The Idea Blog

“Each collection begins with a constellation of such images, and from there a loose theme arises.  The muted colors and marbled fabrics in the 2009 fall collection were intended to resemble granite, slate, marble: ‘the materials used in the structure of a home,’ the designers wrote in an e-mail. The idea arrived when the sisters drove by a cluster of dilapidated houses alongside the freeway.”  From “Twisted Sisters” by Amanda Fortini, a profile of Kate and Laura Mulleavy and their fashion house Rodarte, in the January 18, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.

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Beyond their obvious similarities — quilts by women in isolated communities — two shows that have come through the deYoung Museum in San Francisco in recent years have strongly tugged at my imagination.  Truly, how did the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama and the various Amish settlememts in Pennsylvania and the Midwest — who did not know of each other, yet worked in strikingly similar ways — get their ideas?

The quick answer, I think, is — through their lives.  Their circumstances, the materials available to them, the visual images occuring in their homes and towns and natural surroundings, their religious beliefs, their weddings and births and deaths — all these and many more factors were distilled in an abstract, non-representational fashion through these women’s hearts and minds and out through their hands into the world.  And until Gee’s Bend and the Amish were “discovered,” the world consisted only of the women’s immediate communities, where their quilts were objects of use — sometimes everyday use, sometimes reserved for special occasions — not objects of art.

The Gee’s Bend/Amish isolation also extended to any influence imposed by the greater world of art. Apparently, there was no such influence.  To wit –

“The bold formal inventiveness of Gee’s Bend quilts is truly remarkable and is responsible for the immediate impact they have on art viewers.  Given this fact, it is natural to seek comparisons or context with other art.  We do know that the quiltmakers were not aware of the geometric explorations of twentieth-century modernist abstract painters such as Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, or Ellsworth Kelly.  Yet to many eyes (including mine) there is an uncanny dialogue with this separate and distinct line of art history.  Pehaps the common thread is that both the quiltmaker and the modernist masters seek the challenges and pleasure of creating visually complex images.”  (From “Beyond Gee’s Bend: The Future of Art,” an essay by Dana Friis-Hansen in “Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts, and Beyond” published by the Austin Museum of Art)

“Many have compared the abstract geometry of Amish quilts to the works of acclaimed modernist painters such as Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Victor Vasarely.  Any such comparisons are problematic, however, because they are built on visual coincidence, not on any documented historical connection or known influence in either direction.  Amish women got there first, and they got there whole; they began making quilts around 1880 and were thus working with full-fledged abstract design decades before any of these men were painting grids, color fields, optical illusions, or minimalist reductions.  And, while the designs of the quilts appear modern to eyes accustomed to looking at abstract art, they are not the work of modernists at all.”  (From “Fundamentally Abstract: The Aesthetic Achievement of Amish Quiltmakers,” an essay by Robert Shaw in “Amish Abstractions,” published by the Fine Arts Musems of San Francisco)

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“Apple is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a peculiar form.  Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly.”  From an article in the January 31, 2010 issue of The Economist about the introduction of the Apple iPad.

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“He also figured out how to stabilize the sand and make the soil arable, coming upon a solution almost by accident.  After noticing that barley spilled from a horse’s feed bag sprouted in the sand, he sowed quick-growing grasses along with native lupines and other species.” From “Urban Oasis,” about San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and its original designer Wiliam Hammond Hall’s first efforts in the 1870s to carve a green park out of an expanse of sand dunes, in the March-April 2010 issue of Via, published by AAA.

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“The play was inspired by the real-life case of David Hampton, who gained lodging, meals and money from a number of notables by pretending to be the son of Sidney Poitier.”  From a review of The Old Vic’s revival of John Guare’s 1990 play “Six Degrees of Separation” in the Financial Times (January 25, 2010).

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Two sea creatures doing what comes naturally were the genesis of two ideas written about in the December 12, 2009 issue of The Economist.

Idea #1: The glue “secreted” by the sandcastle worm “to stick bits of sand together to form its casing” (instead of building its shell directly from its own body minerals) may be used to help heal compound fratures of human bones, especially the fragments that are too small to be screwed and pinned together.  ”Medics have long sought a glue to do this work, and now Russell Stewart of the University of Utah may have found one in the secretions of a marine worm.”

Idea #2: Inpsired by “a Japanese company (that) hooked up the lights on a Christmas tree to a tank containing an electric eel,” researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland have developed a photocell — an actual battery that can power things — based on the way the eel’s “living cell membranes and their proteins” communicate back and forth.

When we speak of “harnessing nature,” we generally mean in some grandly visible way, like a hydroelectric dam.  But two sea creatutes, doing their hardly observable little thing?

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“Mr. Lindsey’s productivity was a source of as much admiration as curiosity in the music press, and he was often asked to explain his compulsion to create so much music so quickly.  ’I'm just trying to get the idea out before the inspiration is gone,’ he said.  ’Everything I do is motivated by the fear of running out of time.’”  From The New York Times obituary (January 15, 2010) of Jimmy Lee Lindsey, 29, a “creative tornado” known as Jay Reatard in the punk/garage rock music world.

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I fell for “Jane Eyre” the first time I read it, so many years ago, and I re-read it every five years or so. I have met others who do the same thing. Right now, one of my plans is to paint a picture of the chestnut tree that is split by lighting the night that Jane agrees to marry Mr. Rochester (the first time, that is, before the wedding that doesn’t take place, causing Jane to run away, of course, later she comes back — oh, read it yourself).

So when I found “Becoming Jane Eyre,” by Sheila Kohler, on the shelf at my public library, I checked it out.  This novel imagines how Charlotte Bronte came to write her masterpiece. Early on, this passage struck me with some force, as I thought it viscerally expressed what it can be like to grow the tiniest germ of an idea.  Here, at a time when she is also tending to her blind father, Charlotte is wrestling with what to name her book’s heroine:

“It comes to her out of thin air.  She is not sure if she has heard such a name.  Was there someone she knew with that name?  Does it come from the family arms she once saw in a church, or the river she knows well, the beautiful valley of the Ayre?  Or is it a name that comes from air, perhaps, or fire?  Fire and ire will be in the book: rage at the world as it is.  Unfair!  Unfair! Ire and eyer: she is the one who now sees in her father’s place.  She has become the voyeur, the observer.  Plain Jane, Emily Jane, her beloved sister’s second name, Jane, so close to Joan, brave Joan of Arc, Jane so close to Janet, Jeanette, little Jane.  A name that conjures up duty and dullness, childhood and obedience, but also spirit and liberty, a sprite’s name, a fairy’s name, half spirit, half flesh, light in darkness, truth and hypocrisy, the name of one who sees: Jane Eyre.”

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“The idea of saving for a rainy day originated with farm hands whose work depended on the weather.  Conservationists are thinking similarly about climate change and freezing the cells of threatened animals as a sort of insurance policy.”  From an article about “trying to save a frog from extinction” in the January 30, 2010 issue of The Economist.

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“‘I found the slot that was missing in rhythm education,’ he told The New York Times in 1985.  ’I found a way to activate the silences between the notes.’”  (From Peter Keepnews’ obituary of Ed Thigpen, jazz drummer, on January 26, 2010.)

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