The art of mending

Thursday, February 6, 2020

It was interesting to come across Dorothea Lange’s 1934 photo of a woman’s mended stockings after reading about the Japanese art of Sashiko, which seems to be having a moment online:

Miho Takeuchi, a traditional sashiko instructor and designer born in Japan and based in the United States, tells me via email that sashiko, which developed in poor communities in Japan’s Edo period, “was born from the necessity of mending and patching garments, beddings and household items. In ancient days, clothing and bedding were made from homespun fabrics woven from native fibrous plants such as wisteria and hemp and necessity demanded that this clothing be recycled for as long as possible.” It was only later, she tells me, that the technique evolved to include the elaborate surface-level designs and intricate patterns popular with visible menders today.

“Whereas mending was once the province of those who could not afford new clothes,” the article notes, “today’s visible mending is the province, primarily, of those who can afford the time and attention it takes to make one’s clothes into a statement.” (See: “The poor can’t afford not to wear nice clothes.”)

Here is another photo by Lange, which seems to be of the same legs, stockings, and shoes, but look closely at both images, and you’ll see different contexts. In the first image, which is cropped closely on the legs coming out of shadows, the shoes are resting on worn wooden planks, and the mends almost look like scars. In the second image, where you can see the rest of her outfit and the smooth floor, the mending on the stockings looks more subtle and elegant.

I did a bunch of digging in Lange’s archives at the Library of Congress, but couldn’t find any more images of these feet. (Lange did a whole series of worn stockings and shoes. It’s interesting to note how much Lange liked photographing legs and feet — her own foot was misshapen by childhood polio and she walked with a limp.) Would love to know more about these images, or if there are any others in the series, if anybody knows.

Art from Life

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Found art from Life magazine, Jan 22, 1945, scanned by Google Books. (The words from the opposite page read: “electric America It me.”)

The cube (in praise of solvable problems)

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs to replace the old doorknobs in the old house we were living in. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.

When so many of life’s problems are unsolvable, solvable problems are a wonderful distraction. When so many things seem unfixable, fixing something feels amazing.

My son got a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas. Something compelled me this weekend to sit down and try to figure it out. I missed the whole craze in the 80s, so I was completely new to it. After watching an online tutorial, I discovered that there are step-by-step systems you can apply to solving it. You can actually attack it like a programmer with code: You basically look at the cube and run if/then statements in your head to find the right algorithm to apply. After the first dozen solves, I felt like I was replacing doorknobs again, except there were as many doorknobs as I wanted!

There’s something about keeping your hands busy when your brain feels broken. I have friends with depression who build elaborate LEGO sets. I’ve read about veterans with PTSD who put together gigantic jigsaw puzzles.

We’re wired to want to turn chaos into order. Randomness into meaning.

It’s why hobbies are so important…

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8Eybh5AnIG/

Collage is thinking on the page

Friday, January 31, 2020

For me, collage is the method that gets closest to depicting how I actually think on the page. (Next closest would be drawing, or, more specifically, comics, diagramming, mind-mapping, etc.) Writing, on the other hand, is conveying to others what I think on the page. There’s a difference.

So I was quite pleased when my friend Kio sent me this excerpt from Barbara Maria Stafford’s Visual Analogy: Consciousness As the Art of Connecting:

“Whether participating in a common outer life or making sense of the varieties of inner experience, understanding occurs as the consequence of an expenditure of psychic and physical energy compelling disparate things to converge. The inbetweenness of assemblage—those bodyobject amalgams composed of tossed scraps, found objects, organic and inorganic remnants—embodies this stunning spectrum of relocatable patterns available to human subjectivity. Collage, as the process of transforming ephemera by cutting and pasting them into momentarily stable configurations, continues to be a particularly effective technique for capturing the chimera of consciousness in action. We literally see how the brain organizes incoming visual stimuli by witnessing how perceptual organization begins by distinguishing salient features, to recombine bits and pieces and process them unequally in the mind’s eye.”

(Emphasis mine.)

29-day challenge

Friday, January 31, 2020

A few years ago, I gave up on New Year’s Resolutions. (April might be the cruelest month, but January feels like the longest.)

Now, if I make any resolutions at all, I make them in February. It’s short, therefore it brings the quickest sense of accomplishment to a new daily habit.

If you, too, would like to make a February resolution, here’s an easy, lo-fi way to keep track of your progress, adapted from the 30-day challenge in the The Steal Like An Artist Journal, and modified for the leap year: