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Mona Lisa - Red Queen rising
Your weekly art takeaway
Mona L
October 13, 2024
Oct 12 | Issue 12
ML - Welcome to Mona Lisa. A weekly newsletter for artists with timeless quotes, ideas and light bites for curious & wandering minds.
Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.💰
Lite bites
🔴 Red is the first colour that humans perceive, after black and white.
🫨 Picasso produced about 13,500 paintings and designs, 100,000 prints and engravings, 34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures and ceramics during his lifetime.
🎨 The colour wheel predates the United States.
🧠 The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around. — Thomas A. Edison
Mona’s notes
This Sunday’s newsletter started life as a ‘gym-thought’, on a treadmill, running, but going nowhere.🏃🏽♀️💨
…and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.
The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’
I don’t think Alice was on a treadmill 👀 Lewis Carroll, (whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was the mastermind behind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and had a sharp eye for human behaviour. In Through the Looking Glass, as Alice races through a world where nothing around her seems to move or change, the Red Queen embodies the feeling of working harder, not to move forward, but just to keep from falling behind - currently a relatable feeling.. 🥲
‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’ 👸🏽
The Red Queen isn’t wrong about the race - networking, openings, technology, trends, visibility, production, constant connection… it’s depleting, but it’s the reality of survival today. I could re-frame this - instead of running faster, can I run smarter? Just recognising when I am caught in a race to nowhere I’ve often found a way to step out of it. The faster everything evolves, the more I have to adapt. Staying flexible is often more powerful than brute strength or raw talent. It doesn’t mean I have to change who I am, but just how I do it.❣️🐌
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Sometimes, gearing down —just enough to recalibrate and recalculate— has been a better way to move forward. When it feels like the Red Queen’s rising, maybe the solution isn’t to run twice as fast. Maybe it’s knowing when to run, and when to rest.🌱
With love
Mona x
“You’re only as good as your last haircut.” — Fran Lebowitz 💇♀️
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