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As an art student at the University of Texas Rio Grande, Josie Del Castillo came to appreciate the rich pigment of oils and how easily they spread across the canvas. “I didn’t get it at first, but it made me want to practice,” she says. “The techniques that I’ve developed now—I always go back to oil painting, even though I’ve tried other mediums.” A first-generation, Mexican-American artist raised in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Del Castillo produces self-portraits and portraits of her friends and family, her canvases depicting the landscape of her hometown, with its palm trees, resacas, and sunsets framed by tall clouds.
Growing up, Del Castillo and her family crossed the border often to visit family in Mexico. “I never really saw a difference between the two countries until I was older,” she says. “We always saw it as ‘going to the other side.’” Today she celebrates the similarities and differences between two cultures in her work, often by means of natural symbolism. The aloe plant, for example, “has healing powers in Mexican-American culture, so I use that to symbolize healing ourselves.” Del Castillo’s portraits often explore her own resiliency and that of her Brownsville community. “I’m intrigued by people’s personalities, how they present themselves, and what they do for the community,” she says.
The post Josie Del Castillo appeared first on The American Scholar.
In the back of Show Your Work! and Keep Going, I took out the “recommended reading” heading I used in Steal and quoted Cormac McCarthy from a 1992 NYTimes profile:
The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.
It was also used for the title of a book on his literary influences.
RIP.
YouTube has a plagiarism problem.
We spoke with @austinkleon to try and fix it
Watch ? https://t.co/rdZFPtCRAb pic.twitter.com/RdMNAfaAZp
— Colin and Samir ???? (@ColinandSamir) April 3, 2023
YouTubers Colin and Samir asked me if I would talk to them about plagiarism on YouTube. The resulting conversation was kind of a 20-minute summation of a lot of my thoughts about creative work.
You can watch the whole thing here:
Spoiler alert: My “solution” is not really a solution. LOL.
The solution to plagiarism on the internet
"If you're chasing after something else, you kinda have to get more serious than just ripping off other people's stuff."
(from @ColinandSamir's recent interview with Austin Kleon) pic.twitter.com/e22Sar18yI
— Jay Alto (@theJayAlto) April 3, 2023
Viki Eagle began taking photographs of her Native American friends when she was an undergraduate at the University of Denver. “Being one of the very few Native people on campus, I wanted to tell our story from our perspective,” she says. A member of the Sičháŋǧu Lakȟóta tribe, Eagle (who is also half-Japanese) has dealt with racism firsthand. “When I was growing up in the early ’90s, people really believed that Native Americans didn’t exist,” she says, “or if we did exist, we were still living in teepees or wearing buckskin. Our history erases us.” After completing her series of images of her friends, Real Life Indian, Eagle decided to go even further toward dispelling Native stereotypes by photographing heavy metal bands on reservations. This series, Re(Mapping) a Rez Metal Sonic ReZistance, is now her year-long focus as the Denver Art Museum’s 2023 Native Arts Artist-in-Residence.
Eagle’s interest in heavy metal stems from its ability to push back—“in the most extreme way”—against whitewashed ideas of what Native music is. Her photographs span several genres—documentary, portrait, landscape, and still-life. Eagle would like for her images of musicians and their audiences to demonstrate heavy metal’s popularity on reservations, and in the process, open viewers’ minds to the diversity of contemporary Native life. “I hope that people take away the creativity,” she says. “As contemporary Native people, expressing ourselves, our message and our story is still within that music.”
The post Viki Eagle appeared first on The American Scholar.
My audiobook trilogy is on sale through Apple: all 3 books for $5!!!
It’s a… steal.
Shanghai’s Fiu Gallery welcomes visitors to experience life in London – roughly 5,700 miles away. Contemporary British artist Peter Judson’s Wonder Around East London exhibition stays true to his playful, colorful, energetic style. Daily objects are transformed into “visual energy” that Judson uses to innovate and explore further, extending lightness, liveliness, and joy to visitors.
