To Do list №14 January
January 20th, 2021
9 minute read
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We made it to January, 2021. So much can change in an instant, and hopefully this year brings with it a healthy balance of joy and positivity for each of us. To change things up this year, instead of astrological updates this year each email will include a poem or a paragraph of writing to inspire you every month!
To start it off this winter month, here is a beautiful piece from Tao Te Ching
“Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference between success and failure?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!
Other people are excited,
as though they were at a parade.
I alone don't care,
I alone am expressionless,
like an infant before it can smile.
Other people have what they need;
I alone possess nothing.
I alone drift about,
like someone without a home.
I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.
Other people are bright;
I alone am dark.
Other people are sharp;
I alone am dull.
Other people have purpose;
I alone don't know.
I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.
I am different from ordinary people.
I drink from the Great Mother's breasts.”
― Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Where can you apply this simple poem into your life? When will you relax and let your anxiety go? Stop thinking, and end your problems! What powerful advice.
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Maiden
This absolutely moving documentary feels so good to watch that I actually wept with joy as it ended. One of the most inspiring stories about an extraordinary team.
“What it takes to sail around the world is, first of all, you have to be a bit crazy,” a voice tells us at the beginning of Alex Holmes’ moving documentary, “Maiden.” “You have to be different than the normal bloke.” Holmes’ subjects are certainly different than normal blokes in that they’re the first all-female competitors to enter a boat into the Whitbread Around the World Challenge. As with all firsts, the quest to be taken seriously is almost as insurmountable as the actual task at hand. And the Whitbread is no easy feat; it’s 33,000 nautical miles in total, most of which will be spent battling the Earth’s most plentiful and pissed off geographical resource, the ocean."
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/maiden-2019
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The Wisdom of insecurity
"The perfect guide for a course correction in life, away from materialism and its empty promise" (Deepak Chopra), The Wisdom of Insecurity shows us how—in an age of unprecedented anxiety—we must embrace the present and live fully in the now in order to live a fulfilling life.
Spending all our time trying to anticipate and plan for the future and to lamenting the past, we forget to embrace the here and now. We are so concerned with tomorrow that we forget to enjoy today. Drawing from Eastern philosophy and religion, Alan Watts shows that it is only by acknowledging what we do not—and cannot—know that we can learn anything truly worth knowing.
“Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable.’”
—Los Angeles Times
Alan Wilson Watts was a British writer and speaker known for interpreting and popularising Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York.
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"Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeois was raised by parents who ran a tapestry restoration business. A gifted student, she also helped out in the workshop by drawing missing elements in the scenes depicted on the tapestries. During this time, her father carried on an affair with Sadie Gordon Richmond, the English tutor who lived in the family house. This deeply troubling—and ultimately defining—betrayal remained a vivid memory for Bourgeois for the rest of her life. Later, she would study mathematics before eventually turning to art. She met Robert Goldwater, an American art historian, in Paris and they married and moved to New York in 1938. The couple raised three sons.
Early on, Bourgeois focused on painting and printmaking, turning to sculpture only in the later 1940s. However, by the 1950s and early 1960s, there are gaps in her production as she became immersed in psychoanalysis. Then, in 1964, for an exhibition after a long hiatus, Bourgeois presented strange, organically shaped plaster sculptures that contrasted dramatically with the totemic wood pieces she had exhibited earlier. But alternating between forms, materials, and scale, and veering between figuration and abstraction became a basic part of Bourgeois’s vision, even while she continually probed the same themes: loneliness, jealousy, anger, and fear."
- MOMA
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Suzanne Jackson (b.1944) has had a distinguished career as a painter, poet, costume and scenic designer, and dancer. She holds a BA in Art from San Francisco State University and an MFA in Design from Yale University School of Drama. Her work is included in public and private collections, including the Getty Archives and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Her breakthrough came around 2013. Always interested in layering colors so they seem to hover in pictorial space—as can be seen in her early paintings, which feature numerous thin washes—she asked herself a difficult question: could she somehow suspend her paint in midair? It turned out she could. The secret was acrylic gel medium—essentially the binder used to make paint—without any pigment in it. Using a palette knife, or simply her hands, Jackson lays this clear liquid down on a flat surface, allows it to dry so that it becomes a membrane, and then adds more on top. As she builds the material up, she introduces paint, various suggestive found objects (beads, peanut shells), and lots of plastic netting. The netting both improves the work’s physical integrity and establishes a wonky grid that serves as a visual baseline for her gestural abstraction.
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Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work.
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Gee's Bend Quiltmakers
The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, remote, Black community in Alabama—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The some seven hundred or so inhabitants of this small, rural community are mostly descendants of slaves, and for generations they worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation. Quiltmakers there have produced countless patchwork masterpieces beginning as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, with the oldest existing examples dating from the 1920s. Enlivened by a visual imagination that extends the expressive boundaries of the quilt genre, these astounding creations constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art.
Polly Bennett:
A creator of precisely patterned quilts and free-form, abstract works of rectangular strips—"get-togethers," she calls them—Polly Bennett has maintained this diversity of style since her earliest quilts from the 1930s.
A lot of my life I done forgot. I was born down in the Bend in 1922. My mother, she name Mary Mooney. Daddy was named Minniefield Mooney. Mama stayed down there with him until I was six years old and they separated. We moved up to a place owned by a white man named Dennis Will. We farmed up there: cotton, corn, peanuts, sweet potato, millet—some of them call it sorghum—cane used for syrup. We made what they call ribbon cane syrup. When I was grown I got given a job nursing for a white family—that's a lazy job, sitting down. It's easy after field work, too easy for me. I love to stir around. Then the cook, she left; I took the job cooking. I worked for two, three families. I worked long as I could afford satisfaction. When they start to complain, I might go someplace else. The last job I had, I worked for her for thirty-one years down in Gastonburg. Ora Laird. They say she was a mean lady, but I could get along with anybody once I found out their ways. I enjoyed working for her because she didn't ever tell me what to do. Not even what to cook for dinner. She say, "I ain't no cook. I eat. You the cook; cook what you want to." I never think I'm a good cook, but everywhere I work they said I was a good cook. I hate cooking. - Read more of her story: https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/polly-bennett
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THE PUFF SKIRT
Puffy co-ords didn't exist much before today. Why have the fashion Gods kept them from our lives? Pair the skirt back to the Bodysuit or our Vamp Ghosted top and tights and get that casual tutu effect.
Add the Vamp ghosted top to your order and use code; Dreamvamp for 30% off the full set
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