33 inspirations from my 33 years of life

Books, paintings, music, and movies that have shaped and fueled me

My birthday was this week and I have just turned 33, a delightful palindromic age. The number reminded me of a book series I loved browsing at Barnes & Noble as a teen called 33 1/3¹, where each short book delves into a different music album.

I love my birthday (must be my Leo Rising! 🦁) and thus enjoy making a special birthday post each year. Last year, I wrote 23 lessons upon turning 32. This year, in the spirit of 33 1/3, I wanted to share 33 creative inspirations from my lifetime (music and otherwise). These are works that I consider foundational to my memories, emotions, and worldview.

This is gonna be a long post, so it may get cut off in your inboxes. If that’s the case, click “View entire message” to finish reading. Alright, let’s dive right in!

33 Creative Inspirations:

1. 🎨 I first discovered Johannes Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring in middle school because of the movie (that I have never watched). This painting is my Mona Lisa—something about her eyes just gets me! In eighth grade I went to Paris on a family trip and was so excited to see Vermeer’s paintings in the Louvre, but the wing with his paintings was closed. I was so sad I cried. It’s on my bucket list to see Girl with a Pearl Earring someday, which is in Mauritshuis in The Hague.

   

   Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665

2. 📚 I’ve enjoyed many Roald Dahl’s books but my favorite is The BFG (it narrowly beats The Witches—both are too good!) The BFG depicts a soft-hearted giant living in a grotesque world of other giants who eat chiddlers, aka children. Illustrator Quentin Blake does a mind-bogglingly amazing job of bringing this world to life, and I cannot imagine enjoying this book without his illustrations.

3. 📚 Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth is filled with clever wordplay that lives in my head rent-free—the Whether Man, the Senses Taker, jumping to the Island of Conclusions! This novel has been a huge inspiration in my life, helping me embrace knowledge and curiosity as core values.

   

   Top tier map for The Phantom Tollbooth, illustrated by Jules Feiffer

4. 📚 Though I have lots of memories reading middle grade books, I don’t recall reading many picture books aside from Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline. Bemelmans’ impressionistic, intuitive linework and depictions of urban life are a huge inspiration in my art. My love for Madeline gave me the permission I needed to draw how I want to draw.

5. 🎶 I discovered artist Kim Kwang Seok, a Korean folk rock singer popular in the early ‘90s, when my college friends sang his songs at karaoke. I was instantly enamored with his poetry and raw emotion. When I think of han I think of him, and I frequently play his songs when I’m making art about Korean history and tradition. Though he tragically died at 31, his music still resonates deeply. Watch this going off to war scene from The Classic and tell me you’re not crying!

6. 📚 In fifth grade, I wrote my first and only fan email to Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries, asking permission to write fanfiction (cute and responsible of me to ask!) I’ve always loved writing in a diary and this book series showed me how diaries can be an engaging way to tell stories and capture emotions.

7. 📚 If Manic Pixie Dream Girl lived in Los Angeles she’d be Weetzie Bat, a YA cult classic novel by Francesca Lia Block. As a teenager wanting to escape the boring LA suburb I lived in, I yearned to escape to Weetzie Bat’s dreamy, bohemian version of LA.

8. 🎶 Rooney’s eponymous album will always be the California rock album that reminds me of home. I mean, there’s literally a flag of California on the cover—what more do you need? Fun fact: the lead singer of Rooney plays the romantic lead in The Princess Diaries movie.

9. 💻 Growing up, gURL.com was the coolest website ever. I loved coding my own gURLpage and reading relationship advice that was totally not age-appropriate. Though I found more online community on Livejournal, gURL was the scrappy internet zine that first introduced me to zine culture.

   

10. 🎨 I’m fascinated by dualities, reflections, and mirror images. Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas is one of my favorite artworks with its exploration of cultural identity and the contrast of her public and private self. I thought of this piece while making Jamae and I know the themes of The Two Fridas are ones I’ll keep revisiting time and again.

    

    The Two Fridas, 1939

11. 🎶 Towards the end of high school, I left my emo era and entered my indie pop era when I fell in love with Fur and Gold by Bat for Lashes. This album conjures a mysterious, ethereal atmosphere that served as my soundtrack while making paintings of my matcha world.

12. 🎨 When I want color inspiration I turn to David Hockney, especially his interior and landscape paintings. He uses bold and bright colors which remain grounded in careful observation. He’s a master at depicting light and refraction, and studying his work has taught me to fall in love with the art of observation.

13. 🧸 I love using pink in my art, which I attribute to my childhood love for Polly Pocket. They were the only toys I played with and I loved coercing my sister and cousin to play with me, making up wild backstories about our little dolls as we had them explore different houses.

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14. 🎬 The Diving Bell and the Butterfly took my breath away when I watched it in theaters. The film is based on journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby's true story of getting paralyzed with locked-in syndrome, only able to move his head and eyes. He wrote an entire memoir describing his experiences over two months, blinking his left eyelid to choose each letter. The movie really elevates this inspiring story through its mesmerizing cinematography, which helps the viewer immerse in Bauby’s limited perception.

15. 📚 If I had to bring only one book to a desert island, it would be Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. There’s a particular whimsy and earnestness in Banana Yoshimoto’s writing that helps me see beauty and emotion in the mundane everyday. This is absolutely a “no plot just vibes” book.