In Wonder Around East London, Judson hopes the audience can shift their focus from the functionality of the objects to the beauty of the artwork itself. “There are two things I want to express, and I also want the show to work on two levels. Firstly, to create an aesthetically punchy and interactive experience that can be enjoyed by all. Secondly, I wanted the show to act as a catalyst to a way of thinking,” shared Judson. “Observation is so profoundly linked with conscious and subconscious assumptions. I wanted to use color, abstraction, reduction, and scale as a way to break these assumptions and try to force the audience to view the world around us in a new context.”
The ultimate takeaway is quite simple: “I would love it if anyone leaving the show were to walk home and begin to see the city they live in in a new way. To spot some minute detail they may have normally not noticed and appreciate it regardless of context. To see the object in isolation and maybe find a new appreciation for the world that we live in.”
To learn more about Wonder Around East London, visit peterjudson.com.
Painter and sculptor Loren Erdrich began mixing mediums on large canvases after a friend brought back vials of natural pigments from Morocco. “They did these crazy things on the paper that I was working with,” she says, such as swirling together and blooming into bursts of patterns. “When those ran out, I ended up finding dye that had similar characteristics—my work is very materials forward.” Erdrich now uses a combination of dye, powdered pigment mixed with water, and acrylic paint on canvas, letting the materials guide the final composition. “The dye is part of the fabric,” she says. “It soaks in and colors the actual fabric. I may occasionally have marks of other materials that sit on top of the canvas but really what you’re looking at is a large piece of fabric, the color of which has been changed.” Her most recent works are included in a solo exhibition, In a Certain Light, currently on display at Shrine Gallery in New York.
Erdrich’s images center on ethereal beings. These gauzy, amorphic figures are not portraits of anyone or anything in particular. “I’ve always been interested in that crossover point between inside and outside, what is seen and what can’t be seen,” she says. “That place where you have one foot in the world that you can see and one foot in the invisible world—it’s always been about giving light to everything else around us.” Erdrich says that when she creates these figures, she’s challenging the viewer to imagine what it would be like to live a life of unlimited existence, where dualities aren’t divided and opposites can appear together. “We live in this world that really wants these clear categories and borders,” she says. “But I’ve always seen the world as many things at once. How do I get everything? How do I talk about all of it that isn’t just the actual physical thing I see in front of me?”
The post Loren Erdrich appeared first on The American Scholar.
Multidisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist musician, illustrator, and independent curator are a few of the biggest hats Brooklyn, NewYork-based Michael Hambouz wears. The first-generation Palestinian-American creates chromaesthesia-influenced works – experiments in dimension and color, created under the guidance of music – to process bouts of loss and self-reflections on cultural identity.
“The moment I paid off my student loans and was able to put away enough savings to keep me afloat for 6 months, I quit my last paid salary position…throwing caution and good healthcare coverage to the wind,” Michael says of the moment art went from hobby to career for him. “At the very end of my 6-month mark, I was commissioned to paint the titling sequences for Oliver Stone’s “Untold History of the United States” ad campaign for Showtime – this gig provided me with enough income to extend my time in the studio for another year, cover the expenses for my first solo show, and the campaign was ultimately awarded a 2013 Silver Promax BDA Award, helping to launch my illustration side business. It has been 12 years now that I have been working full-time in my studio (I superstitiously knock on wood every time I state this).”
Experimenting freely with mediums, Michael encourages unexpected results and mutations to bloom in the studio, resulting in conceptually abstracted paintings and prints, intricate paper cutouts, 3-dimensional sculptural works, drawings, and animations.
