Sugimoto for Hermes

Have I seriously never blogged this? Never?! It's one of my favorite art projects of the past several years! In 2012 a special project within venerable fashion house Hermes, called Hermes Editeur, that makes limited edition silk scarves with artists, collaborated with amazing artist Hiroshi Sugimoto on a scarf edition. Sugimoto is known for his black-and-white photos, but this time he used expired Polaroid film to shoot brilliant abstracts of pure light and color. The resulting images are so perfect they make my head want to fall off every time I look at them. Feast your eyes!

The Poem Series About the Spring of 2006 Resumes With This Latest Installment

April 20, 2006
The best thing about today

is my new full skirt
cream-colored
with huge pale-brown polka-dots
worn with a turquoise sweater

I can’t say that my mood
matches how cheery I look
but I suppose
a nice facade
never hurts



image source is here

The Green Editorial Pouch and Its Progeny

Working at Chronicle Books frequently entails gathering up your notebook and your pen and your wallet and your cell phone and your swipe-card for the elevator, and taking them all downstairs with you to Ironside, the cafe in the ground floor of our building, for a caffeinated meeting with visitors or coworkers. And if you are me, when your hands get that full of that many things, you frequently start to drop and/or forget stuff. So as a present to myself (on the occasion of my promotion to Senior Editor (which, honestly, I still can't get over, eeeeee!)) I bought myself the kelly green leather pouch with yellow zipper, pictured above, from American Apparel, to throw all my stuff in and carry down to coffee meetings with me. And I love it. That was what this Publishing Wednesday blog post started out to be about: a recent new enjoyable accoutrement to my job as editor. But what happened? Well, I did a google image search to find a picture of the thing, sorted my search by the color green, and almost immediately found myself tumbling down the image search rabbit hole: photos of pouches, photos of green apparel, photos of random green things. This is what happens. Nor am I inclined to resist it. See for yourself...

Dame Vivienne Westwood

Can we just talk for a moment about how kick-ass Dame Vivienne Westwood is? Seriously. It's kind of mind-boggling. She might just be the coolest person on the planet. A shining inspiration to hold in our minds' eyes as we age; if we could all be one-one-hundredth as awesome when we are old ladies (and I use that term with both consideration and admiration) we will be lucky lucky ducks.

Father's Day!

The girl and her father on Father's Day. This picture makes me really happy.

Jessica Silverman Gallery

I stopped by Jessica Silverman Gallery the other day to check out the current show The History of Technology. Lots of intriguing work here from artists Simon Denny, Samuel Levi Jones, Dashiell Manley, Philipp Timischl, Margo Wolowiec (which you can peek at below, or click through to the show page for more images and details). But my favorite piece was the one above by Samuel Levi Jones. I am coming to realize that I am a sucker for art that incorporates tiled or quilted looking squares and rectangles. Go figure.

A Brief Hiatus in the Poem Series About 2006, to Share the First Non-Series Poem I've Composed in Perhaps Two Decades

People Who Are Walking Down the Street At Five Thirty in the Morning

Insomniacs, night-owls, early-risers
Those just in from other time zones (Japanese tourists, Europeans, New Yorkers)
Gym rats (skinny old men, skinny young women, plump young women)
Nurses (I know)
Bakers (I surmise)
Not the homeless (they are asleep in the doorways)
Not the mad, drunk, or drug-addled (as you might think)

Senior Editor

This week I was promoted to Senior Editor of art publishing at Chronicle books. This is a really big deal and I feel hugely honored. I started at Chronicle a little over 12 years ago, answering the phone. Just shy of 10 years ago I got my first gig as an Editorial Assistant. Now I am doing what has turned out to be my dream job. I feel hugely fortunate.

What Grains of Sand Actually Look Like

I am pretty floored by these photos, taken by Gary Greenberg using an extremely high-powered microscope, and showing what individual grains of sand from various beaches around the world really look like up close. The variety! The shapes and colors and patterns! This is exactly the kind of marriage of art, science, and the hidden astonishing world all around us that just inspires the heck out of me. Thanks to Beautiful/Decay for drawing my attention to these amazing images.

Wildflowers in Oregon

Driving along on the back-roads of southern Oregon, we stopped to pick a small bouquet of wildflowers. It's typing sentences like that one, and looking at photos like the above one, that make me feel I am an extremely lucky human.

Make Me a Woman by Vanessa Davis

When I was in Portland for the ICON illustration conference I had dinner with the lovely and charming Vanessa Davis. I got her book Make Me a Woman and she signed it for me. Having now read it, and loved it, I wanted to share some of my favorite images with you. The way she draws girls' cloths is perfection for one thing (I'm pretty sure I wore the exact outfit above to a party in the aughties). And then I especially love her sketchbook pages that are included in the book--full of brilliant single-point perspective, barely-there yet oh-so-evocative settings, laugh-out-loud humor, and even mistakes like the image at the very bottom of this post featuring a somewhat poorly-drawn tiger and the note to self to "look up tiger."