Austin Kleon

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  1. Texas, Mexico, the southwest… alien planets….First I paint the background and then I put the figures in front of it. Whatever they are. Even if they’re bricks or fragments. Usually they’re fragments of characters and objects. Ed Ruscha did some wide, narrow paintings that I love back in the ’70s. That kind of got me going in that direction. Painting really wide, narrow paintings. It’s like a landscape….when I start painting I think of where’s the water. You don’t necessarily see the water, but that’s the first thing I think about. You already have air, or you’d be dead. You have a while to find water. In the paintings, that’s what I think about. That’s the first moment, anyway.

    —Gary Panter, in a well-timed interview with Tom Spurgeon today

  3. I kind of regret not buying the book now, but doing so would have made this my most expensive weekend in a long time, if it wasn’t already…

    Having grown up in and around small town Texas, Marsha and I both appreciated his comments about that experience, and that he managed to “escape”. Also very surprised that he found a nurturing academic art community in the early 70s at East Texas State (now Texas A&M at Commerce), a school very close to my grandma’s hometown. That era was a good time for art in west Texas, mostly due to folks imported from NYC, but what was going on in the east side of our state? He mentioned that Bill Wiman was on the faculty there, and I have to assume it’s the same Bill Wiman that’s professor emeritus here at UT, a renowned watercolorist. I’ll have to dig up a list of who else was teaching at ET back then, and see if any more interesting names pop up.

    “Dal Tokyo” (Dalt Ok Yo?) cracks me up — businesses in and near Dallas have a strange knack for sticking “Dal” on the front of things as a sort of portmanteau. Dalworth, Daltex, Dalrock, etc. Maybe it works, though: I still remember the phone number jingle for Dalworth Carpet Cleaning.

    Also had no idea that Ian McLagan of Small Faces lives in Manor (according to Wikipedia). That was a surreal moment after the slideshow when he said hello!

    I’ll be hitting up Domy as often as possible. It’s the best art/design/academic/small-press bookstore I’ve seen this side of the Menil bookstore in Houston. If Book People, Austin Books, and Domy can strike a perfect balance in what they offer, Austin might have a flourishing independent bookstore scene again, and I’d be very glad for that. Can’t wait to see who they get for upcoming events!

  5. Because they are trapped in Texas, Texans are self-mythologizing. Because I was trapped in Texas at the time, I needed to believe that the broken tractor out back was a car of the future. Japanese, I’ll say, because of the exotic far-awayness of Japan from Texas, and because of the Japanese monster movies and woodblock prints that reached out to me in Texas. Japanese monster movies are part of the fabric of Texas.

    — Gary Panter, on Dal Tokyo

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