On January 10, The Washington Post reported that Donald J. Trump passed a milestone that none of his predecessors is known to have attained: just short of the anniversary of his first year in office, he told his two thousandth lie. The path from the first lie to the two thousandth (and now beyond), a veritable Via Dolorosa of civic corruption, has been impossible for even the most resolute citizen to avoid. Trump is in our faces, and our brains, constantly. Yet the barrage is so unceasing that we can’t remember what he did and said last week, or sometimes even yesterday.
Month: January 2018
How to Become Successful: The Real Secret No One is Talking About
Hustle. Work harder. Sleep less, do more. Quit whining and get to work! All of these lines are terrible pieces of advice. I know because I’ve tried them all for myself. I worked 16 hours per day, killing myself to try and grow my business. At the end of the day, my only accomplishment was massive burnout and exhaustion. And then something happened… I discovered the real “secret” to high performance. No one’s talking about it while others laugh at it. For me, however, it helped me transform from being stressed, anxious, and on the verge of bankruptcy into a joyful, happy, and a 7-figure business owner. So, what’s this secret? Read on to find out.
Your Life is a Race Car
Have you ever watched Nascar or Formula One? If so, then you probably noticed that these high-performance vehicles are forced to stop several times over the course of a race to refuel and replace their wheels. Those cars are some of the most finely tuned, high-performing feats of modern engineering our world has ever seen. Yet, they are forced to stop dozens of times over the course of a race to refuel! This is obvious to most people, but when applied to life, most people would think, “Bah, I can sleep when I’m dead. Life’s for the living baby!” If that’s your attitude, then I want you to listen carefully to what I’m about to say. If you want to perform really well, then you need to get serious about refueling yourself. Just ask any bodybuilder you know. Unless they are hopped up on steroids, they will tell you that proper nutrition, high-quality sleep, and the right supplements are just as important (if not more so) than lifting heavy weights. So, how can you apply the “secret” of refueling to your life? It’s actually pretty simple. Focus on the “Three P’s” of high-performance refueling. Physical, psychological, and personal.
Refueling Yourself Physically
The first part of the “Three P” equation is also the most commonly practiced. Physical refueling. Whether you want to or not, every single one of you reading this has to spend time each day eating, drinking, and sleeping. It’s a requirement if you want to continue living. However, few people fail to do that. So, over the next month, I want to challenge you to do three simple things.
Sleep More and Sleep Better
Sleep deprivation can kill you. If you want to perform at the highest level, then you must take your sleep seriously. Here’s a checklist to help you get better sleep tonight.
- Stop drinking coffee by 2 p.m.
- Take 500 mg of Magnesium before bed.
- Turn off all the lights.
- Put the thermostat at 67 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Take a cold or hot bath one hour before bed.
- Drink one cup of chamomile tea with 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and 1 tablespoon of honey.
If you will do these tips, I promise that you will sleep better than you have in months!
See Also: Get Strong, Sleep, Repeat: The Importance Of Sleeping
Eat More Greens and Less Meat
Many of you might hate me for this one (and I understand) but one of the changes that had the biggest impact on my physical health was reducing my meat consumption (specifically red meat) and increasing my fruit and vegetable intake. I’m not saying that you have to go vegetarian or vegan. I haven’t either. What I am saying is that the quickest way to boost your energy, reduce fatigue, and generally feel better is to eat more whole fruits and vegetables and less meat, dairy, and processed foods.
Practice Weekly Self-Care
It’s amazing to me how many of my friends will spend $997 on a brand new business course promising to transform their lives but they won’t pay $45 to get a massage after a long week of work. The final part of the physical refueling trifecta isn’t more exercise (although that’s important); it’s to find small ways to care for yourself weekly. Whether it’s a massage, a salt bath, 30 minutes in a steam room, or simply a long nap, you need to prioritize taking care of your body and doing things that add energy into your life.
Refueling Yourself Psychologically
While many people excel at refueling themselves physically, they still end up feeling stressed, burnt out, and exhausted (just like I did) because they don’t prioritize refueling their psychological tank. Just because your body is firing on all cylinders doesn’t mean that your mind is keeping up. Here are a few quick tips to help you overcome brain fog and refocus your mind.
