Brood Cicadia: Back Again in 2014

No way! What an incredible specimen.

Last year, a certain type of cicadia that only breeds every 17 years or so (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2013/06/nature-brood-ii.html), emerged from their dormant state to spectacular profusion, and they are enormous. This lovely specimen (pictured above), was so completely fresh and intact, some of its' front legs still moved from the fluid flowing within. Yes! That's fresh, yo.

Bug specimen next to piece of wood for size comparison.

So, I did what any self-respecting, wanna-be, 21st century da Vinci would: I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and took a picture of it, then wrapped that bitch up in a couple of pieces of paper torn out of a notebook I always carry, so I could look at it more closely at home later on in the day.

Last years' specimen, labeled and protected for future preservation.

It was even more beautiful up close, a phenomenally unique specimen. Keen observation out in the field is so essential to our type of scholarship, that an art student cannot enter the hallowed halls of RISD (The Rhode Island School of Design) without it. 

The Nature Lab, at the Rhode Island School of Design

We have a nature lab on campus that speaks to the core of who we are as a people out in the world: artists, designers, scientists, engineers, educators, leaders, and mentors. We are the builders, makers, doers, thinkers, and hardcore scholars that make the world go forward in such beautifully perfect harmony. Well, most of the time. 

One cannot be an intellectual without a foundation like this at their core, and I wouldn't want to even try it. I've been bringing home samples since I was a kid. It's more than some pretty picture, this is who I am. Happy hunting, collectors.

The DNA of Our XYZ: RISD by Design

Natural instincts, and other magical gifts.

Being a RISD grad (pronounced RIZZ-DEE) is like dropping the Harvard bomb into casual conversation at a cocktail party: the music stops with a sudden scratch of a needle across a record (you remember those, right?), like the person opposite you has just spied spinach caught conspicuously between your front teeth, as is now deciding whether or not to tell you the truth about your appearance based on your relatively new, and brief, acquittance. How to proceed? Alarm, dread, surprise, or maybe a kind of slow-creeping dawn of recognition widens their eyes, and those are just the people who know the truth about who we are.

I do not (nor have I ever) resemble a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, just like I don't resemble the stereotypical, movie version of an artiste, or the square-framed, shy, passive-aggressive, arrogant, know-it-all book designer, like your average, working class, boogie-down New Yawker, or your typically self-righteous Catholic girl, though I am, in fact, all of those things: an artist, a book designer, a native New Yorker, a person of faith, and that's just scratching the surface. Like my ethnicity, the story of who I am is not the Dummy Guide to the Self or a CliffNotes version of reality, though I am far from pretentiously complex, nor purposely difficult to pin down, like some pompous hipster living high on the hog in Williamsburg (look it up).

Nature, and also, design.

Through time, I found myself to be exactly who I think I am, and that my experience at RISD was exactly what it was supposed to be: hard, brutally hard, and not something I would ever contemplate doing again, because my purpose was (and is) to go out in the world to share my work and my vision as a leader in the world, and as a woman of the world. It was a "one of a kind" type of thing, just like my time as a student was.

I now see my time there as something akin to the cinematic version of the combined Harry Potter books: a magical sort of place that doesn't actively seek out students (nor should they, because RISD has the lowest acceptance rate in the world), but simply draws to it the beautiful and gifted like another type of magnet, that Sorting Hat of Potter fame. As much as I didn't "fit" in (and who would, at such an extraordinary place?!), I found over time that I am exactly what they wait for at RISD: a type of intellect that can cross barriers, jumping lightly over divides to make previously unseen connections, building almost impossibly beautiful bridges seemingly out of thin air.

Human animals, and other topics of interest.

Because, just like one of my professors admitted, we are this era's Leonardo da Vinci's (and every era's ever after), as we always have been, and we always will be: not easy, not trendy, not "alternative" for the sake of a short term sale, but rather to become enduring, lasting, classic, innovative, a type of forever that's also human and achievable. It's kinda like being the stuff that books are made of: once bound and sewn by hand, then printed on paper by a press with movable type, and now rendered into a computer programming language for the Digital Age. Yeah, like that.  Come, see for yourself.  http://issuu.com/risd/docs/risdxyz_spring2014_final_single_pag#

Revolutions in the making, and other brilliant feats of typesetting.