my clerks, Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor. And it was a good likelihood that anybody who clerked for me with his kind of background would have gone upstairs to the Supreme Court. … Those are the best credentials you can have entering the practice of law. You can make an awful lot of money very quickly. You can just about call your own spot and where you want to practice, who you want to practice with.
As he said when he told me why he wasn't going to interview with me, that wasn't the track he wanted to follow. [...]
He had a pretty good idea of who he was and where he wanted to go; that money was not going to drive his ambitions; that he viewed success not in terms of how big a mark he could make in the law but rather on a larger stage.
Emphasis mine. Full video's inside.
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