Work in 42 Minutes
Although many experts suggest working in the traditional Pomodoro blocks of 50 minutes, I’ve found that I’m more productive when I only work for 48 minutes. Give it a try for yourself and see how effective you are during the day. First, write down your #1 priority for the next 42 minutes. Then, use e.ggtimer.com and set a timer for 42 minutes. Put your head down and work as hard as you can and then, when the timer buzzes, get up and take a break for 18 minutes.
Learn Something New Daily
Ironically, I’ve found that some of the most rejuvenating mental activities are also the most challenging. For example, if I sit down in front of the TV and watch Family Guy reruns for two hours, I will leave feeling drained and mentally sluggish. However, if I used those same two hours to read a good book, practice a new language, or toy around on my guitar, I leave feeling inspired and motivated to take on the day. Commit right now to learning or practicing something new and I promise that, 365 days from now, your life will look completely different.
Take a Morning and Evening “Braindump”
One of the simplest yet most profound techniques that I’ve ever found for clearing mental fog and refueling your psychology is to build a morning and evening “braindump” ritual. The practice is simple. Take a pen, a notepad, and your brain. Sit on the couch, set a 10-minute timer, and then write down everything that comes to your head. Whether it’s to-do list items, angry feelings about a fight you recently had with your spouse, or inner frustrations about a situation at work, get it out of your head. If you do this every morning and evening for a month, your brain will never feel the same.
Refueling Yourself Personally (or “Spiritually”)
Before you check out on me and roll your eyes because I used the “S” word, realize that I’m not referring to anything esoteric, religious, or “woo-woo”. I use the term “spiritually” very loosely, referring to those activities that recharge your “higher self”. Here’s what I mean.
Get Out for 30 to 60 Minutes Every Day
This one simple habit has the power to significantly reduce stress and rejuvenate your mind and body in ways you probably can’t imagine. We evolved to live in harmony with nature. In our fast-paced world, we often forget this and spend days, weeks, or even years without reconnecting to our roots and enjoying the great outdoors. Make it a priority to do something that you enjoy outdoors for at least 30 minutes a day.
Do Only One Thing
This might sound like an odd practice but you’d be surprised at how effective it can be as a refueling activity. In our day to day lives, we’ve seemingly lost the ability to focus on a single task. We’re never just doing one thing. We’ve always got something else going on in the background. So, I want to challenge you to take 15 to 30 minutes a day and just do one thing. Whether you sit and enjoy your morning cup of coffee in complete solitude, enjoy talking with your partner without distractions, or even just do your work without notifications going off in the background, learning to focus on one task at a time will help you conserve your energy and live a more fulfilling life.
Volunteer and Spend Time with Other People
The final way to recharge yourself spiritually is to spend time every month in service to others. Go volunteer at a local soup kitchen, clean up the trails near your home or sign up to build a house with Habitat for Humanity.
See Also: 5 Reasons Why You Should Volunteer
Just do something that will help you remember how much you have to be grateful for in your life. You won’t regret it.
The post How to Become Successful: The Real Secret No One is Talking About appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
The past is in your head…
Even in winter, there is plenty of amazing outdoor activities to…
Even in winter, there is plenty of amazing outdoor activities to do at Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. From early November to May, visitors can explore the park by fat bikes, cross-country skis, snowmobile and dog sled. No matter your experience, you’ll enjoy the stark beauty of winter at Kenai Fjords. Photo by National Park Service.
Weapons in the Wind
Any time you start the day by gassing women and children, you have to expect it to end badly.
—Wesley Pruden reporting on the Branch Davidian assault in the Washington Times, Waco, Texas, April 19, 1993
In this era, when we look to technology to produce a different battlefield than the trench warfare of a century ago, a battlefield whose nature may appear bloodlessly revolutionary to planners and generals — think of spy drones, for instance — but which is likely experienced very differently, nightmarishly, to soldiers on the ground, it’s worth turning the page back a century, to the multinational rush to chemical weaponry — even chemical agents thought to be relatively harmless, such as tear and mustard gases, though that proved not to be so — that changed the face of warfare, and see how that experiment worked out.
Hellfire Boys, by Theo Emery, is a thoroughgoing albeit smartly, lightly handled history of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, which was birthed as the United States was preparing to enter World War I and found itself in need of gassing up its arsenal, which was woefully lacking in phosgene, sarin, mustard, chlorine, and sundry agents. The book’s emphasis is on the personalities involved, but there is plenty of horrifying descriptive material to keep the story rolling along.
World War I didn’t usher in chemical warfare at Ypres in 1915, Emery notes, for there were already international treaties banning asphyxiating gases signed in 1899 and 1907. But those elegantly drafted documents did not survive the brutal realities of the Western Front in 1915, and when the French troops peered over the edge of their muddy, rat-infested trenches after a morning bombardment from German cannons on April 22nd, they saw a distant movement. It wasn’t soldiers but “something else, something they’d never seen before. Something evanescent, something that flowed and coiled. Wisps of bluish smoke . . . turning greenish yellow as the cloud undulated toward them on the wind.” It was chlorine gas.
Say hello to the first chemical war. Once Germany, which was in the vanguard of industrial chemistry, let noxious and toxic gas out of the bag, it was every nation for itself, and all combatants joined in. The United States, not even party to the conflict until 1917, initiated a gas research program, which is much the meat of Emery’s book: how the Office of Gas Service became the Chemical Service Section became the Chemical Warfare Service. It is a tale of academic beard pulling, backbiting, and jockeying for power, meanwhile creating a stockpile of lethal chemical agents while perfecting the gas mask and simultaneously striving to flummox the enemy’s gas protection.
The way to do this, Emery explains, is to fire a barrage of chloropicrin — or vomit gas — which would work its way past the charcoal and cotton filters of the gas mask, making the wearer sick enough to doff the mask; then hit them with a barrage of phosgene, chlorine, or sarin. Chemists — a surprising egotistical, power-hungry, politically savvy bunch by Emery’s reckoning — were the hottest commodity: “We are of the opinion that gas will win the war,” or, in the more poetic words of one chief chemist, Winford Lee Lewis, “She [Germany] started this poison gas game and we are going to finish it. He who gases last, gasses best.” Just so.
Emery’s story is well constructed and well documented, but he writes something curious at the end of the volume. “Since World War I, the United States has never used lethal chemical weapons in combat,” then goes on to suggest that napalm and “arguably, the defoliant Agent Orange was a kind of chemical weapon as well.” And another lethal chemical weapon the United States has used with great avidity is tear gas. As Anna Feigenbaum writes, tear gas’s toxicity is determined by the ratio of toxins per square meter; the smaller the space, or the more the gas, the more toxicity. Pound a Vietnamese tunnel system with enough tear gas and, voilà, good old-fashioned chemical warfare.
Feigenbaum’s Tear Gas zeroes in on this one weapon’s surprisingly survival and evolution into something every police department wields. Her point is wickedly simple: Despite the blandishments from industry, law enforcement, and the military that tear gas is the epitome of humanistic crowd control, irritating though free of lasting affect, it is in fact a chemical warfare agent banned by the Geneva Convention. We have limited medical understanding of tear gas’s long-term affects, but anyone who has had a taste or a touch of tear gas will tell you it punches below the belt. Under the right conditions, and there are many right conditions, it is lethal.
Tear gas has become, of course, the international go-to suppression system for crowd control. Many, if not most of us believe that tear gas makes you cry and run away — and manufacturers support that impression — but Feigenbaum informs us otherwise. Tear gas is a lachrymatory agent designed to attack the senses simultaneously, prompting physical and psychological trauma. It primarily affects the mucous membranes and respiratory system and is quite capable of causing brain damage, third-degree burns, chronic respiratory problems, miscarriages, and death. It is worth repeating: tear gas is a chemical nerve agent, banned by the Geneva Convention.
