mission control

Coco Chanel made “the little black dress” chic and forever fabulous.  A fashion statement that reveals taste as well as retains mystery.  The ultimate communication of style.

Now if there was a Coco Chanel Officer – a CCO- on board of every entrepreneurial adventure, life would be a much more sane and stylish place.  Is there a reason why my desk, my life, the inside of every pocketbook I own look like a storage container of  black objects, mostly square with shiny surfaces and only operable by tapping and pecking?

Did anyone even bother to ask if there was a better looking way to connect?

I am enslaved to my Blackberry for email.  I love my iPad for making everything I read, view, and listen to a beautiful experience.  I am in control of my universe perched at the edge of my chair at my desk.   If I am what I eat, does that mean I am what I Google?

This is what the inside of my brain feels like.

And yet, in the far reaches of my caffeine marinated memory, I do remember how delightful it was watching words caterpillaring out of my No. 2 pencil onto clean white sheets of paper and becoming something that could be read, viewed and listened to.

I wondered if my head looked like the inside of a pencil.

I also remember Coco Chanel believed that well designed clothes should reveal the style of the woman underneath.  Now there’s incentive to focus on your inner icon.  You are the attraction smoldering beneath your couture, behind your About Page.  Better to be concerned with your essence, not your equipment.

This is something I find myself forgetting every time I get distracted by new shiny toys and lose myself in their distracting power.  So, for the sake of the inside of my mind, I do the following:

Sharpen a pencil

Write one word at a time

Draw a picture

Rinse and repeat

This is a simple exercise, an act of expression at a thoughtful pace.  The movement of your hand across paper, of phrases forming, vision becoming visual.   Do these momentously and with great pleasure.  These are gestures that draw in gazes.

Just like that little black dress.

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Style Notes from me, your artspy

Hoong Yee

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