Austin Kleon

How I start a notebook

First, a link to what kind of notebook, because otherwise, dozens of people will ask.

Then, the weighing in:

This is a silly ritual, but sometimes silly rituals are all we have.

Next, the selection of a guardian spirit to look over the notebook. I picked Durër’s Saint Jerome in his Study for this notebook, which is aiming a little high, but that’s what guardian spirits are for:

And that’s that. All you have to do now is fill it.

A pandemic diary

Here is a peek inside the second diary I’ve completed since we went into lockdown in March. It runs from May 2nd to July 2nd, exactly two months long. (That rarely happens!)

If you follow along with this blog, many of these pages will be familiar, but I think it’s interesting to see pieces in their original context. People often ask me of what use is my diary. If you follow the links I’ve included under many of the posts, you can see just how much of this blog comes directly from my daily diary work.

Here is a closer look at this collage, which I made to set the tone.

I spent a good part of spring obsessed with the blossoming of our cactus plants out back.

This collage was the real beginning of my house collages for Meg. The drawing was part of my series of 100 blind self-portraits.

I wrote more about Sam’s piece in the post, “Advice from a Caterpillar,” and here are more Humpty Dumpty collages.

Printmaking… with vegetables!

Every time we make a thing, it’s a tiny triumph.

Another house for Meg. (I made two dozen of these in this notebook.)

And yet another, with thoughts on how important keeping a diary is to me.

Usually I put guardian spirits in the front of my notebook, but this nun (who I gave sunglasses and cool hair) hung out in the back, maybe to egg me on.

Now it’s time to hold a weigh in and start a new notebook.

Exquisite corpse

Above are three “exquisite corpse” drawings my boys and I made this afternoon. (Top: Jules, 5; middle: Owen, 7; bottom: me, 37.) Exquisite Corpse was a game invented by the Surrealists:

Participants play by taking turns drawing sections of a body on a sheet of paper, folded to hide each individual contribution. The first player adds a head—then, without knowing what that head looks like, the next artist adds a torso, and so on. In this way, a strange, comical, often grotesque creature is born.

Today went more smoothly and resulted in more inspiring results than last week’s session, which, if I remember correctly, ended in tears. One problem is that we swapped which body parts each drawer was responsible for each time, which I think was confusing:

I’m trying really hard to get the boys to be more improvisational with their play together, particularly the 7-year-old, who tends to art direct everyone and to fly off the handle when things progress in a way that doesn’t align with his vision. (I’m not a particularly good collaborator myself, come to think of it.)

We got a good tip from this video: draw the neck and the legs slightly over the fold so the next person knows where to begin…

3 bits of Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser’s poster for Olivetti, 1977

Designer Milton Glaser died last Friday on his 91st birthday. In addition to his visual work (check out these album covers!), here are 3 verbal bits of his that have stuck in my brain over the years:

1. “The model for personal growth is antithetical to the model for professional success.”

I have had that line tacked on my wall for years. Glaser, like many great creative people, got clued into the fact that success can mess your creativity up way more than failure, because if you succeed

people will continue to ask you for what you have already done and succeeded at. This is the way to professional accomplishment–you have to demonstrate that you know something unique that you can repeat over and over and over until ultimately you lose interest in it. The consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn’t aid in your development.

In order to have a more meaningful and fruitful creative life, you often have to be ready to walk away from your career successes, or find a balance between what people want from you and what you want to chase after.

“I believe that Picasso as a model is the most useful model you can have in terms of your artistic interests,” Glaser said, “because whenever Picasso learned how to do something he abandoned it, and as a result of that, in terms of his development as an artist, the results were extraordinary.”

I quoted the emphasized part of that line in the last chapter of Show Your Work!

2. “My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, ‘Prove it.’”

In a 2003 interview with Chip Kidd, Glaser described the influence of his parents on his work:

In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

I quoted that story in my SXSW interview with Debbie Millman, a student and friend of Glaser’s.

3. “Can you imagine calling someone a creative?”

An aside from his talk, “10 Things I Have Learned”:

[C]reative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow…

I liked that so much I stole it for the “Creative is not a noun” section of Keep Going.

RIP. (For even more, check out this thread of advice to his students.)

No doomscrolling

No doomscrolling

From Merriam-Webster:

Doomscrolling and doomsurfing are new terms referring to the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Many people are finding themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19 without the ability to stop or step back.

Don’t do it! Put on a mask and go for a walk instead.

Experimenting with online events

It’s obvious I won’t be traveling for at least the rest of the year, so I’ve been trying to get creative about how to deliver virtual talks and workshops that are maybe even more interesting and intimate than something I would give in person at a big conference or lecture hall. Since I’m speaking from my studio, virtual talks seem like a perfect opportunity to show the place where so much of what I talk about onstage happens.

I recently figured out that software like Zoom lets you select different cameras and microphones on your computer, so it’s possible without much effort to quickly switch between my MacBook Pro camera, which is pointed at me, and my document camera, which is pointed at my desk, all while continuing to speak into my nice microphone. This makes it easy to talk for a bit, then demonstrate a drawing or collage technique or show off an artifact, and then switch back to speaking. (UPDATE: after publishing this post, it came to my attention that you can use the screen share function in Zoom to share an ADDITIONAL camera! No more switching back and forth! Boom!)

It’s surprising to me how seamless this can be — the video above was recorded directly in Zoom and the video below was done for Creative Live.

I’m pretty busy with kid wrangling and book writing right now, but if you’re interested in having me do this kind of online event for your organization, drop me a line.

All good things must begin

Octavia Butler’s notebook

“All good things must begin.”
—Octavia Butler, journal entry

Here is the inside cover of one of Octavia E. Butler’s commonplace books, from around 1988. She wrote herself many of these motivational notes, which can found in her archives at The Huntington.

That encouragement was probably essential: Butler faced a lot of challenges. She grew up black and poor in Pasadena, Calif., when legal segregation was dead, but de facto segregation was very much alive… In several interviews Butler said she wrote because she had two choices: write, or die. “If I hadn’t written, I probably would have done something stupid that would have led to my death,” she said cheerfully.

Notes by Octavia Butler

Looking at Butler’s notes I was reminded of the notebooks of another fiction writer, James Salter, who wrote all his novels by hand, but would start his notebooks with advice to himself on the inside flap:

This flap, from his notebook for his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime, has advice from André Gide:

Write as if this were your only book, your last book. Into it put everything you were saving—everything precious, every scrap of capital, every penny as it were. Don’t be afraid of being left with nothing.

His notebook from Light Years has the same advice: “SAVE NOTHING.”

“As always, you try to put everything you have in a book,” he said. “That is, don’t save anything for the next one. (The book of his uncollected writings is titled, Don’t Save Anything.)

(These images are from his collection in the Ransom Center.)

I always take comfort in the fact that even the great writers needed to pump themselves up to get to work.

Even if you don’t believe it or feel it 100%, it can be of great help to write down the things you want to be true about your life and work. (If you believe otherwise, why write?)

“Creative work is very hard,” wrote Sidney Lumet, in Making Movies, “and some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to start.”

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