Hellfire Boys touches on the subject as well — charting how a few forward-thinking companies, like Dow, saw the future use of nerve agents, while most felt that once the war was over, so would be the need for such things as tear gas — but it is one of Feigenbaum’s main concerns: how did this appalling nerve gas morph into the air poisoner of choice for public-order policing? Follow the money: “These pages shine the spotlight on some of the salespeople, scientists, military buyers, arms dealers, patent attorneys, police suppliers, and defense magazine editors currently enlisted in the worldwide effort to sustain the fiction that tear gas is safe and humane.” That she does, with the same quality documentation as Emery but with a bracing passion held neatly in check.
Feigenbaum quickly covers the ground Emery has so assiduously turned, and it is nice to see that their facts are in alignment. Then Feigenbaum uncovers the morphing process, when tear gas was used on the postwar Bonus Army of American military veterans demanding government aid. Manufacturers extolled its ” ‘irresistible blast of blinding, choking pain’ that would ‘produce no permanent injury’,” while the Nation magazine spoke of one victim “one eye glaring at me and something like a mouth — when he tried to call for water, more blood and sputum came out than anything else.”
Strikebreaking, riot control, protest dispersal — here was a tool that could “render the rioters temporarily harmless without inflicting physical injury of any consequence.” Seemingly only one step north of laughing gas, tear gas was used in great quantities by colonial authorities to quell nationalists from India to southern Africa to Palestine, from Selma to Montgomery and all through the antiwar protests in the United States, and probably, somewhere, right now. Each of Feigenbaum’s chapters and subsections feels like an intensely observed vignette, spelling out how tear gas made some ghastly impact or another, wrecking havoc, causing death.
The fiasco of the 1969 Battle of the Bogside, in Northern Ireland, where “by the end of thirty-six hours of CS [tear] gassing, a total of fourteen 50-gram grenades and 1,091 cartridges containing 12.5 grams of CS had blanketed the Bogside,” prompted the Himsworth Report, which, unsurprisingly, found tear gas to be a crackerjack riot control gas. It is a report still referred to today by proponents of tear gas use. And as the militarization of the police continues, the more commonly such reports condone the excessive use of tear gas, writes Feigenbaum.
“If the century-long medical history of modern tear gas shows us anything, it is the problem with for-profit science. When science is leveraged for the few instead of the protection and health of the many, all of society suffers . . . Government secrets pile up and the partisan membership of weapons evaluation committees remain undisclosed.” We were suitably aghast when in 1988 Iraq smothered a Kurdish town with sarin and mustard gases; when in 2013 Syria’s president ordered a sarin and chlorine attack on his own capital city; when the Islamic State retaliated in 2015 with mustard gas; in 2017 when Syria again was accused of using sarin gas. But tear gas is being used somewhere right now, in Bahrain or Venezuela, Uzbekistan or Baltimore, in a prison, at a protest, to disperse some lawful, even if unruly, assembly. It’s likely to be a long wait to see who gasses last.
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Consciousness and the World
You mean, essentially, that we are objects, and objects “take place,” rather than act.
We are part of the physical world, hence objects. What else could we be—immaterial souls? As for identity, we are what we are because we are identical with a portion of the world that has come together over the years in a certain way. The traditional separation of subject and object that underpins all standard thinking on consciousness and identity lies at the heart of our troubles as individuals and as a society.
The Stockdale Paradox: How to Successfully Deal With Life
I like to read a lot. Through the years, I have come to understand and memorize plenty of quotes. Only a few of them left a long-lasting mark on my life, just like those was found in a book called Good to Great written by Jim Collins.
I have read that book 4 years ago and it was one of those books that changed my entire approach to life. This book showed me mistakes in my leadership style, like how I neglected the people I was leading and how badly I was dealing with some situations. It also showed me all the good stuff I was already doing which gave me a huge smile on my face.
In the book, there was one principle, or better yet, a paradox which got stuck in my head. That is the Stockdale Paradox.
Before I explain its meaning (which you will find very interesting), I will share some details about the guy who started it all- Jim Stockdale.
Jim Stockdale was an American pilot in the Vietnam war. He was captured and made into a POW. He spent 8 gruesome years in a war camp in Vietnam while being tortured almost daily. After he was able to escape, he explained how he survived and why both optimists and pessimists were the first ones to die in the camp.
