Sometimes you’ve got to roll a hard six.
– Bill Adama, Battlestar Galactica (via thelewisaurus)
Let’s sell it and spend the money on books.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
– Aristotle
Lagging Behind
Oh dear. I haven’t done very well at all this past week. I feel like I’m lagging behind, not taking my work seriously enough and just losing touch with everything. I’ve got myself in a right funk, and feel like I’m sinking into quick sand and not doing anything at all about it.
I went out today and attempted to get things together for one of my projects but I could feel myself start to feel achy, tired and heavy, like I just wanted to lie in a dark room for a few hours. I suppose it didn’t help that it was raining cats and dogs, I couldn’t find anything I was looking for and London just felt like it was in a bad mood.
I think I need the holidays to come a little faster. I need to see my family and just chill out, get away from everything. I need to pep myself up: it’s a difficult time but the last thing I want is to wish the next six months away too fast.
This was last week…but so much Christmas-ness on the South Bank, with gluvine, bratwurst and carousels. Well just one carousel but I haven’t been on one in years and it was so much fun.
Experiments with pinhole photography.
Yesterday Ollie and I traveled up to the South Bank to see The Habit of Art at the National Theatre. With my ticket costing £0.00 I already knew it was going to be a pretty good night, but the play was simply fantastic. I came out grinning! And when Ollie pulled a bottle of Prosecco and two glasses out of his bag while we were sitting outside before the doors opened, it absolutely made my night.
The state of things today…
I really cannot wait to see this :)
It is perfectly true that millions of people who read type every day of their lives are utterly unconscious of these differences. All type looks alike to them. It is equally true that most of these same people could not tell you whether the dining-chairs they use every day have straight or cabriole legs, or whether the bed they sleep in is French Provincial or early Grand Rapids. But even though they may not be conscious of the elements, nearly all people are responsive to the over-all effect. They know the minute they step into a room whether it is a pleasant room to be in and one that reflects the personality of the occupants. And without knowing a thing about the anatomy of type they are pleased by a page in which the type, spacing, margins, and other typographic details are in harmony with each other and with the subject.
– Frank Denman, The Shaping of Our Alphabet
After the show we all went to see the Seizure exhibition down the road. It’s an old council flat, scheduled for demolition that the artist filled with water and dropped in copper sulphate, resulting in an amazing cave-like space filled with blue crystals. Stunning, and you really have to see it to appreciate it but there are more photos here.
The idea behind it is based on the act of translating idioms and the problem it faces when trying to communicate an idea successfully. Chercher midi à quatorze heures is an expression in French which means, basically, to complicate things. But when translated directly into English it becomes: to look for midday at two o’clock, which loses the original meaning of the phrase. This deterioration is mirrored in the printing effect where the lino retains less and less ink as the phrase is translated until it is more difficult to read and, therefore, to understand.
We also had a Swap Shop courtesy of Sean, where we brought a creation in to swap with someone else’s work. I swapped some postcards of my prints with Simon & Mark’s manifesto booklet.
A few shots of the exhibition today. I was really impressed with how it turned out. Lots of interesting work. My contribution was the purple lino prints of a French idiom on the wall in the first photo, but I’ll put a better photo up later perhaps!
"Sometimes you’ve got to roll a hard six."
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."
Lagging Behind
"It is perfectly true that millions of people who read type every day of their lives are utterly unconscious of these differences. All type looks alike to them. It is equally true that most of these same people could not tell you whether the dining-chairs they use every day have straight or cabriole legs, or whether the bed they sleep in is French Provincial or early Grand Rapids. But even though they may not be conscious of the elements, nearly all people are responsive to the over-all effect. They know the minute they step into a room whether it is a pleasant room to be in and one that reflects the personality of the occupants. And without knowing a thing about the anatomy of type they are pleased by a page in which the type, spacing, margins, and other typographic details are in harmony with each other and with the subject."
