In-Between Spaces

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The awesome and intoxicating work of art entity Knomad Colab. Had the pleasure of joining them outside Nederland, Colorado at an abandoned mining town called Caribou for a short and impermanent light installation. The design they create using the building and nature as the backdrop are enchanting and haunting and really fucking cool. Check out their other work here: http://www.knomadcolab.com/

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I don't believe in art, I believe in artists.

Marcel Duchamp

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10 Denver Street Artists You Should Follow on Instagram

Public art—both commissioned and not—is one of the many beauties of living in Denver. Finding some of the murals that grace the sides of buildings, alleyways and even dumpsters just got easier with…

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Gorilla Graffiti in Denver, CO (via littleplaces)

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One of the most painful parts of functioning inside a broken system is the persuasive illusion that it is you who is broken.

Melissa Febos (via littleplaces)

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Handwritten and designed calligraphy and watercolor postcards by yours truly. (via littleplaces)

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I have never been lost, but I will admit to having been confused for several weeks.

David Bowie (via littleplaces)

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Bearded Man, found on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado. Unknown artist

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My work is a practice   with intentions to invite myself into that place where time is lost & I become present My work is about appreciating the simple & delicate things in life You settle into a moment You forget where you are Or over aware You stare off into space Like a meditation Like an epiphany Like magic Traveling In between here & there Then & now Like you're everywhere & nowhere Like your everything & nothing A little at the same time you live & you die There's a longing & grief A place between life and death A place between wakefulness & dream a humble place of now My art lives here

Jess Webb

Colorado Artist with an exhibit at the Leon Gallery (www.leongallery.com) in Denver, CO. 

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She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (via feellng)

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Practicing calligraphy, practicing acting big. Quote by Rumi

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Life, the Universe and Everything

In my own way I have pieced together some idea of what I think life on Earth is about. The so-called “meaning of life.” Don’t think it presumptuous of me to postulate on such an enormous topic, I simply can’t help myself.

I think we are all here to experience the world in our own singular perspective. When we (and all beings) die, we bring back those experiences to some collective whole. We experience feelings and senses and beauty and conflict and humor. We dance. And the point is to really experience these things, like animals do in their lives. Watch a dog or cat or mountain goat and you’ll see they don’t question their purpose. Being alive is their purpose. I don’t know if we reincarnate back into this world. Perhaps the Universe is made of different realities and dimensions that all souls pass through sequentially, maybe we all only get one opportunity for “life” before reconnecting with the cosmic web. 

What I do know is that humans have created so many distractions from just living that is seems blasphemous to me and what I believe as God. The earth shouldn’t revolve around money. We should all be saluting the sun and the water and the soils we depend on. 

And when I start to doubt the importance of just one soul-- me or you or the man asking for change on the corner-- I realize that it’s similar to doubting the necessity of a single letter. That single letter holds almost no meaning by itself, in the middle of a page, but without each singular letter there would never be words, or meanings behind them. So I imagine we all must be like that-- letters which spell something supremely meaningful but alone mean very little. 

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Protect our Winters! 

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Handwriting has nearly disappeared. We, who still pick up pen and paper, know somewhere within us that this ‘old school’ way of writing is worth holding onto. There is an unparalleled beauty in the individuality of hand written words; a window into the mind through the fluidity of the hand. Handwriting speaks to the artists and poets and historians because it carries so much weight, so many stories, and yet it is simply lines connecting other lines. It’s a study in connectivity-- between words and sentences, sentences and paragraphs, paragraphs and novels. Special handwriting, like calligraphy, is a study in connecting our focus with our creativity, discipline and free-form.  

Personally I cannot remember a time I wasn’t fascinated with handwriting. Regularly I would fixate on changing an aspect of how I wrote-- perhaps changing my a’s or capitalizing all my r’s. Often, these changes came about after I saw someone else use such a technique. When I was in school cursive had started going out of style, even to teachers who more often than not required typed papers. But I still practiced, in my free time, in countless journals and notebooks. I practiced writing and I also practiced how I wrote. Incorporating new techniques gave me flexibility and eventually I was able to forge another person’s handwriting quite well. I stunned my mom one time with a note “from her” that I had actually written. Never did I use this skill without the person whom I was forging’s permission, rather it was always an exercise in my always expanding universe of handwriting. 

Until this last week, I’ve always used pens for handwriting. But now I’ve taken up calligraphy. Real calligraphy with nibs and nib holders and the ink in the jar. At first, it’s been frustrating. My grip is all wrong and without a decent grip no ink flows from the nib. After repeating each letter of the alphabet about 25 times, I finally started to feel comfortable with my fluency. What I like about it the most so far is that you have to train your mind to let go of the word in order to complete a single letter. Back to the basics, you could say. 

Handwriting might be considered dead or dying to some, but I love it dearly and will continue to use and improve my own so long as I can hold a pen (or nib!). And I hope handwriting is as beautiful to others as it is to me.  

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‘Nuff said.

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“Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.”

-Angela Monet