Greetings, Readers!
Our exploration theme this month is “Excellence.” The concept of excellence has different meanings for different people, so for this issue, we focus on ÀNI Art Academies’ definition: “Striving for the highest standards in teaching, learning, and personal development.”
ÀNI’s definition describes excellence not as perfection, but as striving. Excellence rarely happens all at once. More often, it develops slowly through repetition, experimentation, frustration, observation, and persistence. It appears in the willingness to return to something again and again, even when progress feels invisible. Sometimes it looks dramatic from the outside, but most of the time it is built quietly through daily effort. This issue explores that idea from many different directions.
We are excited to debut a new recurring series, The Adorned World. The first object featured is one of the most familiar: the chair. What starts as a practical object quickly becomes something much larger. Across cultures and centuries, chairs have reflected authority, ritual, status, comfort, technology, taste, and changing ideas about the body and the interior it resides. The series asks larger questions about why humans decorate the world around them and how objects carry meaning far beyond their function.
This issue also features Anthony’s ambitious article, The Cognitive Forest, which explores the landscape of learning, perception, and knowledge-building through an enormous body of interdisciplinary research. It is a piece that invites slow reading and reflection, revealing new connections each time you revisit it.
Mitchell Bagnas returns with another honest and engaging contribution, reflecting on the realities of skill acquisition and the balancing act of pursuing serious artistic training alongside everyday life. What makes his writing resonate is its sincerity. There is no romanticized shortcut to growth here, only the very real costs, sacrifices, routines, and persistence that meaningful development often requires.
Lastly, I want to sincerely thank everyone who reached out with kind words about last month’s issue hitting our six-month mark. Hearing that these articles, conversations, and ideas are resonating with readers truly means a great deal. At the same time, it feels important to say: we are just getting started!
Thank you, as always, for reading and for being part of this growing community.
With excitement and gratitude,
Ava Ash-Waichulis
Editor-in-Chief