Michael Hambouz \\\ Photo: Lauren Silberman
It clicked for Michael around the age of 7 that art could be something bigger for him. “At age 7, my 2nd grade classmates and I were each assigned to create an art piece inspired by our favorite fairytale. While most students delivered heavy-on-the-parent-assistance shoebox dioramas, I spent two hours after school every day for two weeks in the classroom working on a 9-foot-tall portrait of the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk. I was shy and not quite keen to the concept of showing off at that age, which made the feat feel very pure in motivation. To me, the grand scale was essential. Anything smaller would have simply been inaccurate,” he shared. “It was also during this time that my parents were going through a very turbulent and nasty separation. In retrospect, it was absolutely this moment that I realized art could provide me with positive escapism, independence, confidence, and the tools to process life’s most difficult challenges – there was no other path for me.”
Today, we’re happy to have Michael Hambouz join us for Friday Five!
Photo: Fred R. Conrad, The New York Times
Hungarian-born American industrial designer Eva Zeisel made works of pure beauty – colorful, elegant, playful, tactile, and accessible. She was astoundingly prolific and her work always so very distinctly “Eva.” It was an honor for me to plan her 100th birthday party many years ago and get to know her a little better – sharp sense of humor, kind, and so thoughtfully well-spoken. She promptly arrived at 6pm and was the last to leave her party around 11pm. She continued actively making work until she passed away just a few years later at the remarkable age of 105. Though our practices and mediums of choice differ, I find it hard to think of another artist that is more inspiring to me than Eva. I highly recommend reading Eva Zeisel: A Soviet Prison Memoir.
Taraka performing at Our Wicked Lady, Brooklyn, New York \\\ Photo: Michael Hambouz
As a spectator or as a participant, live music has always been a very important part of my life. When I first started visiting New York City in the late 90s, I would pour over the show listings in the Village Voice in a similar fashion to looking at the Sears’ Christmas toy catalog as a little kid. I didn’t quite realize just how much I missed seeing shows during the pandemic until I finally masked up and hit the streets after a two-year hiatus. I promised myself that if the following bands came to town, I would make the effort: Bristol UK’s Beak>, Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and New York state’s own Taraka. I was fortunate to see all three in the last year – absolutely transcendent. As a musician, I’ve found that the ultimate show makes me 50% entranced and 50% inspired to leave immediately to go play music as loud as I can in my rehearsal space. These three shows did that to me (I stayed until the end for all of them, so I suppose 51% to 49%?).
From left to right, top to bottom: the studios of Will Hutnick, Courtney Childress, Julia Norton, Tony Cox, Stephen Somple, and Roxanne Jackson \\\ Photos by Michael Hambouz
I am a very social, community-oriented soul by nature. Though I can easily spend weeks on end focused on my own work in the studio, often forgetting when to blink or eat lunch. I’ve found that I really thrive most when I take time to engage with fellow creatives, talking through our current projects, and more often than not, talking about everything under the sun except art. I make sure I take at least two days off each month to studio visit with other artists, and a least two days each month to visit friends’ and friends-of-friends’ gallery shows throughout the city. Sharing a few recent studio visit highlights – I’m especially drawn to visiting artists that work with materials and processes foreign to my personal practice.
Image courtesy Democracy Now!
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman gave a talk at my alma mater Antioch College in the mid-90s shortly after the launch of the show, leaving an indelible impression on me. I’ve been an avid follower since, tuning in daily, and have even volunteered in their development office over the years during fund-drives. I firmly believe that we all have an obligation to know and care about what’s going on in the world around us, and have access to unbiased, uncensored free press to keep us informed. As a longtime human rights and social justice advocate, there are few other sources I trust more than Democracy Now!
Monsanto, Portugal \\\ Photo: Michael Hambouz
Traveling wasn’t in the cards for me growing up. We didn’t have the money, and my mother rarely had time off from working multiple jobs to even leave if we had had the resources. I never resented this, but I have made it a point in my post-adolescent years to make up for lost time by traveling whenever I possibly can. International travel is most desired, but there is still so much to see in the U.S. (I still have yet to visit the Grand Canyon!), and even an afternoon bike ride over the Brooklyn Bridge can be a thrilling adventure. My last big trip was to the mountains of Portugal to visit my sister after a long gap since our last time together. We hiked, cooked, caught up on SNL, chopped wood, and picked olives – it was beautiful – all of it!
