paper tiger: I am the notebook

11 December 2008

I am the notebook

I just bought some new Moleskine notebooks today and decided to look at their website. What loveliness it is to peek into someone else's thoughts and images.

http://www.moleskine.com/eng/_interni/storie/immagini.htm

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

Cahier No. 40
Approx. 1906 - 1907

71 pages of pencil and ink drawings.
Even the cover of a simple notebook becomes a space
for expression and statement – to identify with one’s own
cahier, to perceive oneself as a blank page, to merge with
one’s own sketches and notes: “I am the notebook” -
revolutionary poetics in just four words.
Printed front cover with handwriting:
Je Suis Le Cahier appartenant à Monsieur Picasso,
peintre, 12 Rue Ravignant, Paris XVIIIe.

Photo and caption: "Je Suis Le Cahier",
The Sketchbooks of Picasso,
The Atlantic Monthly Press New York, 1986.

Words to inspire

Insist upon yourself. Be Original.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

I really think it's important to be in a situation, both in art and in life, where you don't understand what is going on. --John Cage

Listen Carefully: Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with them a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires or ambitions, we fold their world into our own. Neither party will ever be the same.  --Bruce Mau from ''An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth''

Every set that I did in the gym, every repetition I did on chin-ups or on squats with 500 pounds, I never said to myself, ‘Oh my God, another rep.' I said, ‘Yes! Another rep, another rep,' because that will make my dream turn into reality.
--Arnold Schwarzenegger

Enthusiasm is the electricity of life. How do you get it? You act enthusiastic until you make it a habit.
--Gordon Parks

Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
--Oliver Wendel Holmes

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
--Picasso

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
--Goethe

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist.
--Edward Hopper

They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
--Andy Warhol

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
--Eugene Ionesco

20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
--Mark Twain

You've gotta fake it till you make it.
--Tyra Banks from Next Top Model