Favorite Finds — Feb 2021
A curated list to spark creativity and wonder.
Welcome to the 25th volume of Morning Pages, a newsletter sharing inspirations to help you cultivate creativity and fulfillment in life.
For every last issue of the month, I’ll share my favorite finds of the month and personal updates. Here are my February favorites.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her enigmatic portraits of fictitious people. This exhibition at Tate Britain brings together around 80 works from 2003 to the present day in the most extensive survey of the artist’s career to date.
The figures in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are not real people – she creates them from found images and her own imagination. Both familiar and mysterious, they invite viewers to project their own interpretations and raise important questions of identity and representation. Often painted in spontaneous and instinctive bursts, her figures seem to exist outside of a specific time or place.
Her paintings are coupled with poetic titles, such as Tie the Temptress to the Trojan 2016 and To Improvise a Mountain 2018. Writing is central to Yiadom-Boakye’s artistic practice, as she has explained: ‘I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about.’
Narumi Takada: Step on Fresh Snow
Narumi Takada(@nrm_takada) is a Japanese embroidery artist. This piece of embroidery: 新雪を踏む (Step on fresh snow) is quite elegant and clever. The artist used a push needle to create hoops and then trim them to create the fluffy texture of snow.
Newsletter: Bookbear express
I discovered Ava’s newsletter: bookbear express from multiple people on Twitter. What I loved about her writing is the candidness of her thoughts and feelings. It’s intellectually stimulating but still has a sense of intimacy and vulnerability. It’s the type of writing that I aspire to do.
You’ve heard, I’m sure, that The Little Prince line about how what is essential is invisible to the eye. To me that means that I could tell you one thing that contains everything, and I could tell you everything and it could still mean nothing. You can spend so much time not getting it right, but you only need to get it right once.
The only thing I know about how to be more prolific? Write about the thing that means the most to you, then write about the thing that means more.
Studio Update
February has given me lots of highs and lows. I launched my first group coaching program which will begin next week. Although I have a waitlist of clients who want 1:1 coaching, I wanted to explore something that I have not done.
When creating the program, I had many moments of self-doubt. I felt heavy self-judgment. I wanted to scale the program from day one. Later on, I reminded myself of the lessons from designing at Airbnb,
To scale, you have to first do things that don’t scale at all.
As a result, I want to focus on giving a magical experience to a small set of people first, instead of finding the most scalable solution to maximize profits. After several months of hard work, I’m incredibly excited to support this group of designers in the next 8 weeks. The collective energy from the program fellows is very uplifting.
In March and April, this newsletter will get updated biweekly. This will allow me to focus on the group program and a series of custom workshops that I’m leading with OnDeck. I want writing to fit into my life, not the other way around.
See you in two weeks!
Thank you for reading this volume of Morning Pages. All views in this newsletter are my own. If you’re enjoying this newsletter and want to express your appreciation, spread the word and support the studio for the price of a cup of ☕️.
Yuan Studio is a space that explores the intersections of global cultures and identities. Currently, the studio is incubating a series of creative projects, such as Morning Pages, and coaching women and people of color to unleash their creativity and leadership potential. You can reach out on Twitter and LinkedIn.