(Photo: Cameron Butler/Washington Post)
This is Devon "Bosco" Farr. He's a manager at BookPeople, an independent bookstore in Austin, Texas. Every day for the past year, Farr has eaten a taco.
He's part of an emerging trend among creative people. It can be hard to fit in artistic work while trying to earn a living and going about the other chores of normal life. In response, many artists, as a disciplinary practice, create a small object or perform an inventive task every day for an entire year.
We've already seen the fruits of this labor. Every day, Noah Scalin created a skull-themed piece of art. Stian Korntved Ruud made a wooden spoon. Tanaka Tatsuya made a miniature diorama. And there are many more. Gillian Brockell of the Washington Post talked to several artists engaging in 365 projects, including Lauren Rapp, who makes little chairs out of many different media:
For Rapp, it all started in December 2014 with a failed attempt to finish the “The Artist’s Way,” the 1992 self-help workbook that’s supposed to jump-start your creative side. Rapp, who was frustrated and barely getting by with freelance Web consulting gigs, had been meeting with friends to do the workbook, hoping accountability to a group would push her through to the end. Something, anything, to break the procrastination.
“We made it through three or four sessions,” she says, laughing . “And then, you know, people get busy. Life gets busy.”
The book encourages meditation, so after what ended up being the last group session, she sat for 10 minutes, “which to me can be an eternity.”
“And during the meditation, during my wandering thoughts, I just thought it would be cool to make a little chair for my bookshelf, for a decoration,” she recalls. “Then I thought, ‘Well, you’re supposed to be meditating, not thinking about this!’ ”
Eventually, Rapp realized that her way of mediating was to make chairs.
-via Marilyn Bellamy