Tag: klee

On the benefits of diaries, journals and notebooks


We’ve all have or had diaries and journals at some point. Sometimes they’re just a few abandoned pages: other times they are volumes of notes and information. If you are like me, you are in the former group, even though I’d like to be in the latter (no doubt smaller) group.

One person I know who is the group I am not is Austin Kleon. He has written extensively about them, and he creates several of them throughout a year (the photo above is of his collection). If you read him, you see he has a number of reasons to write them: to help him pay attention to his life, to give him something to write about later, and more.

Now if you are someone special like Paul Klee, then maybe someone will put them all online for others to study them (see here). Or if you are living in historic times, like the composers of these thousands of desperate vivid diaries from occupied europe, then historians may gather them and hold them in a special place like the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. (That might happen to anything you write, especially if you kept one during the pandemic. Decades from now people will be curious to know what life was like during lockdowns.)

Regardless of what happens to your diaries, it is beneficial to record your life, as I argued here. The only beneficiary later may only be you, but that’s enough. If anyone else benefits from it, that’s a bonus.

 

The last works of seven famous artists

This is interesting and something I’d like to see more of: the final works of famous artists. At Artnet.com they have at least seven of them: the Poetic, Heartbreaking Final Paintings of 7 Famous Artists, From Salvador Dalí to Marcel Duchamp.(They kinda gush a bit in that title. :))

Here is the last one from Dali:

That is interesting in itself. (Dali is always interesting.) But what makes it more interesting to me, as someone interested in the form of mathematics known as catastrophe theory, was that Dali was interested in and and inspired by it too. As artnet explaiins:

During the last years of his life, Dalí became obsessed with the mathematical catastrophe theory developed by French mathematician René Thom, who suggested that there are seven “elementary catastrophes” that occur: fold, cusp, swallowtail, butterfly, hyperbolic umbilic, elliptic umbilic, and parabolic umbilic. This painting, with its generous curves and sharp edges, mimics these catastrophic events in black lines painted atop what appears to be a crinkled white sheet of paper. The organic curves of a cello appear to one side along with, perhaps as a reference to his own famous facial feature, a handlebar mustache…

Fascinating.