If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
Over the years, we have created mood boards, conceptual packages and idea books for clients in architecture, interior design, fashion and the entertainment business.
We eventually realized that the most interesting and gratifying aspect of our work was the world we were creating outside of all of the research. It was the things that would inspire us along the way that had made a lasting impact in our lives.
Our Blog is collection of images that have made us pause, reflect and appreciate art that reinforces our belief that each and every day there is a endless flow of beauty being manifested in the universe by people who are capable of providing a glimpse into a world of infinite possibilities, beauty and excellence. Enjoy!
As you study the image before you, it might initially seem like a beautiful textile design, but then familiar elements of typography and language float to the forefront of your awareness and you realize it’s something much more.
Each piece is a Buddist saying, a song lyric or an inspirational thought which has been written in reverse. Through this process, we deconstruct words and letters, and create pieces which embody the virtues of the phrases they represent. Thus, the viewer absorbs the meaning as opposed to just reading it.
All of the art, prints and photographs and other collectables in our curated collection are carefully produced: Every work comes signed and with a numbered certificate that ensures the one you own is part of an exclusive edition created with Harvey Lynch. Once they’re sold out, they’re gone for good-so if you see something you like, snap it up!!!
Nicole Davis interviewed John Baldessari in his studio in Santa Monica, Ca., on Apr. 12, 2004.
John Baldessari: So, fire away.
Nicole Davis: What led you to become an artist?
JB: I always had this idea that doing art was just a masturbatory activity, and didn’t really help anybody. I was teaching kids in the California Youth Authority, an honor camp where they send kids instead of sending them to prison. One kid came to me one day and asked if I would open up the arts and crafts building at night so they could work. I said, “If all of you guys will cool it in the classes, then I’ll baby-sit you.” Worked like a charm. Here were these kids that had no values I could embrace, that cared about art more than I. So, I said, “Well, I guess art has some function in society,” and I haven’t gotten beyond that yet, but it was enough to convince me that art did some good somehow. I just needed a reason that wasn’t all about myself. Read more
John Baldessari is an American conceptual artist. After studying art at San Diego State College (1949–57), he began to develop his painting style, soon incorporating letters, words and photographs in his works. By 1966 he was using photographs and text, or simply text, on canvas as in Semi-close-up of Girl by Geranium … (1966–8; Basle, Kstmus.). From 1970 he worked in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. His work is characterized by a consciousness of language evident in his use of puns, semantics based on the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and by the incorporation of material drawn from popular culture. Both are apparent in Blasted Allegories (1978; New York, Sonnabend Gal.), a series combining polaroids of television images captioned and arranged to suggest an unusual syntax. Baldessari differed from other conceptual artists in his humour and commitment to the visual image. He dramatized the ordinary, although beneath the apparent simplicity of his words and images lie multiple connotations. We LOVE him!
The illusion derives from tiny glass beads that Mary Corse, now 66, mixes into her paint before brushing it on the canvas. The same microspheres, as she calls them, are what make the white lines on a two-lane blacktop reflective in the dark. “But my paintings are not reflective!” Corse was quick to say during a recent visit to New York from her home in the Malibu hills of Los Angeles. “They create a prism that brings the surface into view. I like that because it brings the viewer into the light as well. The idea, she said, is to get inside the paintings — “to create a space that actually isn’t there.”
Throughout her career, the nature of perception has been Corse’s subject, but it only underscores her basic premise. “There’s nothing static in reality,” she said. “So I didn’t want my paintings to be static either. But we live in an abstract universe and it’s pure abstraction I’m after.”
Stefano Arienti (born 1961) is an Italian artist whose art is inspired by the Arte Povera and Conceptual movements. He lives and works in Milan, Italy.
His work is made of found materials such as magazines, postcards, newspapers and books. Source materials are transformed through minimal actions such as folding or puncturing done repeatedly and systematically. He has exhibited extensively and in 2005, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l’Arte held a retrospective of his work. In 2008, Francesco Bonami curated the monumental exhibition “Italics: Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008″ at the Palazzo Grassi that included Arienti’s Cassetto con strisce, 1987-1989. In 2009, the exhibition travelled to MCA Chicago.In 2007, Arienti was commissioned by Art Pace for their International Artist-In-Residence program. There he exhibited Library, a landscape of 400 bushels of wheat and 99 books that were buried within. In the Fall of 2010, Arienti showed his third solo exhibition, natura, natura, natura at greengrassi in London, UK.
Berlin-based Norwegian artist Øystein Aassan uses a combination of materials including paper, plywood, ink, adhesive letters, photography, and pop cultural imagery to create sculptural installations and wall pieces that explore issues around memory and duplication. Influenced by the presentation of works in Peggy Guggenheim’s early-20th-century gallery, Art of This Century, Aasan arranges images and reproduced texts on architectural grids, or what the artist calls “display units”, drawing attention to the construction of the pieces.
Mary Lum Born 1951, in St. Cloud, MN, lives and works in North Adams, MA
Received her MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY and her BFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Carrol and Sons Gallery, Boston, MA
Mary Lum creates collages and wall works that outline and unfold space, gleaned from the margins of the urban environment. She collects fragmented images and the poetic undercurrents of the city through her camera lens, later dislocating these architectural details—stairwells and railings for instance—and repositioning them in geometric planes of color that open up space. In doing so, she draws attention to the overlooked but subliminally powerful architecture of modern life.