The paradox goes like this:
“You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. AND at the same time… You must confront the brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
So, let’s now dissect this paradox and see what we can learn from it.
You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.
This is the first part of the paradox and it covers the optimistic side of life. It says that in order to survive a hard period or any period in life, you need to have absolute faith that you will manage to conquer it. This goes to serve not only the people in war camps but also those who face any difficulties.
This part of unyielding faith can be applied to any part of your life. Whether it’s about a traumatic experience, losing a job, going broke or breaking up with someone, you need to have that strong faith.
“It too shall pass”.
This is a phrase you often hear someone tell you when you’re going through tough times. It means looking at what could be instead of what is.
Although it’s supposed to be good, it actually creates more problems.
With only the future in mind, what will happen with the present?
You must confront your current reality.
This is the pessimistic side of the paradox. It’s about being realistic.
You need to look at what’s happening in the present and assess it as it is.
To be honest, pessimists are way better in dealing with problems than optimists.
Pessimists see the current reality as it is while the optimists try to see what things can be.
That part is really important because you are going to your desired future, but you need a starting point. And that starting point needs to have a solid foundation which is your present reality.
Here, you can’t lie or deceive yourself out. You need to be brutal.
Let’s take an example to explain this.
Imagine you want to be the boxing heavyweight champion of the world. That is the first part which is the optimist part. We will call that POINT B.
Before you reach that point, you need to know where you currently are.
It can be a point where you can’t even do a southpaw the right way. Once you are able to acknowledge that, you can start working on it and become better. That is your starting point and let’s call it POINT A. ”
You need to meet them where they are”, the quote would say and the same thing applies to you.
Before you start earning a million dollars, start with earning a $100. Take it one step at a time.
This is what makes a difference and creates a paradox. You need to be optimistic about the future but at the same time be realistic (pessimistic) about the present.
I don’t care how smart or capable you think you are. You need both of those factors to succeed in life. Optimism takes you forward, gives you a vision and a better future to strive for but the pessimism grounds you in your current situation and makes you focus on what’s ahead.
This is how Jim Stockdale survived the war camp. He knew he is going to walk away free one day and that was his desired future. At the same time, he endured physical pain every day in the war camp and found a way to face that.
“The optimist that says everything will be alright and does nothing is the same as the pessimist that says nothing will be alright and gives up”, said Stockdale to his students at Stanford where he became a professor of Stoicism after the war.
The world will conspire to gives us what we deserve when we implement the paradox in action. Some call it God while others call it destiny. For me, however, it is karma.
What about you? Where does the Stockdale paradox apply in your life?
The post The Stockdale Paradox: How to Successfully Deal With Life appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
3 ACTIONABLE Steps To Change Your Life Through Thought
You’re reading 3 ACTIONABLE Steps To Change Your Life Through Thought, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
What kind of person were you growing up? Were you confident, popular or self assured? If so, you were the complete opposite of me. Me and my friends were called “the trolls under the stairs…” and that was by the teachers. The closest I came to social interaction was avoiding eye contact with anyone who walked past me… But I always wanted more.
I always wished I could reach out and talk to new people. To be like the popular kids, never being afraid of what I was going to say or if it was going to look stupid. For me it seemed like other people were always so confident, so sure of themselves and their ability. I wanted to be like that more than anything else.
Fast forward 3 years..
Since those days I’ve had the privilege of being a Bartender, PR & Party Host across Europe. I spent the last few winters working in the alps, skiing and meeting new people and the last few summers working, laying on a beach and partying at night. And this is all possible for ANYONE once they change the thoughts in their head!
But maybe travelling and working abroad doesn’t interest you. It doesn’t matter, whether you want to build your own business, network with new people, apply for your next big job or even something as small as talking to a sales assistant in a shop (something that used to terrify me), These steps will help you!
3 Actionable Steps To Change Your Life Through Thought
Step 1: Become Your Own Best Friend
How many times a day do you hear a voice telling you that you can’t do something? Or you’ll look stupid? That same voice is in everybody’s head. Always telling people they’re not good enough for something. But, it takes just as much effort for that voice to say something negative as it does positive.
