Mona Lisa - Everything was once something else

ML - Welcome to Mona Lisa. A weekly newsletter for artists with timeless quotes, ideas and light bites for curious & wandering minds.

Lite Bites

🪨 The oldest known pigment is ochre, used in cave paintings 100,000 years ago.

🕸️ Spider silk is five times stronger than steel—yet light as a feather.

🗣️“A material is not just a passive substance. It speaks, it has its own life.” — Anish Kapoor

🖋️ Vellum, used for medieval manuscripts, is made from calfskin. It's so durable some pages remain pristine after 1,000 years.

Mona’s notes

Everything you see was once something else.

That book you are reading was once a tree 🌲. That piece of chalk, a cliff. Pigments in paints and dyes, henna, cochineal, indigo, were once plants or insects. The marble in Michelangelo’s David stood in the Tuscan hills for centuries. A pearl is nothing more than an oyster defending itself from an intruder.

Every material carries a history. Gold is always recycled. Wood tells its story through the grain. Plastic was once oil, a slippery sludge of ancient plankton and algae, transformed over millennia. A work of art is rarely new. It is a continuation of everything the material has lived through.

The sublime is in the shift, at the brink of change where alchemy rules. Perhaps that’s why glass can be so compelling—an amorphous solid, caught between liquid and crystal. The moment something becomes something else.

Not, “What am I made of?” but…

“What am I becoming?” 🌟 

Love Mona x

“A lot of times, we censor ourselves before the censor even gets there.” - Spike Lee

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