With frequent residencies in Paris, London, and New York, Lum casts herself in the role of the latter-day flâneuse (a French term meaning stroller coined by Charles Baudelaire). She ties her interest in flânerie back to Baudelaire, but also to Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project and the concept of psychogeography as practiced by 1950s and 60s writers and artists of the Situationists International. Pyschogeography suggests the experience of one’s environment through intuition rather than cognitive organization. This kind of perceptive exploration of cities feeds Lum’s interdisciplinary practice.
Ai Weiwei (born 18 May 1957) is a Chinese contemporary artist, active in sculpture, installation, architecture, curating, photography, film, and social, political and cultural criticism.Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics.
Ai Weiwei is China’s most famous international artist, and its most outspoken domestic critic. Against a backdrop of strict censorship and an unresponsive legal system, Ai expresses himself and organizes people through art and social media. In response, Chinese authorities have shut down his blog, beat him up, bulldozed his newly built studio, and held him in secret detention.
As a political activist, he has been highly and openly critical of the Chinese Government’s stance on democracy and human rights. He has investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of so-called “tofu-skin schools” in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
In 2011, following his arrest at Beijing airport on 3 April, he was held for over two months without any official charges being filed; officials alluded to their allegations of “economic crimes” (tax evasion).
In October 2011 ArtReview magazine named Ai number one in their annual Power 100 list. The decision was criticised by the Chinese authorities. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin responded, “China has many artists who have sufficient ability. We feel that a selection that is based purely on a political bias and perspective has violated the objectives of the magazine”.
AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY is the inside story of a dissident for the digital age who inspires global audiences and blurs the boundaries of art and politics. First-time director Alison Klayman gained unprecedented access to Ai while working as a journalist in China. Her detailed portrait provides a nuanced exploration of contemporary China and one of its most compelling public figures. This is one to watch and it’s on netflix!
Born in Cholet in 1926 François Morellet worked in his father’s business between 1948 and 1975. He taught himself to paint but also took lessons from a painter. His early landscapes, portraits and still lifes were executed in pastose brushwork in a subdued palette but they soon gave way to painting distinguished by stylized pictorial elements. By 1950 François Morellet was styling himself an “abstract painter”. That year Morellet had his first one-man show at the Galerie Creuze in Paris.
In the mid-1950s François Morellet was preoccupied with configuring the picture field as an infinite structure reaching beyond the confines of the picture itself. In so doing, François Morellet eliminated the all-over technique of a Jackson Pollock from his range since Morellet based each work on principles and systems established in advance. François Morellet was in fact more interested in method than in the finished painting.
Morellet joined “GRAV” (‘Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel’: 1960-1968), a group of Kinetic artists who explored the possibilities of the visual arts in a scientific and experimental way. Determined to find a new medium of expression, François Morellet used neon from 1963 as his material of choice. What interested Morellet in neon tubing was its specific material properties: its luminosity, the way it could be made to shut on and off automatically and the fact that it was manufactured.
From 1968 François Morellet became interested in architecture and space. He was given commissions for working in public spaces, including the Centre culturel in Compiègne, the La Défense section of Paris and the Kröller-Müller Museum Park in Otterlo.
In 1992 François Morellet summed up his work himself in “Relâche n° 1″ by combining in it all the materials he had ever used: painted canvas, neon tubing, adhesive tape and strips of metal. Following aleatoric principles, François Morellet allowed chance to transform his materials into an aesthetic disorder. His provocative stance and humor place Morellet closer to Dada than to Geometric Abstraction and Minimal art.
François Morellet lives in Cholet and Paris.
Paul Insectis UK street artist, who is most famous for his 2007 solo show Bullion exhibition at London’s Art gallery, Lazarides Gallery. Damien Hirst is reported to be a fan of Insect, having purchased the show days before it opened.
Insect, who also goes by the name of PINS, worked alongside well-known artist Banksy at the Cans Festival, Santas Ghetto, and on the separation wall in Palestine.Insect is well known for his collective named ‘insect’ which started in 1996, and disbanded in 2005. Insect held an exhibition at a disused Sex shop in London’s Kings Cross area in 2008 in partnership with Lazarides Gallery.This contained 12 bronze skulls with color enameled bunny ears. Dead Playboy Bunnygirls …..
Paul Insect also works with the San Francisco based Hip Hop producer, DJ Shadow creating the artwork for his Outsider Album.
Love it!
Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born in London in 1932 and attended Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham . British painter and printmaker, his work is most often associated with abstraction. In 1984, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and in the following year won the Turner Prize. He has exhibited internationally for over four decades and his work is included in major public and private collections all over the world. In 2003 he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of Honour. A major exhibition of his work was mounted at Tate Britain, London, in 2006. Also in 2006, The Independent declared him one of the 100 most influential gay people in Britain, as his work helps many people express their emotions to others. Hodgkin’s work plays with the notion of “representational pictures of emotional situations,” and viewers delight exploring in the intense interactions of paint and surface. A brilliant colorist whose work lies between representation and abstraction, Hodgkin defies definitions.