There’s a quote “If you talked to your best friend the way you talked to yourself, would they still be your friend?” Well, would they? And if not, doesn’t that say something about all the negative things you’ve been telling yourself?
So, the first step is too start changing that voice in your head. Every time you hear the negative voice, start thinking about what your best friend would say to you instead. Or your mum or dad. Remind yourself of their words of encouragement. Sometimes you just need to believe in someone else’s belief in you.
Step 2: Imagine Your Future As Bright As You Can
This isn’t some positive, feel good “just imagine and your dreams will come true” speech. What I mean by this is literally sit down, close your eyes and envision where you want to be in the future. Visualise every minor detail. Because that is going to be massively motivational for you!
Think about it this way, what’s going to make you hungrier: Thinking about that delicious burger you’re going to eat for dinner, filled with a mouth-watering, tender patty, crispy fresh lettuce, Camembert cheese and a delicious, ripe, juicy tomato packed between two perfectly toasted buns.
Or a bog standard burger?
When you think about where you want to be with as much detail as you can, you’ll provide yourself with more hunger and motivation to make it happen.
Step 3: Stop Think About What Can Go Wrong, Start Thinking About What Can Go Right
In every situations there are hundreds or thousands of possible outcomes, which outcomes are you focusing on most? The negative ones or the positive ones? Like I said earlier, stop focusing all your time on a negative outcome that, chances are, won’t even happen, and start focusing on the positive outcomes. Believe me, I know this is easier said than done.
I’ve had days where negative outcomes keep popping into my head again and again, 100’s of times. And every time they do, I’d acknowledge them and then choose to let them pass. Because your time and energy is better off spent thinking about the positive outcome instead. This is a skill that takes time to develop. But that time is going to pass anyway. Do you want to spend the rest of your life only thinking of the negatives because you don’t want to spend time changing your habits of mind?
And Remember…
Even after all of this, there are going to be some times when you still don’t feel good enough. Or that you can’t do something. And that’s perfectly okay. But those are the moments when it’s even more important to just go out and do it. You need to prove to that voice in your head: “No I am good enough, I can do this”
The truth is, even if you don’t make the cut this time, you’ll be proud of the fact that you took the initiative, you were courageous, you believed in yourself and took a chance. And just because you didn’t quite make the mark once, you’ll be damn sure you’ll make it next time!
“The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” – John Milton
Antonio Tourino is the owner of You Are Your Reality. He’s spent the last 5 years traveling, overcoming fear and conquering confidence issues.
You’ve read 3 ACTIONABLE Steps To Change Your Life Through Thought, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
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Meet William Morris: The Most Celebrated Designer of the Arts & Crafts Movement
“Strawberry Thief” 1883 via Wikimedia Commons
Elegant swirls of vines, flowers, and leaves in perfect symmetry, William Morris’ iconic patterns are instantly recognizable. Designed during the 1800s, Morris’ woodblock-printed wallpaper designs were revolutionary for their time, and can still be found all over the world, printed for furniture upholstery, curtains, ceramics, and even fashion accessories. But do you know the history of how they came to be?
The Arts and Crafts Movement
Beginning in Britain around 1880, the Arts and Crafts movement was born from the values of people concerned about the effects of industrialization on design and traditional craft. In response, architects, designers, craftsmen, and artists turned to new ways of living and working, pioneering new approaches to create decorative arts.
One of the most influential figures during this time was William Morris, who actively promoted the joy of craftsmanship and the beauty of the nature. Having produced over 50 wallpaper designs throughout his career, Morris became an internationally renowned designer and manufacturer. Other creatives such as architects, painters, sculptors and designers began to take up his ideas. They began a unified art and craft approach to design, which soon spread across Europe and America, and eventually Japan, emerging as its own folk crafts movement called Mingei.
Who was William Morris?
Born in Walthamstow, East London in March 1834, William Morris was a poet, artist, philosopher, typographer, political theorist, and arguably the most celebrated designer of the Arts & Crafts movement. He strived to protect and revive the traditional techniques of handmade production that were being replaced by machines during the Victorian era’s Industrial Revolution. Although he dabbled in embroidery, carpet-making, poetry and literature, he mastered the art of woodblock printing, and created some of the most recognizable textile patterns of the 19th century.
