When I was 13, I wrote to the artist Winston Smith, and he wrote me back a 14-page handwritten letter that changed my life:
15 years later, I got to meet him.
I told the whole story two days after it happened when I spoke at Pixar, and then I retold it a few months ago at UX Week and they got it on video. It’s probably my favorite talk I’ve ever given. Enjoy:
Can’t see it on mobile? Watch it here→
Making art is a lonely business. Hell, being alive is a lonely business.
I have been swimming in tweets and nice e-mails from people discovering my work via the 20×200 prints. It’s pretty wonderful. And disorienting. And a major high.
But it will taper off. And next week I will have a dark day when I want to quit, when I wonder why the heck I even bother with this stuff.
That’s why I attach a Gmail label to every nice e-mail I get. (Trollish e-mails get deleted.) When those dark days roll around and I need a boost, I just click on that label and read through a couple.
Then I get back to work.
Try it: instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. For when you need the lift.
I’ve received a few e-mails from young(er) writers in the past couple of months, many of them trying very hard to figure things out and looking for words of advice and encouragement. Because I’m totally unqualified and ill-equipped to deliver them such words, I’m reading The Master: Rainer Maria Rilke and his Letters To A Young Poet.
Rilke was twenty-seven—still a young artist with his best work ahead of him—when he got a letter from a nineteen-year-old military school student named Franz Kappus. Kappus sent Rilke some poems and asked him for advice about becoming a writer. Rilke got lots of letters from aspiring artists, but Kappus’s touched him: Rilke had spent the worst five years of his young life forced by his parents into the same military school. And so o began a ten-letter correspondence lasting from 1902–1908.
The letters aren’t really letters, they’re diaries. Rilke saw himself in Kappus, and so they’re written from Rilke to Rilke—both to his past and his present. They begin with a description of Rilke’s current setting (various cities across Europe) and continue into the subject of how to live and how to create. Each is a map of where he’s been and where he needs to go.
There’s so much to take away from the ten letters, but here’s a short-list of questions a young writer might ask, with Rilke’s responses.
Is my stuff any good? Am I good enough to really make it as writer?
[You're asking the wrong questions!] There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity….
…But after this descent into yourself and into your solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet (if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all). Nevertheless, even then, this self-searching that I as of you will not have been for nothing. Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.
What should I write about?
Write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?
Can you send me some freebies?
…as to my own books, I wish I could send you any of them that might give you pleasure. But I am very poor, and my books, as soon as they are published, no longer belong to me. I can’t even afford them myself – and, as I would so often like to, give them to those who would be kind to them.
What about chicks?
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn.
Okay, I must write—but how am I supposed to feed myself?
[....]
That’s a subject Rilke doesn’t really touch on. For a good 20th century update, I’d point to Hugh MacLeod’s “How To Be Creative.”
If you haven’t yet read Letters To A Young Poet, I highly recommend doing so. Get the the Stephen Mitchell translation.
When my father-in-law was down from Cleveland last week, he brought me an envelope sent to our old address, postmarked Europe. I couldn’t imagine what European would be sending me anything, so it was a real treat and a surprise to find two copies of La Cagouille No. 6—a little zine that a couple of French folks put out. I had totally forgotten that way back Gabriel Papapietro had asked me if they could print an old comic of mine called “Rendezvous.” The package contained a note from Gabriel…so nice to get handwritten letters!
Other than my comic, everything else is in French, so I’m piecing my way through. Here’s a spread from Gabriel’s comic, “Royan Sur Brie,” which you can read online if you add him as a friend on Myspace.
Very cool. Thanks for the mail, Gabriel!
Since people dug the previous post, here’s another letter—short this time—from collage artist Winston Smith sent to me in 1997 (I was still 13). In this one, Winston raps about saving money by not being addicted to cigarettes, the greatness of Leonardo Da Vinci, and Anti-Nazi German collage artist John Heartfield (who, coincidentally, worked with George Grosz).
