The magnificent people of Free Range are attempting to build an alternative to Bandcamp as a platform coop. What a splendid idea.
There aren't many artists on there at the moment but Elite Panic is one of them.
Email and bricks
This interview with Glenn Adamson has a couple of lovely bits in it.
Firstly, this reframing of email, which I really like:
"And I remember in fact somebody once telling me that what you must never do is treat your email inbox as your to do list. And having thought about that for for while, I’m actually not sure that I agree with that because I think that email does uniquely is immediately remind you of what people are expecting from you and what they need from you. And it’s a stunningly accurate, immediate reminder of your relationships. The way that it indexes those other humans in your life, and all those dependencies, I think that’s quite remarkable and kind of beautiful. So if you can detach from the stress and urgency of it and think of it as a kind of portrait of your ongoing human contact. I think there’s actually a lot to of value there and I find it quite a helpful instrument for getting all this stuff done."
Secondly this story about bricks:
"As you were talking a couple of minutes ago it reminded me of a house that we once listed for sale with The Modern House, a few years back.
And it was owned by a librarian and he, basically, would take a backpack with him to the library each day. And on his way walking back in the evening he would go down to the Thames.
And he would find the nicest, best preserved bricks that he could, that had been washed up from the water. And he would put them in his backpack and he would carry them home.
And he did this for years and years and years, and eventually he built up enough of a pile of reclaimed bricks that he could build a house, So he built this house.
And I think that’s the most extraordinary thing because it’s all about craft and it’s about passion and love and so much heart in it and of course it’s as local and sustainable as you can get."
Related: this from Anthea Hamilton
Do Cornelissen
A piece in today's FT magazine reminded me that I wrote about L. Cornelissen in the long version of the Do Interesting book. It's still in there but it got trimmed a lot. It's below.
And there's this lovely little quote from the owner.
Here's the piece. This version's also better because it's got a longer interview with Navaz...
There’s a shop called L Cornelissen and Son. They’ve been selling art supplies in London since 1855.
The place sells colour like a Harry Potter shop might sell magic; like a mediaeval library for paint and papers.
And they’re indirectly responsible for billions of pounds of commercial creativity, because generations of advertising art directors and copywriters get their particular large, green scrapbooks from L. Cornelissen.
Advertising creatives have particularly well honed habits when it comes to the production of interesting ideas. They do it on demand. For money. They know, more than almost anyone else, that you can’t rely on inspiration.
So they collect and collect and collect.
Images, photography, illustrative styles, bits of type, overheard speech, fragments of idea, other ads, anything that grabs their eye.
None of it with any real purpose other than one day it’ll come in handy. (And this is one place where the industry's reputation for kleptomania comes from.)
Everyone in an advertising agency has seen it: late at night, ‘the creatives’ stuck on a project, desperately leafing through their scrapbooks looking for the image, or the juxtaposition of images, that’ll light up their brief.
And then, even later, sneaking into another creative team’s office to see what’s in their scrapbooks.
This is where most of the best ads in the world have come from.
Follow their lead. Collect stuff that catches your eye. Stick it in a book. Flick through when you’re looking for ideas. You can do it electronically but paper really helps. You develop a sense memory for where a particular idea sits, you get the unexpected connections and happy accidents of adjacent pages, you get something to do with your hands when you’re thinking, and something to share with your work partner.
Maybe physical scrapbooks work by being tools for what the psychologist Ellen Langer calls ‘soft openness’
“What you want is a soft openness—to be attentive to the things you’re doing but not single-minded, because then you’re missing other opportunities.”
And it’s not just advertising creatives who love scrapbooks. Fashion people are the same.
Navaz Batliwalla is an editorial consultant, author, stylist and fashion blogger. I talked to her about her creative habits.
“Yeah, I have scrapbooks and I've been doing scrapbooks since I was a student. I'm like a scrapbook myself. I'm very hybridy. Taking things from different places and then hatching them together in whatever context.
I love collage and when I went to college I actually wanted to be an illustrator. The course was called fashion promotion, illustration, and photography. The course was like a collage itself.
One of my good friends at college was into collage and he made these beautiful scrapbooks. And I got this really amazing one with different coloured papers, it was massive and quite expensive so I just keep stuffing and stuffing and stuffing.
So now I’ve got to the point where they're completely overstuffed and now I just use boxes and carrier bags. Bags full of scraps and it's really relaxing, putting the scraps together because that's when you start making connections.
I tend to revisit them all the time. And I tend to play with the scraps rather than actually putting them in the scrapbook. Once you commit to the scrapbook, it’s like I’ve finished something. I've made this lovely piece of art. So you are torn. How do I use this? Do I commit it to this or do I commit to something else?
It's so relaxing and even the process of putting straps together, your mind wanders. Maybe I do it every six months and all the things that happened to you in your life in six months means that you're looking at this piece in a different way. It means something completely different. It then goes with something else.
And if I'm starting a big project, like a book, you can just get the scrap out or get the box of sheets out and just start going through them, pulling things out and making a new pile and a way of thinking.
It's a way of easing yourself into the subject and it's amazing because although I know my scrapbooks and my boxes quite well now, there's always things that you've forgotten about. Something that you kept not knowing what it'll be for.
Also, when you look back through your scrapbook you find, oh, there's some themes in here which maybe you didn't know you were interested in to start with.”
I made it light up
This is this
'She mentioned a game that she used to play on car trips. “It’s called Fall in Love with a Tree,” she said. “The first tree you see in the distance, you just look at it and notice everything about it that makes it more special than the other trees.” She figured that the exercise could easily be applied to buildings, and homed in on a glass tower in the financial district. “I’m picking it because it’s not as noticeable,” she said. Suddenly, a halo of white lights began to glow on the building’s roof. Dacus smiled. “I made it light up.”'