Serbian designer, furniture builder, photographer, and artist Ana Kraš is a constant inspiration, not just from the diversity of work she does and the prolific rate at which she does so, but because of her general disposition about what it means to lead a creative life and how to integrate your interests into your work. A favorite website of mine, Domahoka, did a great interview with her awhile back that I keep bookmarked; I highly recommend reading it. For now, her likes and dislikes.

i like

when someone scratches my back and arms, cream spinach, colour navy, gasoline smell, 90′s toyota corola sedan, nissan pick up trucks, old land rover defenders, old dodge chargers, aerodynamic hybrid bicycle helmets, sporty bicycles, gentle manners, when someone brushes my hair, to swim, to dive, tall beds, flying on an aeroplain, poppy flowers in fields or isolated, dill, ice cream, coconut fragrance summer lotions, mojitos, rice pudding, mashed potatoes, kimichi, sauerkraut, fine hair in a small bun, very white hair on old people, paragliding, interacting with a dog, holding a sloth, holding a koala, surfing, ceviche, cherries, ancient aliens, choreographies, massages, hot waxing, wasabi, almond croissants, quince smell, burek, to take a bath, to cut my own and other people hairs

i don’t like

loud restaurants, metro, hard boiled eggs, soy sauce, loud taking people, violence, festivals, the smell of lamb, incense, african masks, cats, coffee, bear, cartoons, polyester, shopping malls

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Peter Shire has historically avoided labeling his work, and for good reason: putting the LA artist in a box is impossible. A creator of sculptures, ceramics, paintings, public art, drawings, furniture, and more, Shire’s work lacks boundaries while remaining incredibly specific. The bold, abstract, and expansive Shire aesthetic has been lauded by institutions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the City of Los Angeles; in our weird world where I judge people’s “legitimacy” by whether they have their own Wikipedia page, knowing where to start in listing Shire’s accolades and influence on the art world is ridiculous. That said, I have long been a fan of Shire’s work: he graciously answered some interview questions for us on memory, intersecting mediums, and the influence of objects.  
-Leigh 

1983. Mexican Bauhaus Derrick Funnel

1980. Cubist Steam

1. I was taken by something you said in your 2011 interview with “Art Inquiry,” where you mention your primary influences being geography, writers, music, and other things that aren’t ‘art.’ Please elaborate. 

Lately, it seems there are two main aspects of activity. The process or act of making something. Creating an object or something from raw materials. And there is a mental leap that occurs during the making or the conceiving of. And the responding and acknowledgement of that, change and revelation perhaps the creative moment. This coupled with the ongoing study and questioning of what creativity is with the seeming main questions that people ask during a given era, are very interesting to me.

Now people have always asked “what are your influences” over the years. They seem to be very happy with codified or simple answers, which should probably read a famous, i.e. Calder, Miro, etc. And a little bit confused and sometimes even angry with a personal or equality more pertinent answer of someone or something, that they can’t pigeon hole quickly. It always seems that the high impact moments that we’re inculcated to accept as such have their value, yet the things that catch us on the periphery sometimes make a more romantic and lasting impression.

From what I understand, it seems that there is a current notion, perhaps an old notion, that everything that you have heard or seen or said, is stored up in ones brain. Most of it, not unlike some sort of a crazy warehouse where everything is in crates or covered with sheets, and there are no inventory lists. Certain things are in the main show room, and some of it rotates, and some of it comes out of hiding at the weirdest moments.

So of course there are stories behind all of the works, and stories of favorite quotations being mad at people, thinking about how I should have gotten even with them…often I’ll say to myself “I’ll show the.… that I can make things that convey tragedy, deep seriousness, angst, and roiling storm clouds, and they start out grey, and black and prussian blue… and the next thing you know, well, a little yellow would really set off that grey, and then perhaps a little red might make the yellow just vibrate and jump off the page, and by the time I’ve put it all together, I’ve forgotten who I was mad at some years later. And it is joy of making these amazing things takes me over.

To return to the main question, I’d have to look at a specific piece to tell you the stories, the little things I say to myself as I’m doing it, and sometimes the big stories that are about being alive and grateful for it.

Perhaps it has been alluded to that the list includes just about everything I come in contact with… to prioritize or give a degree of impact, is something that I’m already too preoccupied to do; but to put them in main categories, there are things that disgust me, there are things that anger me, there are things that assault every part of my consciousness and ideals of aesthetics, there are things that I love, there are things that I respect, and there are things that send me into states of envy, there are things that send me into states of desire. The goal is to chew them all, digest them, and turn them into something great. Unexpected. That has stretched my imagination around a corner that I couldn’t see before or know it was there.

Peter Shire mugs, via I’m Revolting

Peter Shire mugs, via I’m Revolting

2. Do you think about ways that different mediums can work together?

Yes.

