The Artist’s Magazine, in its July/August 2009 issue, ran a combined profile/how-does-he-do-it article on the prolific children’s book writer/illustrator Eric Carle.  Mr. Carle is known for his disarming and deceptively simple use of “painted tissue paper collage.”  As Holly Davis wrote in “A Very Young Heart,” it is his “hallmark” and the artist has been refining its form and use for many, many years.

I was struck by the joyful persistence that seems to characterize Mr. Carle and his continuous tending to what makes his work, his look, his approach, unique.  On the one hand, this is just one simple idea — a “painted tissue paper collage.”  On the other hand, it is an idea that is born anew every time he takes on a new project.  His discipline extends to reprints of his existing work.  For example, “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See,” his first picture book, has been reprinted six times.  So, six times he has refreshed and updated the illustrations to reflect the ongoing development of his collage process.

And here’s an example of where Mr. Carle’s collage themes might come from:  ”… a newspaper article about a crate of 29,000 rubber ducks that fell from a ship — and the various places where some of those ducks were later found …” was the genesis for two works, the counting book “10 Little Rubber Ducks” and the picture book “Topsy Turvy.”

“Google engineers usually start with a single question: Why must we do things the way they’ve always been done?”

From “Searching for Trouble,” a profile of Google by Ken Auletta in the October 12, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.

“Like Duchamp’s ready-mades, the ultimate importance of a work by Warhol is not who physically made each object, but the ideas it generates.”

From “What Is an Andy Warhol?” by Richard Dorment in the October 22, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books (reviewing three recent Warhol biographies).

Consider the story of astronaut-turned-artist Alan Bean, as told by James C. McKinley Jr. in the The New York Times of June 25, 2009 — “An Astronaut Goes from Walking on the Moon to Painting It.”

On the one hand, Mr. Bean is close to being unique.  Because of his Apollo 12 mission, he is one of only four people to have walked on the moon.  His work clearly reflects his experiences, down to his use of his actual space hammer, space boots and patches of his spacesuit to texture his canvases.

On the other hand, in the details that Mr. McKinley reported, I also saw near-universality.  Mr. Bean is answering the questions that each artist, no matter his or her background, faces — about the individual expression of ideas.  He took up painting early in his space career, but struggled with stereotypical — to him — classroom still-life assignments of fruits and flowers.  A friend challenged him about why he kept painting earth-bound things: “You’re the only artist that’s ever been anywhere else but this earth, and you keep painting the earth.”  He quit NASA in 1981 to paint full-time because “there were younger pilots who could handle the new space shuttle … only he could do the paintings he wanted to do.”

“Dissatisfied with the sound of amplified guitars, he used a piece of railway sleeper to make a solid base for the strings and pickups, producing in this way a unique tone.  The ‘log,’ as he called it, was the first solid-body electric guitar.”

From the tribute to the late Les Paul, “the man who changed rock music,” in the August 22, 2009 issue of The Economist.

Often we think of ideas as flashes — as all-of-a-sudden — as epiphanies that cause us to fall off the horse, like Paul.  But many ideas just take their time.

This seems to have been the case with Ivan’s idea.

Ivan is the newly-revealed half-brother of my friend Leonor’s husband Doug.  It seems that 80+ years ago, Ivan’s mother Eileen left infant Ivan in Ireland and came to the US, where she made her life, including marrying and having two other children.  The Ivan-part of her life was apparently abandoned, and the children never knew of each other’s existence.  Eileen died in 1992.

From his youth, Ivan had begun very slowly trying to find his mother, as she had left some tantalizing clues. But Ivan had a life to lead in Ireland, a good one, with his own marriage and family and work, so it was not until the middle of 2008 that Doug received a stunning letter — from  a reputable Irish charitable organization that helps reconnect separated families.  The rest, as the cliche goes, is history.

Leonor had to dial the phone for that first call that Doug made to Ivan, so nervous was Doug.  But the conversation was soon like that between two long-lost — well — brothers.  Leonor and Doug and Doug’s sister have since visited Ivan and his family in Ireland, and they have all also met up in New York.  The letters and e-mails and phone calls fly fast and furious.  Among all these people, there is now a new definition of “family.”

Ivan’s idea took many, many years to play out — and it will continue to play out for years to come, in ways that Ivan will have no control over, no knowledge of.

Leonor wonders mightily about the timing of the revelation of Ivan’s existence.  Just months before Doug received that letter, Leonor lost her brother James to suicide.  And through her grief, though it’s still fresh, she sees the mirror image of a lost brother, and a found brother.

“Mr. Rogallo’s wife, Gertrude, helped him develop his ideas for a flexible, ultralight aircraft.  She used her sewing machine and a flowered chintz kitchen curtain to give substance to the vision, a sort of cross between a boat sail and a parachute.”  From Douglas Martin’s obituary of F.M. Rogallo, “the father of hang gliding,” in the September 5, 2009 issue of The New York Times.