My interview with writer and artist Edward Carey

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

“It was dark, and I needed a little light. So every day I did a little drawing.”

Here is video of my interview with the excellent Edward Carey for Creative Mornings Austin. We talked about art, family, Pinocchio, and the challenges of making things during the past year:

When they asked me if there was a local Austin artist I’d like to interview for CM Austin’s 8th anniversary, I had a long list of folks in my mind, but when they said the topic was procrastination, I immediately thought of Ed, and, specifically, this clipping, which I cut out of a NYTimes years ago:

I’m shocked that his latest project still doesn’t have a US publisher. Editors, get on it!

I’ve written more about EC’s work here.

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

My July pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.

Here’s my intro:

Tove Jansson, the writer and artist best known for creating the Moomins, spent her summers on an island in the gulf of Finland with her lifelong partner, Tuulikki Pietila. She wrote most of her books there, and she wrote The Summer Book, about a girl and her grandmother living on an island, at the age of sixty, after losing her mother. I love this book because it’s what I wish all my summers would feel like, deep and just a little dark and surrounded by the sea…

The timing couldn’t be better: a new festival is starting in the UK called The Woman Who Fell in Love with An Island. (Inspired by a letter she wrote to Tooti in 1963, asking her partner if she’d read the D.H. Lawrence story, “The Man Who Loved Islands”: “How about ‘The Woman Who Fell in Love with an Island’?”)

The Guardian recently published “How Tove Jansson’s love of nature shaped the world of the Moomins,” with more about their life on the island, including this passage about their “hut” and routine:

Like the lighthouse that the author hymned in Moominpappa at Sea, the hut’s one room had windows facing in all directions so that Tove and Pietilä could watch the horizon from 360 degrees, and see the winds and storms coming and going. Seated at separate desks (in Helsinki they lived in separate apartments joined by an attic corridor), they “got a lot into the day”. While Jansson wrote, Pietilä drew, or filmed with her 8mm camera. Occasionally they had a joint project, constructing scenes from the Moomin books, with Pietilä making the 3D models and Jansson painting them: “That was their play time.”

Back in April, I watched a (rare) documentary made up of footage Tooti shot on 8mm: Haru, Island of the Solitary.

Jansson wrote a piece called “The Island” that is, according to translator Hernan Diaz, “at once a short story, an essay, and a prose poem,” which “reads both like a sketch for The Summer Book (published eleven years later) and a vignette of Klovharu, the island where Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, her partner, built a summerhouse in the mid-60’s.”

It begins: “There is a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming about an island.”

I am one of them!

Sign up for the club to join the discussion.

Fart collages

Thursday, June 10, 2021

When my oldest was five, he recited this poem:

A FART
by Owen Kleon

A fart! A fart!
You can hear a fart!

A fart! A fart!
You can smell a fart!

A fart! A fart!
O why can’t you see a fart?

Perhaps that was the inspiration for our fart collages, an ongoing collaboration and art activity I pull out whenever the kids are driving me absolutely crazy. It’s very easy to make a fart collage: simply cut out a photo from a magazine and add a toot visualization.

I believe deeply, you see, in the connection between fart jokes and creativity. (There’s a whole wiki devoted to Mozart’s love of scatalogical humor.) Jokes, pranks, irreverence — if we start poking fun at the world, at a certain point we wonder if maybe we can change it…

The inspiration for Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers is one of my favorite picture books, so it was awesome to read about how he came up with it in his treasury:

I found one of those old German printings sheets called Münchener Bilderbogen — they were the equivalent of a comic strip in the 1890s. There was a a story in there with a picture of three robbers. They inspired my story, which developed as I started drawing. So I must say that originally those three robbers were not my idea. Original ideas can always be traced back to something. We are all influenced by something, and then we translate it and transpose it into something else.

Emphasis mine. (Steal like an artist.)

Cécile Boulaire, assistant professor in children’s literature at Université de Tours, tracked down the original sheet Ungerer was talking about:

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of a page from the book with a panel from the sheet:

And a close-up of the original robbers:

When the mind’s eye is blind

Thursday, June 10, 2021

I first discovered aphantasia when I wrote a post about having an imagination (“images in the head”) and a few people wrote to me and told me they literally can’t form pictures in their heads. This information blew my mind, and I’ve been fascinated ever since.

In The New York Times this week, Carl Zimmer follows up his original article with a report on the ways scientists are studying aphantasia, along with its opposite, hyperphantasia, or a mind’s eye that’s so vivid it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.

Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar and helped make huge advances in 3-D animation, announced “my mind’s eye is blind” a few years ago, and even found other animators at Pixar with aphantasia. He told the BBC that aphantasia helps clear up “some misconceptions about creativity”:

“People had conflated visualisation with creativity and imagination and one of the messages is, ‘they’re not the same thing’.

“The other one I think that people might have assumed, but if you think about it you can see why it’s false assumption, is you would think if a person could visualise, they’re more likely to be able to draw.

“If you open your eyes and you take out a pencil and pad, how many people can draw what they see? The answer is a very small number, so if you can’t draw what is in front of you then why would we expect that you would be able to draw what you visualise?”

my zine, *How to Talk to Someone with a Missing Imagination*

I used to be one of those people who conflated creativity with imagination! When I first heard about aphantasia, it sounded like a disability to me, but I quickly learned that it can actually be helpful, depending on what you’re trying to do. For example, I read about a writer who said that since she doesn’t think in images, there’s no need to translate them, so it’s easier to get thoughts down on the page. (My friend Kelli Anderson talked to a designer with aphantasia who said she worked with “a tinkering, try-things-out process.”)

Fantasy novelist Mark Lawrence wrote an essay about his experience with aphantasia, and lo and behold, he discovered his condition the same way Ed Catmull did: by being asked to visualize something during meditation. At first, Lawrence says he felt robbed of something, but then he came around:

These days, I reject the description of aphantasia as a defect. I see it as an alternative. You see a horse if asked to imagine one. I find this rather limiting. I imagine a web of horse-stuff that leads me down many paths. The idea of seeing one particular horse actually lacks appeal. What if it’s not the horse I want? What if I want something larger, more fundamental than an image?

Lawrence also notes he was shocked to discover “there are people who don’t hear an inner voice.” In Blake Ross’s essay about what it’s like to have aphantasia, he describes what goes through his mind all day, instead of pictures: “All narration, all the time. An infinite script of milk voice dialogue. When you read a sarcastic essay from me, it is a transcript of this voice.” (A man in Carl Zimmer’s article described aphantasia as “thinking only in radio.”)

Now I feel like I’m missing out on something!

Read more: “Images in the head”