Bright & Colourful:

Arbutus Coffee (Duncan Rawlinson a.k.a. thelastminute, flickr)

I just love the colour and simplicity in this. (justinknol, flickr)

In the Vintage & weird department:

Coffee + Spankings, vintage ad (seanbonner, flickr)

Coffee means pleasure, coffee means fun! (cowtools, flickr)

Coffee can bring the world to you! - vintage brochure imagery (cowtools, flickr)

Dedicated to the craft

Coffee Break (scarygami, flickr)

Old-time charm

London coffee shop (sheyne, flickr)

MUTO: An ambiguous animation painted on public walls

You’re invited to join her for The Ivy Project this Saturday Feb 28th (and the last Saturday of each month until Nov/09) at the Stanley Park Nature House. There’ll be much weaving of ivy and joining of previously woven pieces.

This project is in cooperation with The Ivy Busters. Sharon says:

Since 2004, Ivy Busters have removed over 3.95 hectares of invasive plant material from Stanley Park. Now the public is invited to work with me in exploring English ivy as an art material, re-purposing this invasive weed into sculptures that will be returned to the forest as artificial nurse logs, bird habitats and crocheted anti-erosion bio netting.

The Ivy Buster’s efforts have turned Ivy deserts into a more natural forest state. I have a patch of Ivy desert in my property… wonder if I could convince them to come over?

If you’re interested in other works like this, check out MOPARRC. Sharon, Lois Klassen, and Madam Beespeaker are an artists’ collective working in the Means of Production Garden in Vancouver. It’s a communal garden with the aim of growing materials for artists to work with. Cool stuff!

1. My dear friend Jody MacDonald has her first solo show in Campbell River until February 27th. (See her amazing sculptures in situ on her blog.) I just learned she’ll be interviewed by Sheryl MacKay of CBC’s North by Northwest. Yay, Jody!! I’ll update the air time once I know it. UPDATE: the show will air Sunday January 31st, 6-9 a.m. Guess I’m getting up early this Sunday!
   
2. Pam Slim, who I’ve gotten to know a little bit by hanging out on Twitter, has been getting a lot of press lately. She’s shared 5 ways to get media exposure on her blog.

This morning I sat staring at the blank pages of my sketchbook. The very, very blank pages. And I thought “Where are all the ideas?” “Why don’t I have any?” All the while, an ear worm circling in my head: “Where the fuck do ideas come from?” (That one courtesy of Ze Frank’s brilliant riff on ideas as brain crack. Thanks for that one, Darren.)

So without further delay, here are two answers I came up with this morning. They’re not definitive, mind you. And I hope you will share your answers to these important questions in the comments.

The first answer is so obvious I’m probably not the first to think of it.

It must be the Greedy Squirrels.

You see, an idea manifests in your brain. When it’s ripe for the picking, before you even know what’s happening, it falls out of your brain and a greedy idea squirrel comes along and takes it. He then squirrels it away underground somewhere. So, odds are, when you see a truly fabulous tree, it’s thriving on the pile of ideas buried within it’s roots. So I say next time you’re short on ideas, go squirrel hunting! What the heck, it can’t hurt and it’s better than banging your head against the keyboard.

So that explains why you might lose an idea. Where do they come from in the first place?

Idea Factories

My theory is that orbiting the earth are giant indetectable idea factories. Day in, day out, minute after minute, they pump out ideas like so many widgets. So many in fact that they have an entire department devoted to randomization. This department ensures that every idea is just a little bit different from every other idea.

When ideas reach the end of the production line, they are shot out of thousands of giant Suessian tubes pointed at Earth. They travel the long, dangerous journey, and if they’re lucky enough to miss the satellites, airplanes, birds, and skyscrapers and such, they’ll land safely in one of our minds.

And if you are really lucky, the ideas you receive have lots of randomness and survived the journey without getting bruised or shat upon by a brid.

I think this theory explains why I get so many ideas outside or in the shower. Some of those ideas must land in the streams and end up coming through the shower head.

Now it’s your turn. Where do you think ideas come from? What/who’s to blame when you have none?

I’d never heard of Elvine before; looks like they make nice stuff. I’d link to a couple of their sweet-looking jackets but their site is in Flash so the best I can do is their homepage. *Sigh*.

(Discovered via Gagan Diesh)

I’ve had this same sketchbook for almost 10 years. Sad, to have sketched so little in it, but it tells a story about the last 10 years of my life nonetheless. There are a number of sketches and sculpture ideas about losing myself in the giant telco, like making a self portrait of myself as Pinocchio wrapped mummy-like in telephone wire.

This sketch tells the story of life-in-the-wrong job at a glance:

Self Portrait Crushed by the Boot

That’s me, being crushed under the weight of “The Boot” which was then headquarters. Ah, the good old days of November 2004.

I went from finishing art school in ’96 to full time clerical work, squeezing in studio time at Dynamo Arts, an artist run centre I co-founded with Jody and others.  Didn’t take me long to realize my soul was withering at the day job and I began studying the web (was it in 98 ’99?). Eventually I gave up my studio at Dynamo – between school and work there wasn’t the time to run a centre and make art. My art has mostly been the forgotten orphan since then.

Making web sites fills those creative urges well enough that I don’t feel the same pull to the studio that I used to. (I think that will change when my under-construction studio is finished… Yay!) Most of the web work I’ve done is for other people, so I’ve kept this (odd?) separation of my Art Sketchbook from my day-to-day Web note/sketchbooks. So you can see why my art sketchbook would last me over 10 years.

Still, I’m reminded that I actually can draw reasonably well sometimes and I should get back to it. Here’s perhaps my favourite sketch (of mine), ever:

Sketch of a Sculpture of DaVinci

…and, posting that image which is too wide, I’m also reminded how badly I need to update the design on this blog. Cobbler’s shoes and all that. I drew this in a gallery (Victoria?), of a sculpture that was made after a sketch of Leonardo DaVini’s called “Lyre”.  It was in a small sketchbook so I ran out of room – I always seem to do that. Lots of my life drawings used to have cut off or deformed limbs from me trying to squeeze that foot into the bottom of the page. Case in point, on this one the poor girl had to reach onto the other page of the book:

After a photo book cover

Speaking of odd finishes, it’s now past 5am and I’d better sleep before I stop making any sense at all. G’night. ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz.

Take for instance Danny Barnes and his Banjo. Yes, banjo. But not just any banjo; the sample he gave us for the site sounds like some wild combination of hilbilly pickin’, traditional Japanese music, and sci-fi soundtrack.

Or Brian Lamb‘s Confessions of a Mashup Unartist which I would describe as an aural collage. (Um, Brian, you are an artist. Get over it. )

Both of these samples made me smile. Go, listen now, to these really inspiring people! Oh, and let me know what you think about the website. I’d love to hear it.

(*Though, as a Canadian, I do cringe at the part where a big fat NOTHING is displayed over my beloved homeland. )