Week of the 08/02/2021 - #6

Contents

Tech

• Your favourite calculator

Art

• A Rashid Johnson Sketchbook

Your favourite calculator

Recently a Twitter user cathode rae 💖💜💙 BLM tweeted: “What’s the best-looking desk calculator ever made? Drop pics, let’s build this thread together! Right pointing backhand index” [Read Tweet]. Many people posted great calculator pics. Here are my favorites:

A Rashid Johnson Sketchbook

In this blog post on the Moma blog we can take a peek at a beatiful sketchbook by Rashid Johnson. Here are some of the sketchbook pages I liked most:

A passage from the article which I liked talking about lines and intent:

The lines that Picasso made were always quite consistent from the point they begin to where they resolve. You feel like the intention was fully there—that the line had no expectation to go any other direction other than the one that he had projected for it—and he captured all of that intention from the start to the finish. I think something similar happens in the work of someone like Willem de Kooning, who understood and had tremendous confidence in the directionality and intentionality of his lines.

I like to contrast that with someone like Christopher Wool, whose lines you feel have a clumsiness to them, and in an almost insecure way, take other directions as if they’re quite confused. I like that existential line-making: something that can change direction or get confused in the middle of being made. I think that’s a better representation of contemporary life and of how I see the world. I like to start in a certain direction and imagine I’m going that way, but really I’m open to a very hard turn in the other direction. I think it requires honesty and malleability to be humbled in the making of something to say, “Oh, wow. Is this the right way? Maybe I should change direction and make a hard turn and an uncomfortable turn.”