Portrait of William Morris by Frederick Hollyer via Wikimedia Commons
Born into a wealthy middle-class family, Morris enjoyed a privileged childhood, as well as a sizable inheritance, meaning he would never struggle to earn his own income. He spent his childhood drawing, reading, and exploring forests and grand buildings, which triggered his fascination with natural landscapes and architecture.
Having developed his own particular taste from a young age, he began to realize the only way he could have the beautiful home he wanted was if he designed every part of it himself. As he famously once said, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
The Red House
While studying at Oxford, Morris met his lifelong friend, architect Philip Webb. His dear friend helped him design and construct his Medieval-inspired, Neo-Gothic style family home in Bexleyheath, where he lived with his wife, Jane Morris, and his two children, Jane “Jenny” Alice Morris and Mary “May” Morris. Built in 1860, it became known as the Red House, and is now one of the most significant buildings of the Arts and Crafts era. Today, the house is owned by the National Trust and is open to visitors.
The “Red House,” home of William Morris. via Wikimedia Commons
A number of Morris’ creative friends spent a lot of time at the Red House, including Pre-Raphaelite painters Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who both helped him elaborately decorate the abode. While he envisioned living there for the rest of his life, Morris’ perfectionism caused him to move on after only five years. Over the course of his short stay, he discovered a number problems with the property. However, he enjoyed the process so much that he decided to set up his own design company, with a desire to create affordable “art for all.”
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. which was later known as simply Morris & Co., was incredibly successful, and produced reams of fabric and wallpaper designs for over 150 years.
The Red House front door from inside. Photo: Tony Hisgett (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons
Morris’ Wallpaper Designs
Featuring swirling leaves, thieving birds, rose-filled trellises, and fruit tree branches, the designs of William Morris have a unique timeless quality. He began designing wallpapers in 1862, but their sale was delayed by several years while he experimented with printing from zinc plates.
Morris & Co. sample book via Wikimedia Commons
Inspired by nature, Morris’ designs feature leaves, vines, and flowers that he observed in his gardens or on walks in the countryside. Rather than life-like illustrations, his drawings are subtly stylized versions. Daisy, a simple design featuring meadow flowers, was the first of Morris’ wallpaper designs to go on sale in 1864.
“Diasy” 1864 via Wikimedia Commons
Morris designed Trellis after being unable to find a wallpaper that he liked enough for his own home. Inspired by the rose trellis in the garden of the Red House, Morris designed the pattern which went on sale in 1864. Interestingly, Morris could not draw birds, and the birds for this design were actually sketched by Philip Webb, the same friend and architect who designed the Red House.
William Morris design for “Trellis” wallpaper 1862 via Wikimedia Commons
“Trellis” wallpaper designed by William Morris 1862 and first produced in 1864. Via Wikimedia Commons
Morris had his wallpapers printed by hand, using carved, pear woodblocks loaded with natural, mineral-based dyes, and pressed down with the aid of a foot-operated weight. Each design was made by carefully lining up and printing the woodblock motifs again and again to create a seamless repeat. Morris once spoke about the precise process, saying, “Remember that a pattern is either right or wrong. It cannot be forgiven for blundering, as a picture may be which has otherwise great qualities in it. It is with a pattern as with a fortress, it is no stronger than its weakest point.”
He employed the printers Jeffrey & Co. to print his wallpapers up until his death in 1896, when the Merton factory took over production until the company’s voluntary liquidation in 1940.
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Art in Free Fall
The Los Angeles artist Laura Owens brings a light touch and a tough mind to a new kind of synthetic painting. Her exuberant, bracing midcareer survey at the Whitney beams a positive, can-do energy. As a stylist and culture critic, Owens is neither a stone-cold killer nor a gleeful nihilist, traits embraced by some of her peers. She’s an art lover, an enthusiast who approaches the problem of what to paint, and how to paint it, with an open, pragmatic mind. Her style can appear to be all over the place, but we always recognize the work as hers. Her principal theme may be her own aesthetic malleability.
Sig Nordal 