Susan and I recently rested at The George in Montclair where Susan grew up. This clever boutique hotel — brainchild of cosmetics mogul, Bobbi Brown, and real estate developer, Steven Plofker — appealed to us in a “we might have created something like this” kind of way. It’s a one off. It’s quirky and clever, a sensitive historic rehabilitation with a modern sensibility. It’s slightly irreverent an eye to playful assemblage (a 3-D mashup of collecting, curating, collage, and interior design) where combinatorial creativity reigns triumphant!
Walls and guest rooms collage themed images, often but not always, vintage headshots, magazine covers, and portraits.
It’s a combination of many different things, and it’s still a work in progress. I’m curating the photographs, and it’s not just individual photos, it’s themes. There are paintings too; one of my favorites is George Costanza, which I love, and I bought on Etsy. Some of the photographs are from our personal collection, some are through Getty, some are things I found in flea markets. Now we’re going to start looking for concert tickets. If it’s a name like Frank it could be Frank Sinatra concert tickets. I just looked around my house to start with. — Bobbi Brown (Source: “See Inside Bobbi Brown’s Newest Business Venture: The George Inn” by Melissa Minton, Architectural Digest, February 20, 2018)
As we lay in bed looking up at the many Nancies hanging on our wall, trying to identify the patchwork of fun mostly vintage photographs and media clippings Austin Kleon’s weekly words and images floated into my inbox. As yet another master of combinatorial creativity, it made uncanny but timely sense that his newsletter shared a foreword he’s recently written for Citizen Printer, a monograph showcasing the work and ideas of Amos Paul Kennedy. Sometimes the universe rhymes! 
This, for example, resonates almost too perfectly.
“I’m just borrowing things,” I’ve heard him say. “I’m putting things together that people left for me.”
I ordered the book and allowed my morning mind to meander. A few of my recent reflections on combinatorial creativity follow. Please consider it a still coalescing collage not unlike the collections that Bobbi describes at The George.
Combining Combinatorial Creativity
Like ingredients gathered, blended, and baked into a confection, I’m hoping that chemistry and environment might morph this mashup into something nourishing.
I’m Pollyanna-positive that combinatorial creativity (and the cross-pollination it so often engenders) will transform today’s tidbits into tomorrow’s template, outline, map, something that will show me the way forward. (Source: Fenestrated Refinishing)
First, the gathering of ingredients.
How do we transform old elements into new elements and leftovers into fresh creations? Today I offer you… a sort of creative alchemy that’s occupied much of my reflection over the last couple of years: art from artifacts.
Old, disused, detritus and vestiges revitalized. The abandoned adapted. Refuse recycled and upcycled. Forgotten and neglected ingredients reimagined as unfamiliar confections.
Composing from decomposed elements! …
We are rehabilitating today into tomorrow, the past into the future. We are creating and re-creating from the enduring leftovers, the compost, the echoes of what has gone before.
Distilling the enduring, the durable from the decomposing, the vanishing. (Source: Art from Artifacts)
Then capricious curating.
[I enjoy] experimentation with enough whimsy and creative license that it almost feels like playing around.
I’m referring to a sort of exploratory brainstorming, decidedly unscientific but curiosity-fueled artistic experimentation… Would this experiment in combinatorial creativity contribute meaningfully to a unique, cohesive design?
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As creatives we must grow comfortable with the prospect of forging our own way, navigating by trial-and-error… Experimentation — and this encompasses failures as well as success — is fundamental to the creative process…
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Jettisoning the familiar patterns, the customary solutions, and the “right way” is liberating, and sometimes a little unnerving…
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But every once in a while, wandering in this metaphorical wilderness of experimentation, we discover something singular, something remarkable… It’s incumbent upon us to untether from the familiar, the tried and true, the already discovered, in order to wonder and wander uninhibited, in order to explore and experiment without prejudice and confining assumptions. Not always, of course. And we must be willing to fail. Often. It is this vulnerability combined with curiosity, and with the courage to challenge our constraints and catalyze that curiosity through experimentation into the possibility of discovery. (Source: Mixed Species Flooring Experiment)
Creative risk and experimentation. Sometimes failure. Sometimes alchemy.
I’ve been exploring and experimenting with fragments, artifacts, and relics. Mostly these are physical objects. Found materials. Items that for one reason or another offer insight or contribute to Rosslyn’s story in some way.
Today let’s consider intangible fragments and artifacts. Relics of poetry past. Like potsherds — disinterred and sometimes reassembled or reimagined as part of a mosaic or the pendant on a necklace — “poet-sherds” resurface and invite recomposition. Or new composition. Poet-sherds might coalesce into a collage poem, a mosaic poem, a lyric essay, or possibly even a song.
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Something about these sorts of artifacts invite fidgeting and experimenting. Their fragmented endurance is a sort of irresistible puzzle inviting playful iteration. (Source: Potsherds & Poet-sherds)
Sometimes it’s but the subtlest of sympathies that pull puzzle pieces together.
Two planets passing, briefly eclipsing, a gravitational closeness, a tender but fleeting affinity, an ephemeral communion.
To be aware and receptive in these moments, to allow curiosity to prevail over confirmation, and to course change when opportunity offers. These are a few of the promises and aspirations of combinatorial creativity.
Afterward: Slow Rehab
By way of closure to a wayward and inconclusive dispatch, I offer an only nominally relevant aside. In conversation with staff at The George (all exceptional, by the way), it was mentioned that the full rehab, redesign, and launch took half a dozen years. 6 years to reinvent this property in its current, clever reincarnation. Six years. “That’s our kind of timeline,” I said to Susan. Perhaps rehab, real rehab takes time. Organic and dynamic. Evolving as we live and grow.
But, the articles I’ve come across suggest a span of two years.
But my enthusiasm, erroneous or not, endures. Sometimes slow and steady is the only path forward.
What do you think?