Smith Journal – Volume Six

It takes a certain kind of person to commit so fully to a task that they lose track of everything else. These obsessive types populate the pages of volume six. There’s Robert Gamblin, who uses science, intuition and a blender to create oil paints that are used by artists the world over. There’s retired sailor and shipwright Ray Gascoigne who, at 85, spends hours painstakingly building ships on the world’s smallest dry dock – a bottle. There’s Kazuko Koike, one of the founders of the Japanese non-brand brand MUJI, whose almost dogmatic obsession with simplicity and usefulness helped define Japan’s design culture. There’s David Noble, a committed bushwalker who unknowingly unearthed the Wollemi Pine, which had previously only been known from a 150-million-year-old fossil.On the pages you’ll also find mushroom farmer and scientist Dr Noel Arrold, Drones frontman Gareth Liddiard, Vimeo co-designer Zach Klein, Tetris-style builder Michael Johansson and Kano Jigoro, the guy who invented judo. If all that passion feels impossible to live up to, there’s also an old-school motivational poster to keep you on the task at hand.