S in the G (2022), acrylic, flashe, and gouache on multidimensional panel, 36″ x 36″ x 3″. A recent 3-dimensional painting featured in my upcoming solo exhibition Hot Blooded at Troutbeck, presented by Wassaic Project and curated by Will Hutnick. \\\ Image courtesy Michael Hambouz
Current Mood (2022), acrylic, flashe, and gouache on multidimensional panel, 36″ x 36″ x 3″. \\\ Image courtesy Michael Hambouz
I Think We’re Alone-ish Now 2077 (2022), hand-cut paper on panel, 18”x24”. \\\ Image courtesy Michael Hambouz
Occupational Hazard (2022) \\\ Image courtesy Michael Hambouz
Regardless of the medium, art exists at the intersection between passion and precision. Whether it's summoning the appropriate technique or implementing the proper tools, crafting a masterpiece is almost always an exercise in exactitude. Few mediums capture the profundity of art's dichotomous nature as potently as video games. — Read the rest
Artist Shantell Martin has been catching peoples’ eyes for more than a decade with her large-scale black-and-white drawings. They simply can’t be ignored! Often times they include messages and questions – such as “Who are You” – in Martin’s signature all-caps handwriting. Now, with the open source release of Shantell Sans, everyone has access to this bold, playful, easy-to-read font!
The marker-style font was built for all types of creative expression by Martin, Arrow Type, and Anya Danilova. They made sure to include Latin and Cyrillic characters to support languages throughout the Americas, Europe, Central Asia, and Vietnam. Shantell Sans can be adjusted by weight, spacing, informality, bounce, and italics. It’s also worth mentioning that its all-caps design is especially easy to read.
Martin’s relationship with fonts and type go way back because she lives life as a proud dyslexic. “I always wanted to reclaim that space due to my dyslexia, and defeat my past challenges. The creation of my own font was an innate process and an extension of my artwork, and something I always wanted to do,” she said. “I think fonts can really change the mood of a person in the way that they can be dense and limiting, or, on another hand, open and playful. I think we do pick up on these subtle messages on a subconscious level. I wanted to share my work in a new, exciting medium accessible to anyone.”
Fun, welcoming, energetic, approachable, and creative are just a few of the words Brooklyn-based Arrow Type’s Stephen Nixon used to describe Shantell Sans. “The variable axes of bounce, informality, and spacing take the basic font and add in more of the natural variance and personality from Shantell’s writing, and I especially hope to see people find uses for those in animated text in video titles and stuff,” he shared. “Shantell Sans is a little bit like an elevated, less stiff Comic Sans. It’s also a little bit soft and inky like Cooper Black or Windsor.”
Download Shantell Sans for free here.
To learn more about the making of Shantell Sans, visit shantellsans.com.
In a recent interview, Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz) showed Zane Lowe where the hit song “Clint Eastwood” came from — the “Rock 1” preset on his Suzuki Omnichord.
I loved this clip and it got me thinking it would be fun to make an entire playlist of hit songs that were based on synthesizer presets or pre-programmed drum machine patterns.
At the top of the list would have to be Wayne Smith’s “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” which came out of Jamaica in 1985 and “kick-started a new genre and changed the island’s culture almost overnight.” The beat came from the “rock’n’roll” present on a Casiotone MT40 keyboard, which was programmed by a Japanese woman named Okuda Hiroko, who was straight out of music college and working for Casio.
The Guardian has a whole list of “the greatest preset sounds in pop music,” including:
And so on and so forth. Once you go looking, the list is endless.
Thinking about presets coincided with my discovery of the Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) and Sonic Boom (Peter Member) collaboration from last year, Reset.
