The Hammock Papers: Frugality.

26 November 2012

Frugality.

Leibovitz, Georgia O'Keeffe's Handmade Pastels, 2010

I was being given an award at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and they kindly offered to take me to Ghost Ranch and to her house in Abiquiú, up on a hill overlooking the valley. So I went, and as I walked into her studio I started to cry. Something just hit me about the way she lived. Her frugality – all of her linens were frayed – is a reminder that we don’t need much. She had a simple life: she worked every day, grew a vegetable garden and ate well, walking on this land that she was so drawn to. She was the real thing.

I was lucky. The museum’s curator, Barbara Buhler Lynes, showed me around. She had written a book about where O’Keeffe painted. There’s a red hill in some of the paintings that looks like a mountain; in reality, it is only about 12ft high, almost an anthill. What’s remarkable about the house is that it’s pretty much been left the way she had it when she was alive. The pastels that O’Keeffe made herself are in the museum. Seeing them, you really have the sense that she held and used them. They are the colours of New Mexico: the reds are the sand in the hill, the blues are the sky.

- Annie Leibovitz

Read the rest at Adobe Airstream.

Thank you, Jess.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL