A poster on the wall at the School for Visual Arts.
Rob Walker spoke at the 4th annual Phil Patton Memorial Lecture this week on his new book, The art of noticing: 131 ways to spark creativity, find inspiration, and discover joy in the everyday. The part after the colon clearly is there to get it onto the self-help shelves, because when he talked about noticing, it was riveting, serious, not cheesy at all. As an example, he showed slides of "what you're not supposed to notice": security cameras. As with Basquiat, Walker was able to change how I see what I see.
Phil Patton taught design at SVA but I knew him from our days as auto writers. What an eye that man had. And mind. And oh my, he could write.