The album is sample-based, with a little twist that all the samples come from really obvious and identifiable bits from vintage tracks which are worked up into something different:
At first, Kember began re-familiarising himself with his long-lost collection of ’50s and ’60s American doo-wop and rock-and-roll LPs. Crafting song-length loops from classic intros to tracks by Eddie Cochrane, The Troggs and The Drifters, Lennox then added his own vocal observations to create fully-formed songs.
I discovered the album when I got excited that KUTX was playing The Drifters’ “Save The Last Dance For Me” and suddenly Panda Bear started singing. (The song was “Livin’ in the After.”)
Sonic Boom explains the thinking behind the sampling:
[It] struck me that a lot of these tracks had intros that juiced the whole thing even though they were independent from how the rest of the song sounded. I just felt they had a vibe that we could grow something from.
When I listen to the album, I ask myself why these “obvious” samples feel rich to me while other obvious samples sound cheap.
For example, I was at my kids’ swim lesson the other day and a song that turned out to be Coldplay’s “Talk” came on. I’d never heard it all the way through, but the song takes a riff from Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” and plays it throughout. It felt really cheap somehow to me in a way that “Planet Rock” — which samples the Kraftwerk songs “Trans Europe Express” and “Numbers” — doesn’t.
Coldplay even cleared permission with Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter to use the song. But maybe that’s why it feels cheap to me?
For me, great sampling is about transformation. It usually comes from two places:
1) the sample is from something obscure or humble (like a preset)
2) the sample is from something huge and classic and is re-contextualized — usually by someone in a more humble position (like with early hip-hop, the kind of Robin Hood theft of taking from your parents’ records and twisting it into your own thing)
A great sample works on the original in a sense, it changes it a bit, makes you hear it in a different or more interesting way.
The sampling in the Coldplay song feels like neither to me: A wildly popular band borrows a line from a masterwork to make a completely mediocre song that you’d hear on the mix at your kids’ swim school.
It reminds me of something Nick Cave wrote on the subject of creative theft:
Theft is the engine of progress, and should be encouraged, even celebrated, provided the stolen idea has been advanced in some way. To advance an idea is to steal something from someone and make it so cool and covetable that someone then steals it from you. In this way, modern music progresses, collecting ideas, and mutating and transforming as it goes.
But a word of caution, if you steal an idea and demean or diminish it, you are committing a dire crime for which you will pay a terrible price — whatever talents you may have will, in time, abandon you. If you steal, you must honour the action, further the idea, or be damned.
And speaking of Cave, I need to wrap this post up, so let’s bring it back to the beginning with a tweet by his bandmate and collaborator, Warren Ellis, on using presets to get started:
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This segment from Art21's program, London, explores the work of visual artist and composer, Christian Marclay. Marclay is probably best known for his "turntablism," a technique that involves manipulating vinyl records on a turntable to create new sounds. His 1985 piece, "Record Without a Cover," is a landmark in the genre. — Read the rest
Timothy Goodman is a busy man: When not donating murals to non-profit organizations in New York or designing Nikes for basketball star Kevin Durant, prepping for a new gallery show, or collabing with big-name brands, he somehow managed the time to move to Paris – and then, several years later, publish a book about that experience. The full title is: I Always Think It’s Forever: A Love Story Set in Paris, Told by an Unreliable but Earnest Narrator.
Goodman’s story just hit bookstores a couple weeks ago, and in this episode of Milkshake, he takes us through the project: part memoir, part travel story, part art book. Interviews punctuate a deeply emotional recounting of how Goodman extended a stay to Paris after meeting someone. “That’s just the only way I know how to tell a story,” he says. “There’s this continuous through-line of the love story, but then you turn the page and suddenly wherever you’re at in that love story, I’m talking, I’m wrapping myself in the context of today’s dating culture. If I’m in a chapter where I’m talking about the heartbreak of my love story, suddenly you turn the page and then it’s, like, here’s 25 non-cheesy breakup songs, or here’s all these funny dating app bios I came across on Hinge or Tinder. What’s personal is always universal.”