16. 🎶 Of Montreal’s The Sunlandic Twins is the weird and whimsical album of my dreams. I loved it so much I had “The Party’s Crashing Us” as my ringtone for years (back when my phone wasn’t always on silent mode). The song is forever burned into my memory, yet it still cheers me up every time I listen.

17. 📚 Of all the books I read in school, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is my favorite. It's a compassionate and moving coming of age story of a girl Francie growing up in Williamsburg in the early 1900s. It was wonderful to visit Francie’s local library, Leonard Library, when I lived in the same neighborhood over a hundred years later.

18. 🎨 I will find something to fall in love with in every Henri Matisse painting, and one of my favorites is Woman in Blue. I loved this piece before knowing the context, but what is most fascinating to me is how much Matisse was dissatisfied with the laborious effort and lack of spontaneity in it! See below for the many iterations of the painting in the span of two months.

    

    Woman in Blue, 1937

19. 👯‍♀️ I had a brief Warhol phase in high school, but it was really Edie Sedgwick I fell in love with. She was gorgeous and had incredible style, but her undeniable charisma combined with her fragility really fascinated me. It breaks my heart to think about how Andy Warhol exploited her, ultimately lea

    ding to her downfall.

20. 🎶 The first album I ever bought was Come On Over by Shania Twain. Y’all, the number of hits on this album..! I love both her ballads and female empowerment anthems, and this early consumer choice signaled my deep appreciation for artists who can mix multiple genres to create something uniquely themselves.

21. 🎶 Whenever I needed to stay alert driving to my 6:30 AM chemistry class in high school, I would blast Hannah Montana. I mentioned I love dualities before—if dualities had a pop theme song it would be “The Best of Both Worlds”!

22. 🎬 I absolutely wanted to be a girl rock star, so Josie and the Pussycats was my jam. The movie is so unabashedly fun, from the maximalist outfits to the catchy music to the interwoven satire. I fully believe this is Parker Posey’s best film!

23. 🎨 I first discovered gouache from Maira Kalman’s art, and now it’s one of my favorite mediums. I love how gouache is matte and chalky yet vibrant and playful. It’s not as expensive as oils and is more workable than watercolor. Maira Kalman's poetry has a great conversational rhythm that pairs so well with her paintings.

    

    For 13 Words by Maira Kalman, 2010

24. 🎶 Need a lullaby? May I prescribe you “Through the Night” by IU? Listen to this song with headphones in bed with all the lights off and let her voice hug you to sleep. I reach for this song whenever I want to swim the depths of my heart and feel hopeful again.

25. 🎬 Memento's fractured narrative structure to tell the story of a man with anterograde amnesia continues to blow my mind 20+ years later. This is a movie with high rewatchability—first to follow the unreliable narrator’s point of view, second to understand the full story, then many times after to marvel at the details carefully crafted by director Christopher Nolan.

26. 🎶 Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” changed my assumptions about classical music. The song is so gentle and contemplative compared to the dynamic symphonies of Beethoven or Tchaikovsky I grew up hearing.

27. 📚 Persepolis may be her more famous work, but Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi steals my heart for its unapologetic stories of Iranian women’s sex lives. I love how this graphic novel eschews panels, page numbers, and sometimes even speech bubbles so it can mimic the fluidity and interjections rife in group conversation.

28. 🎨 I feel so lucky to have gone to Hilma af Klint's NYC exhibit in 2019, her first major solo exhibition in the US. I love af Klint’s dedication to spirituality and how it reflects in her art. Though she wanted to show her large paintings in a spiral temple she was never able to display them during her lifetime, so getting to see her work in the spiraling walkways of the Guggenheim was incredible.

29. 🎶 Lane 8 is a fantastic electronic music producer making lush, melodic songs that I love listening to as background music. “Sunlight” and “Midnight” are my go to day and night songs—one is twinkly and gently euphoric, the other reflective and cinematic.

30. 🎨 Swedish graphic designer Olle Eksell’s midcentury illustrations dominate my Pinterest boards. He is a master of shapes, composition, and negative space, all with limited color palettes often seen in the midcentury era.

31. 🎨 The Art of Living is an impressive collection of artist Saul Steinberg’s drawings. Whenever I think drawing feels like a chore, I open up this book and bam—I’m immediately inspired to pick up a pen.

32. 📚 Learning by Heart is a book of artist and nun Corita Kent’s teachings. It has a wealth of experimental assignments and inspiration, some of which have shaped past newsletter posts.

33. 📚 Last but not least, Making Comics by Lynda Barry is so good that I organize a monthly club to practice the book’s drawing exercises! I’ll end with Lynda Barry’s observation below, which is a great reminder of the value of creating regardless of how we judge our creations.

    

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We made it to 33, phew! You still here? I hope you clicked on some tabs to explore and had some sparks of “wow, I totally forgot about that.” Maybe you even judged my choices a bit! That’s okay—I’m sure you have a cringeworthy inspiration tucked away in your own memories, waiting to be taken out and appreciated again.

I encourage you to try this list making exercise of compiling your own inspirations. It’s been super enlightening to think of what has lasted with me through the ages and the ways it has filtered through me and my art. If you’d like to reminisce about any inspirations mentioned, I’ll be in the comments!

1. The series is titled 33 1/3 because this is the revolutions per minute for a vinyl LP!