(source)

Penpont, Scotland

Andy Goldsworthy is a talented British artist who “collaborates with nature” to make transient, ephemeral creations—which he then photographs for posterity (and the inspiration of others). Goldsworthy’s goal is to better understand nature by means of intimate interaction and participation. He generally works with whatever comes to hand: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds, thorns, feathers….

“I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and ‘found’ tools—a sharp stone, the quill of a feather, thorns. I take the opportunities each day offers: if it is snowing, I work with snow, at leaf-fall it will be with leaves; a blown-over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn. ”

“Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather—rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm—is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there.”

“I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.”

“Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.”

“The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below.”

Austin, Texas

DJ Stout and his team at Pentagram Austin recently threw a fundraising party to help the homeless and to celebrate the release of Pentagram Papers 39: Signs. Designed by Stout, Signs is a collaboration with legendary Texas musician Joe Ely and renowned photographers Michael O’Brien and Randal Ford that focuses on the issue of homelessness. Donations received during the event went to the benefit of Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a 501(c)(3) social outreach ministry for the homeless and indigent working poor. A good idea and nicely executed…

(thanks, Banksy)

A great little video clip here (2:19 on YouTube) regarding the “vendor/client relationship” that comes frighteningly close to the service/value conversation that we designers often find ourselves in… well worth watching.

(thanks to Cameron Cavers for the link)

A premonition I had in my twenties that I wouldn’t
live beyond forty obviously didn’t pan out…
(message to self—don’t bank on your intuition, OK?)

Thanks to the many friends from far and near
who have sent their regards…

New York, USA

A clever wrap-around poster for the Global Coalition for Peace bearing a profound message… And, a timeless (also ironic) quotation by the USA’s 34th president (NATO’s first supreme commander) expressed exactly 50 years before the ill-informed and wrong-headed 2003 invasion of Iraq:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone, it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953