While it takes place in his incredibly dynamic studio, this Milkshake is also part reading – a testament, he says, to an ambition to add spoken-word artist to his repertoire. “I’ve been doing events with my friends, with jazz guys, where I do spoken word poetry over them playing piano and saxophone,” he says. “I’ve been very heavily inspired by Jack Kerouac – he used to do these albums in the 50s where he would read his poems, his readings, over piano. I want to cut an album.”
Also in this Milkshake, we ask Goodman whether this was a love story about a woman or about Paris itself. Neither, he says: “This is a love story about me more than anything – you know what I mean?” he says. “This book is really about how I was able to finally stop the cycle in heartbreak, in breakups, that I always go through and show up for myself through therapy, through intense evaluation, about being kinder to myself, being okay with not being okay, accepting my vulnerability as a man, accepting that it’s okay again to be masculine and cry or go to therapy or whatever.” Tune in for more!
Diana Ostrom, who has written for Wallpaper, Interior Design, ID, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, is also the author of Faraway Places, a newsletter about travel.
Milkshake, DMTV (Design Milk TV)’s first regular series, shakes up the traditional interview format by asking designers, creatives, educators and industry professionals to select interview questions at random from their favorite bowl or vessel. During their candid discussions, you’ll not only gain a peek into their personal homeware collections, but also valuable insights into their work, life and passions.
“I aim to create a truly unique hand-crafted product from paper that celebrates the beautiful, unique architectural forms of nature,” said Wales-based paper artist Zoe Bradley. Working across disciplines, her work brings together sculpture, fashion, and theater, with her skills as a former fashion designer being evident in the almost tailored sculptures. “I work with paper just as a designer works with fabric, folding, curling, scoring, and stitching. My challenge is always to create something unexpected and playful from a 2D sheet of paper into a magical 3D sculpture.”
Zoe draws inspiration from the nature that surrounds her rural home, as well as couture, art, theater, and architecture. “I always take pictures wherever I am. Staying curious and observing the world around me influences my approach on pushing the boundaries of paper. My work is consistently about making the extraordinary from the ordinary,” she shared.
Zoe Bradley \\\ Photo: Alun Callender
Her paper sculptures are usually commissioned works of oversized silhouettes, though she also likes the challenge of creating on a smaller, more demanding scale. Zoe’s love of skill working with paper first emerged while making showpieces for designer Michiko Koshino’s A/W 2005 show. Afterwards, the well-known London store Liberty commissioned her to create a collection of paper showpieces for their Christmas windows. Since then, Zoe’s been creating sculptures using paper sourced from around the world.
Currently, her clients include brands such as Louis Vuitton, Dior, Estee Lauder, Tiffany & co., Graff, and Christian Louboutin. Zoe’s work has been featured in many magazines, included in several books on paper art, and exhibited in London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney.
Today, Zoe Bradley joins us for Friday Five!
Photo: Zoe Bradley
I was fortunate to visit the museum back in 2019 while I was working in the country. It’s a gravity-defying piece of architecture that rises from the dusty sandy desert, and it took my breath away. The building’s dramatic shape is inspired by the desert rose – a mineral formation created when minerals crystallize below the surface of a salt basin into an array of flat plates resembling rose petals. My dream would be to exhibit a retrospective of my paper sculptures within this magnificent building.
I’ve never followed convention. As a fashion and art student, I was always inspired by artists and designers who viewed life through a less conventional lens. Issey Miyake’s work was revolutionary to me. The way he saw clothes as a form of art on the body led me on my own journey of creating clothing from paper, a form of wearable art. Cutting, sewing, and
pleating the paper into a dress was influenced by his work. It was his decade long collaboration with American photographer Irving Penn that captured some of the most exciting silhouettes of his work. This book never tires to inspire.
