Welcome to the LiveWorkBlog, a repository of ideas, inspiration, writings, drawings, photos, etc. relating to the creation of the new LiveWork studio in Tampa's Old Seminole Heights Neighborhood.
One of the biggest challenges for me in the beginning phases of this project has been my seeming inability to express my ideas about the space and its potential uses without sounding like some kind of pie-in-the-sky lunatic. I feel like I have established the beginnings of an aesthetic or at least a methodology when it comes to the creative/artistic pursuits I have been engaged in for the last twenty years or so. I say this in spite of the fact that I have almost nothing to show for it. Lately however, I have consistently found myself at a loss for words (or images) when it comes time to convey my ideas to people who may or may not know me or my work (such as it is). My thoughts have been overrun with ideas, plans, and schemes for pursuits in a variety of media on various subjects that would seem to the casual observer to be nothing more than a disjointed, disorganized mess. For the most part this is true, but it is my hope that by providing these ramblings with a single home, they might somehow come to be seen as elements of a whole that has some sort of direction.
One keen interest of late is what may be termed "vernacular design". I have always been intrigued by the jerry-rigged, whimsically creative solutions to life's simple problems and lately I have been trying to document the more elegant and interesting designs that I have encountered. A few months ago I took a picture of a Styrofoam cup in an ER nurse's station and I can't stop thinking about its genius. The cup(s) are used to mark the time when the last pot of coffee was brewed. It requires no pen, no paper, no batteries, costs nothing and will last for millennia (it's Styrofoam). This truly is design at its best.
Last week we were in the San Diego area and we spent quite a few hours walking up and down the Oceanside pier. I noticed that the fishermen on the pier were using a type of home-made portable rod holder that I had never seen before. I gather from talking to friends who fish that these are pretty ubiquitous now, but I grew up fishing from piers in central Florida and I had never seen one before. The basic design consists of a C-clamp attached to some sort rod holding apparatus. This whole affair can be clamped to the pier's railing allowing the fisherman to deploy multiple lines without the fear of having one dragged into the sea when the big one hits.