Sometimes it’s related to direct processes that I have incorporated into my studio machinery and capability. In the past there was a drive to find esoteric or unusual new materials that would make the work more individual and cutting edge, those sort of adjectives. Now I’m not so concerned with technology, especially as technology is pretty ubiquitous, and shall we say not that complicated. Or maybe it seems its not that complicated. It also seemed to be looking for a gimmick to set the work ahead. — Currently, I seem to be really focussed on the form of the work as it’s developed over the years, connections, volumes and lines, proportions and vibrating colors, and ideals of narrative, and what power and information objects supply about art. Lives.

CityOnTheHill public sculpture

1981. Brazil Table

3. What are some things you have been recently interested in?

English books and customs and literature, we speak English, and the syntax we use form our value systems. Of course this is basic semantics. Also when I watch DVDs in English, I can draw at the same time, because I don’t have to read the subtitles to get the whole thing. Yet, with English and American DVDs, I prefer to have the subtitles on, I love to read them also, which my brother finds incredulous, and is very upset by. Of course my wife accuses me of being enamored of black people and their customs, which is very true. What she neglects is that I’m also equally enamored with Japanese people, Jewish people, with the rest of the world running a close second. There are certain books that I read often, one is “Huckleberry Finn”, as the great diorama of American custom that we are inheritor to. John Steinbeck’s, “Cannery Row” and “Sweet Thursday”, as the great progenitors of California life as a mythology and a philosophy, and a state of being. At this point it may become evident that books and printed matter take a huge value. Perhaps that they are objects, physical objects that contain what is normally ephemeral communication speaking what happens during the day and is usually lost in the ethers of time.

So… it comes back to objects. I love THINGS. I’m a material person in a material society that as we have evolved as an industrial society with the great ability to produce objects that were formerly only available to the wealthy. We have also become very keyed into the meaning and what objects tell us about their owners. And with that we come to cars. The great object of our world. After all, to have a carriage, personal transport was the domain of the ultra wealthy! So I subscribe to several to several car and hot rod magazines, read books on them, and am morbidly fascinated by the mundane and turgid prose that they use.

1986.Skyhook

4. What are some things you are always interested in?

As to food. I like sushi. And I think that everybody else that like it, likes to see the guy making it, and to possibly have a contact relationship with him. Well, there it is, isn’t it? Where humankind, and in our last millenniums we didn’t get things shrink wrapped and over packaged, they came from their hands to ours. And if we’re lucky… their heart was in it.

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I discovered Michael Ned Holte’s work last month after buying his zine “Proper Names“ at the incredible LA art book store Ooga Booga. “Proper Names” is basically just…a list of people’s names. Except it’s the best, most hilarious and clever and poignant list of names you’ve ever read. I can’t even explain! Just trust me! Anyway, as a fellow list-lover I figured Holte would be a perfect pick for this synonym feature. Friends, it doesn’t disappoint. 
-Leigh

I like names, lists, Routine Pleasures, Cynar, roasted carrots, R. M. Schindler, second chances, fish sauce, glasses, hands, Danish wood oil, peanut butter cookies, blue, gray, Pierre Menard, willful anachronism, procrastinating, La Jetée, Lee Lozano, making soup, short novels, Rainier cherries, Alice Coltrane, Microsoft Word, socks, Celine and Julie Go Boating, dumb jokes, making people blush, Joe Brainard’s I Remember, rolling my own spring rolls at Le Saigon, 20 Lines a Day, Miles Davis in the 1970s, the “Midwest work ethic,” coffee, walking, Rome, cast iron, Iron Chef, banana cream pie from Apple Pan, bad movies about good artists, Corky’s Debt to His Father, correct punctuation, cover versions, alliteration, farmhouse ales, On Kawara, ceviche, scratchy blankets, Roland Barthes, Japanese mandolins, footnotes.

I dislike chain restaurants, art intended to entertain, coral (the color), bad grammar, Teflon, gin, erratic drivers, sourpusses, artificial sweeteners, low-fat anything, feet, washing my car, Las Vegas, laugh tracks, returning phone calls, excess, Febreeze, “It is what it is,” green peppers, Guy Fieri, sport utility vehicles, being made to blush, people who think they are too good to wait in line, waiting in line, procrastinating, “starchitects,” steampunk, underachievers, overachievers, daytime television, slobs, coupons, pho puns, gated communities, sanctimoniousness, having to touch doorknobs (or, really, anything) in public restrooms after thoroughly washing my hands, burgundy, the way dust clings to silicone products—particularly Oxo brand utensils, Polo shirts, the small print, endings.

–

Michael Ned Holte is a writer and independent curator living in Los Angeles. He is the author of Proper Names (Golden Spike Press, 2013). He teaches at CalArts.

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I’ve seen Cecile Daladier‘s strikingly misshapen ceramics around the Internet for years, but never learned the story behind her work and career until seeing this tour of the Paris home she shares with her husband, the architect Nicolas Soulier. Daladier is a true renaissance woman: a ceramicist, botanist, musician…but truly the most interesting thing about her is the perspective she takes on her work and aesthetic, and the specificity with which she regards each area of her art. Read on!
-Leigh

1. I am curious about how different plants and flowers shape what you make — do you have certain species in mind when you make a piece? can you talk a bit about your overall process, and how pieces evolve?
It is definitely the flower that shapes the vase. The size and type of flower have in mind will define it. For instance, a flower with a small stem and no leaf (like a cyclamen) will go in a different vase than a crooked ticker tree branch. The flowers sometimes even give their names to my vases like the tulipier, the violettier… But I’ve also created what I call table gardens, they are shallow, wide vases with different types of holes in order to put all kinds of flowers and recreate a small garden.