Photo: Daniel Burdett
My Sakura Brush brush pen is always in my bag! It allows me to capture my line of movement when I start to create a sculpture, the silhouette starts with my brush pen strokes. It feels so good in the hand to create with, a hybrid of a traditional pen with the softer expressive line of a paint brush. I love to use them for my floral illustration work as they can be so expressive.
Photo: Zoe Bradley
I’ve had an affinity with flowers since childhood, and my love has grown even more since I started my own cutting garden over two years ago. Growing flowers gives me a sense of escapism, and to grow and nurture a flower from seed still captivates me. I love to walk barefoot in the grass, looking for varieties to draw and dissect for my paper sculptures. Tulips and Dahlias are probably my favorites, as their form is so dramatic and voluminous.
Image courtesy St-Germain
Over the summer I discovered the wonderful taste of St-Germain’s Elderflower liqueur. I’ve come to appreciate how versatile it is with my at-home cocktail making. I love to host family and friends, so I’ve been adding this delicious liquor to my cocktails or adding a dash to a simple glass of champagne. It’s been my go-to liqueur for its usability. With up to 1,000 handpicked elderflowers blossoms in every bottle, it’s a perfect staple for my at-home bar cart.
The Social Butterfly Chandelier, containing more than 5,000 butterflies, Harrods London, 2017 \\\ Photo: Melvyn Vincent
Neon Garden installation, inspired by Asia’s exotic flowers, Galleria Melissa, London, 2017 \\\ Photo: Melvyn Vincent
Floral sculptures for Fleuriste St-Germain Pop Up Event, NYC, 2022 \\\ Photo: Sansho Scott
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James Burke is a busy man, an international artist and Chief Creative Officer of Acrylicize, the art and design studio he founded out of art school. It’s perhaps best described as being a “living, breathing sculpture” and a business. The studio, based in both London and New York, sits at the intersection of art, design, and brand. Acrylicize uses the power of art to express the essence of identity within the built environment. The studio designs pieces in-house, works with a global network of artists and designers, and counts firms such as Coca-Cola, Spotify, Netflix, and Wimbledon Tennis club among their client base. Acrylicize’s work can also be found in public spaces around the world as they fulfill the aim of bringing art outside of the gallery space.
For his personal work, James is represented by galleries in London, Miami, and Montreal, and also exhibits around the world. He’s married with three children, plays drums, and is a dedicated meditator.
This week, James Burke is joining us for Friday Five!
James Burke
Photo: Maddie Knight
I started my meditation practice over two years ago, just before the pandemic, and it has had a profound effect on my work and life. I meditate for an hour a day (in 2 x 30-minute chunks). In addition to giving me more energy and mental space throughout the day, it also allows me to tap into my inherent instinct and intuition on a much deeper level, which has been invaluable as I navigate the craziness of the world. In our culture, I think we have a view that if we aren’t constantly striving to succeed at all times we are somehow failing. Meditation counters this by giving you permission to just ‘be.’ No pressure, no stress, nothing to do, nowhere to go, no winning or losing. It’s incredibly liberating.
Happy Gravity by Helmut Smits \\\ Photo: Alexa Hoyer
The Dutch have always been so good at blurring the boundaries between art and design. They have an incredible sensibility for craft, modernity, blending the contemporary with the historic, and connecting all via a playful thread that seems to be ingrained in their practice. Particular favorites of mine are Maarten Baas and Helmut Smits. You might know Maarten Baas from his timepiece, which hangs in Schipol Airport as part of his ‘Real Time’ series, which is part performance, part digital artwork, and part product design. Helmut Smits is an artist who makes numerous observations and provocations which poke fun at the rules and conventions of life through intelligent wit and masterful execution.
Photo courtesy National Parks UK
Having recently moved from my birthplace of London down to East Sussex, I’ve been completely captivated by the South Downs – a 250-square-mile national park of rolling countryside near the south coast of England. To be connected with the outdoors in such a picturesque and dramatic way has been amazing for the whole family, especially the kids who love the space and the intrinsic sense of adventure that nature provides. I’m really looking forward to watching how the seasons affect the landscape, taking the dog for long walks, and getting some respite from the intensity of my London working life.
Photo: Acrylicize
I owe my entire creative career to the drums. I learned to play when I was just six years old and was totally captivated by that first feeling of creative expression. I think I’ve been trying to chase that feeling of flow ever since. Any drummer will know that you can’t really switch off from hearing beats in your head, and this usually manifests itself by tapping into something around you. I move around the world, constantly exploring the sounds inanimate objects make. For instance, I was recently told by staff at Acrylicize that they always know when I’m coming up the stairs as the footsteps are usually accompanied by the tapping of hands on something as I approach.
Photo courtesy Patagonia
From a cultural perspective, I have always been hugely inspired by the brand Patagonia. The essence of the company is based on a genuine passion for what they do mixed with a sense of social responsibility and tangible action. It’s a culture built around understanding what inspires you and leaning into that for the good of all. I think it leads to the idea of flow, which is a subject I find fascinating, and as a window into peak human experiences. As a business, they play by their own rules, put people first, and use their platform to make a difference in the world. The recent announcement to give away 98% of the profits to fight the climate crisis is yet another example of this.
Everything and Nothing explores themes of joy, reflection, suspense, and fragility, specifically within the highs and lows of our relationship with social media. This interactive artwork questions the effects of our newfound addiction to the brief euphoria that we experience on a daily basis via online gratification. Guests can like a photo on Instagram and, in real-time, inflating the heart-shaped balloon slightly with each like until it bursts. \\\ Photo: Acrylicize
In Anticipation is a public sculpture of a moment frozen in time, celebrating the infinite possibilities of our next thought, move, or action. The larger-than-life sculpture suggests that in our defining moments – moments that would see us immortalized on such a pedestal – we are more vulnerable than the traditional depictions may suggest. \\\ Photo: Acrylicize
The Manchester Lamps consist of five playfully oversized domestic lamps that invite interaction and engagement within the city center. Each of the five installations marks a significant local historical innovation, with the corresponding time period echoed in each lamp’s distinctive design style: Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Victorian, mid-century and contemporary. \\\ Photo: Acrylicize
The Constant Need for Approval explores validity and perceived worth in the age of the internet. The gold star has come to symbolize the marker for value in our society, no matter how deep or trivial the subject matter. As a purely functional and self-referential statement, the artwork relies on interaction in order to fulfill its destiny to be rated by each guest and showcase its own rating. This symbiotic relationship with the viewer defines the work’s representation, expression, and form, and in doing so questions wider public narratives of what defines art \\\ Photo: Acrylicize
The Art House is Acrylicize’s newly redesigned studio HQ, which was designed in house by the studio. Using a creative and future-forward approach, Acrylicize developed The Art House to be the epitome of a Hyper Evolved Workplace, a term the team coined to paint the picture of true innovation in brand experience. The Art House showcases the future of the workplace through six key principles: purpose, empathy, community, creativity, sustainability, and equitability. \\\ Photo: Acrylicize
On a recent trip to Mumbai, India, comedian Simon Feilder became fascinated by how many bootleg copies of famous books were for sale in stalls around the city. So he bought a copy of a book he already owned to compare: Steal Like an Artist. He made this video about it:
Feilder asked me to be in the video, but I told him it was better without me! He cleverly found this old tweet and included it:
If you pirated STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST when you were young and broke now’s a great time to pay me back and get a fancy hardcover ?https://t.co/eIyOzSlrS9 pic.twitter.com/tBcwCL6hCE
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) March 8, 2022
I laughed, upon re-reading the tweet thread, how many people admitted that they had pirated it and now they were buying a copy. Success!
A batch of quick thoughts:
All that said: Book sales keep my kids fed, man! Please buy them or borrow them from the library. (Remember: Libraries buy books! And you can often request that the library order a book you’re interested in.)
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