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Visual Food 4: Interesting things from around the web

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Jim Denevan Sand Paintings

Here’s some large scale earth drawings that get washed away with the tide. Certainly solves the ‘where do I store all the artwork I’ve accumulated over the years’ problem.

Drawings by Stephanie Bergeron

Here’s a delightful creative project, line drawings that integrate with a shaped book. I particularly like the way Stephanie has integrated the outside edges with the subsequent pages. Wouldn’t it be a great coloring book? (One of the ones for adults that come with really nice colored pencils.  OK, forget the pencils, I’ve got plenty.)

drawing by ©Stephanie Bergeron Art

Art inspired by William Morris

I adore William Morris. I had a portrait of him in my high school portfolio. As a textile major in college, I poured over his designs for wallpaper and fabrics. So I was really interested to see what Hllary Pfiefer is doing.

She’s being inspired by the forms in Morris’s work, creating them as jewelry from found objects, and installing them on a 100 square foot wall. If you click over to the Kickstarter site you can see a short video about the piece.

I was also excited to see she is in Portland. I want to see this!

More info about her work can be found hilarypfeifer.com and on her blog hilarypfeifer.blogspot.com

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Categories: Visual Food

From the studio: Many roads

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Many roads to choose from

In the version above, the images are digitally put together. It’s available from my online gallery in an interesting format called a fotoflōt. The image is printed onto a surface that does not require framing and allows the image to stand by itself without a frame around it.

The images are also available separately as shown below.

I’ve been visually exploring the ideas around many choices, how many roads we have to choose from. I’m not big into regret, I think we do the best we can at the time given what we know. It’s just hard to see where all the roads might lead. In this one I was also thinking about how things look different in the day and night.

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Categories: Artwork

Supporting local farmers

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This is my first year purchasing a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)  share. We chose Sun Gold Farm on the recommendation of friends, alignment with their sustainable approach, and convenient local pick up. I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. I enjoy visiting the farmers market and growing my own vegetables, but the idea of someone else deciding what I would eat? Made me nervous.

Each week we get one bag full of veggies. Quite unexpectedly, the surprise aspect has been one of my favorite parts. It has absolutely inspired me to eat more and a wider variety of vegetables than I would chose on my own. I think I can safely say I have eaten more cabbage this summer than in several years past put together. I’ve tried kohlrabi and all sorts of new kinds of cukes and squash.

The thing I have been most fascinated with so far is in bunch in the center of the photo above. It’s fresh garbanzo beans. We got a bunch of stalks with pods all over them. Inside the pod is a green bean. I’d only ever seen them in dried or canned form. They have some crunch to them, and are really tasty. Much better than the ones from the can.

Sun Gold sends a newsletter out each week where I learned most of the garbanzos are grown in hot climates, but they discovered they were able to grow them here by testing growing them from a bag of dried ones from the supermarket. We’ve enjoyed snacking on them like edamame as well as tossing them into salads.

The newsletter tells us what we are most likely to get in the bags for the week. It has stories about the farm and its history. Sometimes a recipe. We’ve started feeling connected to the place even though we have never seen it. We also follow reports on Facebook which talk more about the planting, watering, hay crop, and getting up in the middle of the night to protect the greenhouses.

Discovering any interesting vegetables this summer?

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Categories: Exploring My Life

From the studio: Landscape panels

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I’ve been interested in paintings that align to form a larger whole for many years. This is the first in a new series I’ve been working on. Prints of the individual panels are available on my online gallery in a variety of sizes.

Categories: Artwork

Po Bronson on the Crisis of Creativity

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On The Harvard Business Review site, Po Bronson talks about the Crisis of Creativity in American Business

One of the things in this video that caught my attention is Po’s point that good managers don’t have to be creative as long as they can recognize and capture the good ideas of others. He identifies a big mistake as a manager who thinks they are the ones who should come up with all the ideas, therefor squelching the creativity in those underneath them.

Facilitating others creativity

I was a facilitator at Penland School of Crafts in the 90′s. It was there that I started to realize that making stuff was not as important to me as helping others access the creative process. I’ve watched thousands of people who identify themselves as artists as well as those who do not, wrestle with their creative anxiety. It’s powerful stuff. It touches the place of feeling like you are not enough.

Po’s call to managers is just the first step. Those managers also need to be aware of the behaviors that squelch creativity in the workplace. Things like performance management systems that only reward narrowly defined outcomes. The lack of effective conflict systems that result in people just keeping their mouths shut. People meeting each others differences with judgment rather than curiosity.These things are why we developed the VisualsSpeak Building Great Teams miniset.  I want to offer tools to help people clear up the things that get in the way of creativity.

What do you do to foster creativity in those around you?

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Categories: Facilitation

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