“You have to want it, want it so bad you will never give up, so bad that you are ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep, friendships, even your reputation,” he writes. “You will have to adopt a particular lifestyle of ambition, not just for a few weeks or months but for years and years and years. You have to want it so bad that you are not only ready to fail, but you actually want to experience failure: revel in it, learn from it.” ―David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us High-res

“You have to want it, want it so bad you will never give up, so bad that you are ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep, friendships, even your reputation,” he writes. “You will have to adopt a particular lifestyle of ambition, not just for a few weeks or months but for years and years and years. You have to want it so bad that you are not only ready to fail, but you actually want to experience failure: revel in it, learn from it.”


―David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us

Mike Stilkey’s recently completed installation at high-end fashion retailer Joyce’s flagship store on Queens Road in the Central district of Hong Kong.

This is the LA-based artist’s second installation following his first collaboration with the boutique  at their Beijing location late last year.  As you can see in these photos by Beau Basse of LeBasse Projects, it features Stilkey’s signature large-format paintings on various book assemblages and multiple shelf displays with smaller pieces.

More fabulous book art: this time with cats, flowers, birds, fishes, and butterflies.

Visual artist Rachel Ashe creates these beautiful pieces by cutting, folding, painting, and gluing objects onto the pages of old books. 

I love the oriental influences that permeate her work.

A few favorite quotes from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez: “The anxiety of falling in love cannot find repose except in bed.” “Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.” “One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship.” “There is always something left to love.” “Gaston was a pilot … On weekends he would pick her up where she lived … They began to love each other at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air of the moors, and they felt all the closer together as the beings on earth grew more and more minute … He wasn’t only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.” “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” This book is strange and enchanting. I re-read it once a year when the weather’s bitingly cold. It warms me. I adore it.

A few favorite quotes from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez:

“The anxiety of falling in love cannot find repose except in bed.”

“Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”

“One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship.”

“There is always something left to love.”

“Gaston was a pilot … On weekends he would pick her up where she lived … They began to love each other at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air of the moors, and they felt all the closer together as the beings on earth grew more and more minute … He wasn’t only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.”

“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

This book is strange and enchanting. I re-read it once a year when the weather’s bitingly cold. It warms me. I adore it.

Landscape sculptures carved out of books by Guy Laramee.

According to Laramee:

My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is “ All Ideas Look Alike”. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only “What” we think, but “That” we think.

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

After 30 years of practice, the only thing I still wish my art to do is this: To project us into this thick Cloud of Unknowing.