Creative Recommendations from September

What I'm reading, learning, watching, and making art with!

Hi friends,

It’s time for my Creative Recommendations from September! These are just for my lovely ~patrons~ aka my paying subscribers. 

Each month, I curate my favorite things I’ve been reading, learning, watching, and making art with. If you want to upgrade to receive these once a month, you’d make my day 🥰

Reading

I read The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and loved learning about the history and design choices that go into objects we barely notice (like light switches and doors). It was originally published in 1988 and it’s wild to hear his accurate predictions of the technology to come. I’ve been learning UX design and this book is a classic for understanding the fundamentals.

Making Art With

For those of you who have seen me in the past few months, you know I’ve become absolutely obsessed with building an app called Free Time. It’s designed to help you use your phone mindfully by locking distracting apps. To unlock your apps, you have to slow down and solve a puzzle or do a mindfulness activity to unlock them.

I’ve been beta testing with friends for the past 2 months and it’s been going great. I honestly can’t believe that I’m in the home stretch and starting a plan to launch it. If you want to get on the waitlist to beta test it, you can here.

I know this may seem like a pivot from my normal climate content, but my current dream is that this app does well and could provide me with enough passive income to support my art. Real talk: this administration has impacted my main source of income since a lot of my normal clients have had their funding cut.

This prompted some big picture reflection and made me think about how I want to expand and grow as an artist. I’ve realized that building this app feels like a form of artistic expression to me. It may not be my normal climate art, but it does create an experience where people disconnect from their technology and reconnect to themselves and their environment in a more intentional way.

So I’m trying on the hat of calling myself a ~multimedia artist~. I want to explore new mediums and have some fun ideas for art instillations I’m noodling on. I’ll continue to share updates on this journey.

Learning

I’m going on vacation with my mom to Paris for 2 weeks and I’m so excited! We leave this weekend and I’ve been trying to practice my French a bit more (I’m conversational and very rusty). I found this awesome website 6pm in Paris that’s like Masterclass meets Netflix for French. It’s all these short little films that are in French with subtitles with lessons after to analyze the vocabulary from the film.

I’ve also been working on my second book proposal for the Quietest Places in Paris, so all of this has been very helpful to get me inspired. If you have any Paris recommendations please send them my way.

Also my Quietest Places in New York book is officially on pre-order! You can read that announcement here if you missed it.

Listening to

Ok this is where this newsletter will get progressively more silly. I’ve obviously been listening to Taylor Swift’s new album. I’m not a full Swiftie but I do love her music. I know there’s lots of opinions on this new album but I like it! I’ve had Honey and Elizabeth Taylor stuck in my head all week.

I remember when Midnights came out a few years ago, I was listening on the subway and imaged the car filled with people quietly listening to it at the same time. I don’t know, something about that makes me smile.

Watching

Now that its officially fall, I’ve begun my annual Gilmore Girls rewatch. This made me think of a painting I did from 4 years ago, pre-climate art days.

I was at a house party the other day and heard someone listening to Gilmore Girls through the walls as I waited for the elevator. This makes me wonder how many of you out there are also rewatching right now too 😅

As always, I save the most embarrassing section for my paying subscribers. So let’s begin! Before Fall hit (or did it? It’s 80 degrees today) I was watching