Designers & Books is great website/blog. All sorts of design types- architects, fashion, graphic, product, interior designers etc. are asked to submit a list of their favorite books, notating why such books are favorites as well as what they are currently reading. A bio is also included. I recommend checking it out as wonderful way of blowing off an afternoon. Its quite easy to lose yourself in the “stacks”.
Remarkably, I was asked to submit my list a few weeks ago! What a surprise and delight. I had a great time perusing my collection of books (a welcome excuse to play hooky) which I had ignored as of late due to time craziness. The exercise rekindled the flames of pursuing different avenues to follow design-wise and brought back pleasant memories of collections and times past.
One of the most favorite of the favorites
My profile was published May 1st and if you are so inclined- take a look and tell me what you think!
Before I started Lisa Jenks Jewelry, way back in 1981, my red “Canal Street Special” earrings appeared on Brooke Shields’ ears on the cover of Vogue. I was 22. Brooke was 16.
A friend, Bonnie Maller (an amazing makeup artist, has worked over the years with great photographers such as Bruce Weber) was wearing these earrings to a shoot with Brooke for Vogue. The stylist took one look at them, stole the earrings right off Bonnie and promptly put them on Brooke’s 16-year old lobes. Right time, definitely the right place. If you remember, 1981 was when Brooke Shields’ name became notorious because of her Calvin Klein commando commercial:
So, I got lots of orders in the mail. 30! And then I got a job designing clothes for Fenn Wright and Manson and promptly went to Hong Kong.
This is the first in a series of posts that tell the story of the birth of Lisa Jenks jewelry, the genesis of my relationship with my future (and current) husband, Chris. Both my business and my family, you could say, started from a pair of scavenged red plastic earrings from Canal Street in New York City.
I’ve read the most amazing book, one of my all time favorites – The Elegance Of The Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. A gentle story full of philosophy, references to literature, art and I could not put it down–although I wanted to savor it. A bit of a dilemma.
A quote from the book knocked me off my chair, metaphorically speaking:
“Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring…We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is Art.
…When we gaze at a still life, when–even though we did not pusue it–we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immoble figuration of things, we find pleasure in the fact there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire.
So this still life, because it embodies a beauty that speaks to our desire but given birth by some else’ s desire, because it cossets our pleasure without in any way being part of our own projects, because it is offered to us without requiring the effort of desiring on our part: this still life incarnates the quintessence of Art, the certainty of timelessness.
In the scene before our eyes–silent, without life or motion–a time exempt from projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed–pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.
For art is emotion without desire.”
The Elegance of the Hedgehog (L’élégance du hérisson) is a novel by the French novelist and professor of philosophy Muriel Barbery.
