Austin Kleon

Living on in doodles


I recently found out that a former professor of mine, Bill Newell, died in April. Here is a caricature of him I doodled in my notebook during his senior seminar, 14 years ago. We weren’t at all close — I learned a lot about him from this lovely obituary, even read a few of his Goodreads reviews — but as the years go by, I respect more and more the education I received at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies that he helped create. For that, I thank him. (How odd it is that we usually only know the value of our educations in hindsight…)

Here’s another doodle, this one by Ric Ocasek, shared by his sons:

Our dad was a prolific doodler. His passing was sudden, unexpected, and beyond heartbreaking. Yesterday, we found this last doodle on his armchair. He couldn’t have known what it would end up meaning to us. We love him so much.

Aside from his great songs with The Cars, Ocasek, in his role as producer, did his own kind of educating. (The word “education” comes from the Latin word educare — “to lead or draw out.”) Just as the educator draws out the best of their students in the classroom, so does the producer draw out the best of musicians in the studio.

I’m thinking about this “drawing out” now, and drawing, and how, even in the roughest doodle, something very human is left behind, the image of the subject, yes, but also the hand of the drawer…

Sixteenth of September


René Magritte, 1956:

I have just painted the moon on a tree in the blue-gray colors of evening. [Poet Louis] Scutenair has come up with a very beautiful title: Le seize septembre. I think it “fits,” so from September 16th on, we’ll call it done.

(Quoted in Magritte: The True Art of Painting.)

When I saw this painting it reminded me of one of my favorite Magrittes, Le Banquet:

I should have known that they were painted in the same year (1956) when Magritte was doing his “trouvailles” (“finds”).

See also: “The simplest cut.”

The sense of place


“Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.”
—Wallace Stegner, “The Sense of Place”

SXSW interview with Debbie Millman

I was delighted that Debbie Millman agreed to interview me live at SXSW for her podcast, Design Matters. I’ve cut and pasted a few highlights, below.

On acknowledging the role of luck:

Anyone who has any kind of audience and doesn’t acknowledge luck is deluding themselves. Of course we make moves that put us in the right place at the right time, but to not acknowledge luck just seems to me a great disservice to everyone.

On my books as bathroom reads:

“When someone tells me that they keep my books on the back of the commode, that is a great compliment to me, actually—because that’s where people read.”

On having parents like Milton Glaser’s:

“I had a mother who told me I could do anything, and a father who said, ‘Prove it.’” That’s the best school there was.”

On finishing a project:

“The great pain of creative work is that once the thing is done, it’s dead to you. I mean, execution is literally like an execution.”

Because I believe in credit where credit is due, there’s one little thing I want to clear up. There’s a really fun surprise at a certain point in the conversation, a moment so good that I hate to ruin it. Though I’ve been a fan of Debbie’s work for a long time, it was actually Mary Doria Russell’s 1999 commencement speech at Laurel School that inspired my wife.

You can watch our conversation on YouTube, or listen on iTunes or Soundcloud below

Happy birthday Mary Oliver

Happy birthday to Mary Oliver, her first since she died earlier this year. She taught us to make an appointment with the page and that we do not have to be good.

She said:

I consider myself kind of a reporter—one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write. For most of my life, I haven’t had the structure of an actual job. When I was very young and decided I wanted to try to write as well as I could, I made a great list of all the things I would never have….

Would not have, because I thought poets never made any money. A house, a good car, I couldn’t go out and buy fancy clothes or go to good restaurants. I had the necessities. Not that I didn’t take some teaching jobs over the years—I just never took any interesting ones, because I didn’t want to get interested. That’s when I began to get up so early in the morning—you know I’m a 5 A.M. riser—so I could write for a couple of hours and then give my employer my very best second-rate energy….

I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you’re working a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay.

(There’s no beach where I live, but there’s sunshine, and I can go outside and get a taco.)

This is just to say

I love copying my kids’ drawings and writings into my diary. Copying seems like a mindless activity when you first start out, but by the time you’ve finished your copy, you usually learn something about the thing you’re copying and/or you discover something of your own.

The first grader wrote this poem last night at the pizza joint. (He and his brother have been watching the poetry episode of Classical Baby and reciting WCW’s “This is Just to Say.”)

While I copied the poem, I noticed how he writes his lowercase a’s and how he forms the letters starting from the bottom. I thought about Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems and about how the size of the paper we write on affects what we write. I thought about how quickly kids move towards parody with their own work, and how here I was, again, making a copy of a copy.

When I copied the tablecloth, I noticed that the original pattern could become a skull or some kind of death mask.

When I copied the exploding earth, I wondered what was with the teeth, until I realized they were exploded parts of the poles.

Copying is a way of paying closer attention.

Side note: I find it interesting how whenever I post something “dark” that my kids make, strangers assume that they’re “dark” kids. They’re actually quite cheerful kids… it’s called “imagination,” man!

Keep it on The One

Prince would get mad when people called his music magical: “Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules.”

Here’s Bootsy Collins laying down the #1 rule of funk: Keep it on the one.

“It’s however you feel, you just gotta fit it in that little space that you’ve got…. Once you got it, you can do anything you want to do with it! Just keep it on THE ONE!”

(Lynda Barry shows this video to her comics classes.)

Collins learned about The One from his former bandleader James Brown. Collins thought he was “killin’ ’em” with all his wild playing, but Brown set him straight:

“Son, give me the one. You give me the one, you can do all those other things.” So, I started to understand: If I give you the one, I can do all these other crazy things.” James Brown was the one that told me: “Son, you need to give me the one.” […] He didn’t know the power of that. That changed my whole life. Once I learned where the one was at? It was on.”

What did James Brown himself say about The One? In the introduction to his biography, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, RJ Smith quotes him:

“The ‘One’ is derived from the Earth itself, the soil, the pine trees of my youth. And most important, it’s on the upbeat—ONE two THREE four—not the downbeat, one TWO three FOUR, that most blues are written. Hey, I know what I’m talking about! I was born to the downbeat, and I can tell you without question there is no pride in it. The upbeat is rich, the downbeat is poor. Stepping up proud only happens on the aggressive ‘One,’ not the passive Two, and never on lowdownbeat. In the end, it’s not about music—it’s about life.”

The One is both practical and mystical.  It’s about artistic freedom through the constraint of form, but it’s also about something bigger.

Here’s Miles Davis at the end of his autobiography:

I have never felt this creative. I feel like the best if yet to come. Like Prince says when he’s talking about hitting the beat and getting to the music and the rhythm, I’m going to keep “getting up on the one,” brother, I’m just going to try to keep my music getting up on the one, getting up on the one every day I play. Getting up on the one. Later.

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