Read the whole thing as a flickr set (with enlarged scans).
The year was 1997. I was 13 years old. Green Day was the coolest band in the world. Two years previous, they’d just put out their album, Insomniac, with an insane-looking cover. I checked out the liner notes, and found out it was done by a collage artist named Winston Smith:
I had a great art teacher, Robyn Helsel, who assigned us a project where we had to pick a contemporary artist and write to them. Most of the class picked their artists out of a catalog. I picked Winston. I used my dad’s e-mail account and sent probably half a dozen e-mails to a gallery curator I found online, asking for Winston’s home address. The curator finally replied: “Stop bugging me, kid. Here’s his address.” I sent Winston a two-page letter using a ransom note font in Microsoft Word, telling him about me and my band, asking him about his technique, his influences…I even had the audacity to include a sketch of an idea I had for a piece he might want to attempt. (I have the letter somewhere…but unfortunately, not the sketch!) A few months went by. As I remember it, nobody in the class heard back from their artist.
Then one day a huge, stuffed manila envelope came in the mail. I ran to the kitchen table, tore it open, and dumped out its contents. There was a 14-page hand-written note from Winston and probably 50 pages of color photocopies of his work and press clippings. I couldn’t believe it. An artist—a real artist!—had written me back!
To me, it was the equivalent of Rilke writing back to the young poet. He told me about his life and his methods. He urged me to always question authority, stay away from drugs, and keep getting straight As so one day I could pay the bills. (An artist—a real artist!—was telling me it was okay to get straight As!) I’d never heard anybody talk about the kind of things he wrote about—art, America, growing up in a small-town—it was like a time-bomb that went off in my brain.
The letter, and I’m not exaggerating, changed my life.
I wrote him back, and he wrote me back. We’ve kept up a casual correspondence since.
I was at my mom’s over the holidays, and decided to use her new scanner to
archive some papers I wanted to preserve for safe-keeping.
I’m not sure if it will interest anyone else, but I’m posting it here as a shining example of great generosity from an established artist to an aspiring artist. It’s one of my most treasured possessions, and I just really freaking love it and want to share it.
And so, with Winston’s permission, here it is. (Also: be sure to check out Winston’s work and buy some of his stuff!)
VIEW THE WHOLE LETTER AS A FLICKR SET
During the (still-in-progress) move, I came across these doodles that Lynda sent me as part of a letter. Everything she does inspires me to create, so I thought I’d share these.
Ever think about how weird it is that we use the phrase “keep in touch” when “keeping in touch” never really means touching?
When I spent six months in England without Meg, we spent a lot of time “keeping in touch.” Lots of e-mail and instant messenger. But the best thing we did was write letters. Real letters, handwritten, with ink and fancy stationary. Envelopes and stamps and waiting. Waiting was what the whole period was about. Waiting.
Nobody waits anymore. It’s the electric age. It can be some comfort, I suppose, not having to wait for word from your loved one, but it takes a lot of the poetry out of it, for sure.
Those letters we wrote to each other would make you bawl. But think back: any letter written to you can make you bawl. Because every letter sent is a little organic piece of the person who wrote it. You can pick up the paper and smell the person. Maybe they smudged the ink and you can see a fingerprint.
And the greatest part is that you can keep them around. You can hang them on your wall, or put them under your pillow. You can hold them in your fingers. Touch them.
We have our old letters in a box in the closet. Many of them have little doodles of the parks in which we wrote them. Many of them became quite elaborate in design. With each one, we would try to trump the other, to see just how beautiful we could make them.
I have typed maybe one or two beautiful e-mails in my life. But every letter I took the time to write was beautiful.
So the other day I was playing with my watercolors and decided to write a letter in comics/watercolor. It was beautiful, spontaneous, and straightforward. I was so pleased with myself that I wanted to hang it on the wall.
But I didn’t. I scanned it in Photoshop (better than carbon copy paper), put it in an envelope, and sent it into the world.
