Austin Kleon

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D.I.Y.

diy

diy

My wife loves to sew and she’s quite the craft-blog connoisseur, so this afternoon she dragged me over to the first Austin CRAFT Magazine Release Party for a little bit. Amazingly, I wasn’t the only guy there. I sat and doodled and ate cupcakes and watched everybody crafting, and it got me thinking about do-it-yourself, and how our generation as a whole is becoming more interested in making things. (Witness Maker Faire.)

I also started thinking about artists who not only make their art, they TEACH others how to make art. This, in a way, not only makes them even more beloved to their pre-existing fans, it also makes them new fans, and new patrons: when you teach someone how to make a certain type of art, you are, in effect, generating more interest for your art form, and creating more consumers for it.

But even more important, you’re welcoming people into a club. “You too can make art! It helps your soul grow! Join us!”

“The market for something to believe in is infinite.”

Not only that: the market for a club to belong to is infinite.

Comments

  2. Amen, sir. While there are plenty of modern advances that are best left to the experts (e.g. building & using MRI machines), there are plenty of areas where we’ve abdicated our DIY abilities in the name of convenience, with profound unintended consequences.

    Some of these consequences are environmental. It’s often much more environmentally sound to do something yourself, e.g. grow and cook your own food instead of having it packaged and transported great distances. My guess is that, along with the general cultural impetus toward DIY provided by things like Maker Faire and MAKE magazine, we’re also going to see more people getting into more areas of DIY because of higher fuel prices and increased environmental concerns.

  4. I think it also has to do with using our HANDS. Dig this excerpt of Lynda Barry talking to a caller on Talk of the Nation yesterday:

    WALT: I think some of the creativity we have as children is stifled by the way we were educated, or at least in my case. I’ve just recently retired so I’m one of these baby boomers…and…we tend to have been educated into go get a job, earn some money, buy a house, so forth and so on, so you go to the job everyday to earn the money, and you don’t have a channel for creation. Some people try to write poetry, some people try to write music on the side, but most of the time you just don’t have time, and you get sidetracked. That’s the best way I can put it.

    LYNDA BARRY: I agree with that. I think that there’s more and more emphasis on not using your hands and fingers. When I teach writing, I always try to get people to do it by hand because I think that just in terms of evolution, I think our hands and our brains and the back of our minds all developed at the same time. And so I think that there’s feel like there’s something about making something or putting something together that just makes us feel better. At the same time there’s this big push to do away with moving our hands or making things by hand. But I feel like just doing something by hand that alone can make you feel better.

    NEAL CONAN: And Walt, now that you’re retired, are you finding that creative vent again?

    WALT: Well, I’m just finding it. I found that there was a big vacuum when I did retire because I wasn’t going to work every day. I got up and I went, well, what do I? What’s what’s to do? You know? What can I do? And there were tons of projects that I probably should have been doing, but none of them interested me creatively. But you can get – it’s amazing that you can get creative joy out of something as simple as mowing the lawn.

    LYNDA: Exactly!

    WALT: …creating a pattern in the grass…

    LYNDA: Exactly!

    WALT: …you can let your mind wander…You do a good job of it, and you look at it after you’re done and you say, boy, that really looks nice. Something as simple as that, can stimulate the creative urges as well as painting a picture or doing something else.

    LYNDA: I agree with you completely, and I think it has to do with moving our bodies. Just what you said: you can mow the lawn, you can mow it one way, or you can do it where you start to notice the patterns. But I think that’s that back of the mind, letting the back of the mind come forward while we’re moving our bodies. And that’s something that really seems to be missing from adult life.

  5. I saw that Barry conversation over on the Tumblr. The first thing it made me think of were the old-school scientist/artists. Folks like Galileo, building a better telescope, and then making those great illustrations of the sun and the moon. Leonardo cutting up bodies, making instruments and engineering stuff while painting and illustrating. There’s a sort of holistic genius at work there. It’s all a big swirl of curiosity and play and learning and making.

Trackbacks

  1. […] A year ago I was sitting in a craft store here in Austin. I sat and doodled and ate cupcakes and watched my wife and all these women crafting, teaching each other, helping each other. There was such a sense of inclusiveness. It was as if everyone was saying to each other, “Yes! You can do this! We can do this! Join the club!” […]

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