The vases are different in many ways. They can have holes or slits, be deep or shallow, narrow or wide… They can have chimneys to create a sort of sculpture…  But what is always important to keep in mind is that you don’t want the flowers to be packed or crowded, they need to breathe and the holes allow that. The flowers I put in my vases are all flowers I picked, that also shapes my vases. I really want to stay away from the traditional round bouquet you buy in a shop and that you stick in your vase as it is.

Another strong aspect of my vases is the water. In a clay vase you can’t see through it but I find it important to be able to see the water at the surface so I often make shallow, wide vases.

Recently I have also made vases with some sort of saucer underneath in order to collect the pollen, the falling petals or the stamens.

With time I have even developed different tools to shape my vase accordingly. I know, for instance, that a toothpick is the perfect size for a grass.

In every instance, when I make a vase I try not to think of making a pretty shape, or I go straight to disaster! If I think of the shape of the vase before I think of how the flower will fit in, then it doesn’t work.

Raku is a very rudimentary technique: its philosophy is to just let things happen and that goes very well is my philosophy of just letting the flowers be.

2. Your work strikes me in that everything is very useful: what is your perspective on making utilitarian pieces, and also on the general intersection between beauty and use?
To me, if something is functional, if it’s intelligent, then it becomes beautiful. Some may say that a vase with flowers isn’t really useful, but to me its function is to bring poetry into the house. We use flowers for everything: weddings, funerals, when you’re invited at a friend’s place… you bring flowers. Flowers are not useful and yet they are completely fundamental to our daily life. So there is no real distinction between beauty and use. If it’s useful, it’s beautiful, and vice versa.

3. You do a lot of different things! piano player, ceramicist, fine arts… Do you find that they influence each other? Do you regard the different mediums in different ways? How do you balance your time?
I have been professional in those three fields, but not at the same time. I first started teaching piano, moved on to fine arts, and now ceramics. But they are all always part of my daily life. They all nourish my imagination in a different way.

My life has been like a stroll, I do everything intuitively, spontaneously. I pick and forage. I invent constantly… it’s all like a musical improvisation. I think the common aspect in the way I undertook those three arts is simplicity. I like momentary, ephemeral, small, and I hate spectacular. What interests me are daily-life things. I love banal, common flowers, I get inspiration from my surroundings and I think (I hope) that’s what comes out in my vases: simple and uncomplicated.

I organize my days differently everyday. According to the weather, the seasons. To whether the kiln is working or not, whether the pieces have dried correctly or if they need to wait another day before being glazed… I’m lucky to be able to get up in the morning and decide on what the day will look like.

What is your favorite time of day to work?
My favorite time of day is the end of morning, around 11am. The light is beautiful, you’re fully awake and you still have lots of time before you.

What are five things you have been recently interested in? 
-Recently I discovered what was solitude in winter. It taught me a lot actually. The tiniest ray of sun, the smallest flower coming out of the earth.. and it becomes such a great joy, it’s fascinating.

-I’ve also read a lot during those snowy days.. I loved Refuge by Terry Tempest William and also Best love, Rosie by Nuala O’Faolain. I actually read it twice.

-I live in the region of truffles. Many people cultivate them in their gardens, they can be relatively cheap on the markets here so I’ve eaten quite a few the last month. I love talking to the women who sell them on the market, they always have such great stories to tell.

-I’ve been watching the birds a lot too lately, I love how they eat.

-Finally, I’ve spent a lot of time building the new shelter for the kiln. I didn’t want a big ugly shed. It was interesting to try to make something practical and pretty. I’ve managed to make it in a way that I can sit next to it (to be able to add wood regularly) and still have a nice view of the mountains.

What are five things you are always very interested in?

-I’ve always loved music. And also children. Children playing music, actually! They have a view on things that is so pure.

-I’ve also always loved picking and collecting: flowers, shells, anything.

-Fabrics have also always be present in my life, I have done quite a few artistic pieces with fabric.

-Food!

More resources:
Cecile Daladier website. 
Remodelista feature
Ensuite interview

*All images courtesy of Cecile Daladier.

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likes

dislikes

dry hands
cold chill
scratchy wool
failed attempts
misunderstanding
not trying
microsuede
defensiveness
defensive dogs
self-doubt
disorder
garish plaids
large electronics
a dirty kitchen
a dirty bathroom
not being motivated
confusion
heights
shoddy work
loud sounds
danger
apathy



Born on the East Coast, living in Seattle. 28 years old. Contrasting textures, neutral colors and natural materials are of consistent interest. Resourcefulness is an inspiration.