Saturday Tweets: Happy Feet and Sad Feet

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
RLeave a comment

Support Root Simple

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Drawing on a diverse array of real-life examples, from Amish farmers to harried parents to Silicon Valley programmers, Newport identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and the ideas that underpin them. He shows how digital minimalists are rethinking their relationship to social media, rediscovering the pleasures of the offline world, and reconnecting with their inner selves through regular periods of solitude. He then shares strategies for integrating these practices into your life, starting with a thirty-day “digital declutter” process that has already helped thousands feel less overwhelmed and more in control.

Make Magazine: Online and Free

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening, Water and Power
3 Comments

Update: It appears that the archive was taken down at the request of the magazine shortly after I wrote this post. Thanks Sean for letting me know!

I was sorry to hear that Make Magazine and its parent company Maker Media are calling it quits. Founder Dale Dougherty promises to bring the concept back at some future date but until that time there’s some good news. You can access all issues of Make Magazine for free at Archive.org.
 An article in Tech Crunch quotes Dougherty,

“We’re trying to keep the servers running” Dougherty tells me. “I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We’re not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I’m committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program.” The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.

[Update 6/9/19: Dougherty tells me he’s been overwhelmed by the support shown by the Maker community. For now, licensed Maker Faire events around the world will proceed as planned. Dougherty also says he’s aware of Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey’s interest in funding the company, and a GoFundMe page started for it.]

I wrote an article on drip irrigation for Issue 18 and have to say that it was a pleasure to work with the Make editorial team. Unlike other publications I’ve written for, the editors at Make knew a lot about the technical details of the subject matter and worked hard to ensure accuracy.

Speaking of technical details, the only thing I’d change if I wrote that article again is that I would recommend 1/2 inch drip irrigation tubing instead of 1/4 inch in the interest of keeping things simple and reducing the need for multiple fitting sizes. I stand by the rest of my irrigation pontifications.

Support Root Simple

Make: Electronics: Learning Through Discovery. The first edition of Make: Electronics established a new benchmark for introductory texts. This second edition enhances that learning experience. Using full color on every page, hundreds of photographs and diagrams convey concepts with unmatched clarity.

Platt uses a hands-on approach throughout. You learn by building your own simple circuits.

I’ve Been Working on This Chair When I Should Be Doing Other Things

Mr. Homegrown
Design
14 Comments

Having a degree in music and being a fan of Wagner’s operas means that I get to drop the word Gesamtkunstwerk in casual conversation around the house. Most often translated as “total work of art” it has, when applied to architecture, come to mean a control freak fantasy of designing everything in the house down to the paperclips.

The English architect C.F.A. Voysey (1857-1941) caught the Gesamtkunstwerk fever early in his life and drew up all furnishings down to the desk accessories in the houses he designed for clients. When I spotted some of the quirky chairs he produced in the years before WWI, I knew I wanted to set about replacing the random dining room chairs in our living room with a sextet of Voysey’s “One-Heart” chairs. I liked the strange devil-like horns, the fuddy-duddy heart, and the odd hexagonal, tapered legs. Voysey used the heart motif almost to excess in his work, so much so that his client H.G. Wells made him invert the symbol to make a spade.

I’m almost finished with the prototype that I based on a photo and from a measured drawing of one of Voysey’s “Two-Heart” chairs, by woodworker Nancy Hiller. The last step will be to weave a rush seat insert. Thankfully Los Angeles hosts not one, but two caning and rush seat supply shops–Franks Cane and Rush Supply and Cane and Basket.

Voysey’s original chair has an eye-catching dovetailed back splat. While aesthetically pleasing the design is a woodworking no-no as it involves grain tied together in two different directions with no allowance for wood movement. On most of the originals, unsurprisingly, the back has split. I omitted the dovetails in my Voysey chair remix opting for an unglued mortise instead. This small detail illustrates why designers and craftspeople need to be in dialog with each other.

Voysey said, “To produce healthy art one must have healthy surroundings; the first effort an artist should make is to sweep ugliness from him.” In our degraded and utilitarian times I’ve come to the insight that the pursuit of beauty is a good thing in itself and a moral obligation. Have a look around our cities and the places we live and work and you’ll see a whole lot of ugly. How depressing that art and music are some of the first things on the austerity chopping block. In our homes and communities we need to start sweeping away the ugliness and get to beautifying. We need to stop telling our children and young people that art is a waste of time. We need to plant gardens, make music and build happy, healthy and beautiful places to live and work.

Support Root Simple

English Arts & Crafts Furniture: Projects & Techniques for the Modern Maker explores the Arts & Crafts movement with a unique perspective on furniture designs inspired by English Arts & Crafts designers. Through examination of details and techniques as well as projects, you’ll learn what sets English Arts & Crafts apart and gain a deeper understanding of the overall Arts & Crafts movement and its influences.

A Brief History of Cat Art

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Cats
3 Comments

Cat drawing by Arthur Tomson.

The cat art meme lords of the present day interwebs aren’t anything new. Over the weekend I was thumbing through a digital copy of the 1894 issue of The Studio an Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, a highbrow art, architecture and craft periodical published in England and the U.S. between the years 1893 and 1925. After several hundred pages of some daring, racy and avant-garde stuff I was surprised to find a review of an exhibition of the cat art of a Mr. Arthur Tomson,

It has been recognised that he has, amongst contemporary painters of cats, eminently succeeded in expressing the suppleness of their action, their grace, and fascinating waywardness. His illustrations to a charming book of poems “Concerning Cats,” contributed to and selected by Graham R. Tomson, at once placed him in the ranks of the masters of this particular branch of animal painting. Those who are acquainted with the work of Burbank, the English painter of cats, Gottfried Mind, called the Raphael of cats, Hokusai, the Japanese genius, the Dutch artist Cornelius Wisscher, Delacroix, whose sketch-books were full of studies of cats, and J. J. Grandville, will understand how completely Mr. Tomson’s work justifies the position it takes amongst the work of these artists.

Would that the latest edition of Art Forum dedicated a few paragraphs to the contemporary masters of cat art. Not wanting to wait for that slim possibliity, I thought I’d take a closer look at the review’s short list of cat artists of the past.

Gottfried Mind painting.

Let’s start with Gottfried Mind (1768 – 1814) the “Raphael of cats.” An autistic painting prodigy, Mind painted cats not from life but from memory hours after he saw witnessed their antics. Other than the occasional bear, Mind focused almost exclusively on cats.

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾 北斎 (1760-1849) painted a lot more than just cats. His work reached the West at a time when there was an interest in all things Japanese.

Cornelius Visscher 1629-1658 was a Dutch Golden Age engraver. His 1657 print Cat Sleeping has a bit of an Albrecht Dürer vibe.

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) is the most famous of this short list of cat artists. He liked to fill the margins of his sketchbooks with cats and, as you can see from the examples above, his work shows the hand of a masterful artist.

J. J. Grandville (1803-1847) a French caricaturist, wins the award for wacky. His anthropomorphic cat series makes him the best candidate for the title of 19th century cat meme lord.

I couldn’t find much info on the English painter “Burbank” mentioned in the article other than this frontispiece based on his work. Update: Root Simple reader Annie tracked down Burbank for me. She says,

I believe “Burbank” is J. M. Burbank:

“A Favourite Cat”

“The Gourmand”

There is a bit about “A Favourite Cat” here:

And this book has a section on Burbank

Thanks Annie!

Beyond the cat-centricness of this post, if you’re looking for a few hours to kill I can’t recommend The Studio enough. You can find the whole shebang here. Notable is how seriously the editors considered the art of casual pencil drawing, since it was a skill more people practiced in a time before cheap, candid photography. Also notable is how risqué the art of the Fin de siècle period was.

Support Root Simple

Le Morte d’Arthur: King Arthur & The Knights of The Round Table. For Arthurian fans worldwide, this stunning gift edition has a cloth binding, ribbon marker, and is packaged neatly in an elegant slipcase. Featuring a new introduction and the elegant illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), this volume of Le Morte d’Arthur is an indispensable classic for every home library.

Saturday Tweets: Parsley Poodle Sandwich

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
1 Comment

Support Root Simple

The Medieval World Complete. “Covers the whole range of medieval life from cartography to castles, from the sacraments to sexuality . . . A revelation and a pleasure.” ―The Scotsman