Here is a collage I made while listening to my hero Lynda Barry on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast.
Filed under: Sunday collage
Here is a collage I made while listening to my hero Lynda Barry on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast.
Filed under: Sunday collage
It was a wild summer for the Kleon family, and, unfortunately, I spent a lot of it not reading. But here are 5 good books I did read, in the approximate order I read them:
Educated
Tara Westover
I wanted to see what the fuss was over. The book is about many things, but one of them is the power of journals and diaries to help you cope with trauma and keep the facts of your life straight. (Westover has kept a journal since she was 10. “My journals supplied me with a level of detail I could never have had if I relied on memory alone,” she says. “I recorded meals I’d eaten, conversations I’d overheard, work I’d done for my father in the junkyard or my mother tincturing herbs.”)
Gringos
Charles Portis
When children are going through transitional periods, they’ll pull out old toys, old books, old stuffed animals. I do the same. This summer I re-read all of Portis’s novels, which is somewhat easy to do because there are only five of them. Gringos was the biggest surprise, and maybe the most underrated of all of his books? Such an interesting world and so many great sentences. I would love for another novel of his to turn up, but I also sort of hope he’s just kicking back on a porch somewhere in Arkansas, sipping bourbon, and enjoying his life.
Good Talk
Mira Jacob
Real talk: I was initially turned off by this book, because at a first glance I thought the clip-art drawings and photo backgrounds were out of laziness. (This is, by the way, the trouble with comics: our initial response as readers is an aesthetic one, and if you only read comics you’re aesthetically attracted to, you will miss out.) But no, this is a smart and heartfelt and well-executed book that wouldn’t work the way it does if it was drawn “better.” The book is great evidence for the cartoonist Seth’s equation that comics = poetry + graphic design. (Here’s a good interview about the making of the book.) Other good comic debuts I read this summer: Ebony Flowers’ Hot Comb and Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream.
Range
David Epstein
This book is both a validation of how I’ve chosen to go about my work and a kick in the pants to not get complacent, stretch out, and go down weird paths. (It’s also, as Ryan Holiday suggested to me, a parenting book in disguise.) I have been planning on writing a “Range for Artists” post, because for every chapter I could think of an example of an artist I love that exemplified the subject, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
America
Andy Warhol
A book of Warhol’s photographs matched with his thoughts about the country. “We all came here from somewhere else, and everybody who wants to live in America and obey the law should be able to come too, and there’s no such thing as being more or less American, just American.”
Need more to read? Here’s the rest of my reading year so far and the past decade or so of my favorite reads.
Good morning. We can now add Blade Runner to the list of stories set in a future that is now past.
Footage of fireworks in LA last night + the Blade Runner soundtrack
(thx @claytoncubitt for the idea) pic.twitter.com/HLdlhuYmOX
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) July 5, 2018
Here are two books about art and horses open on my kitchen table this morning.
The top spread is from Dr. Seuss’s The Horse Museum, which was produced from an undated, unfinished manuscript that Theodore Geisel’s widow found in a box. (In the 1950s, before his children’s books had become popular, Geisel had worked on a television series called Modern Art on Horseback.)
From Kirkus:
This posthumously published text recently discovered in Ted Geisel’s studio uses horse-focused art pieces to provide historical context to artistic movements. Showing art ranging from the Lascaux cave paintings to an untitled 1994 sculpture by Deborah Butterfield, Joyner’s playful illustrations surround the curated photographs of art pieces. By using horses as the departing point in the artistic journey, Seuss and Joyner are able to introduce diverse perspectives, artifacts, and media, including Harnessed Horse from the northern Wei dynasty, a Navajo pictorial blanket titled Oh, My Beautiful Horses, and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge.
My personal favorite part of the book is the appendix in the back which goes through each individual piece of art featured in the book and its creator’s relationship, if any, to horses.
I got to thinking how interesting it would be to go through the archives of my own favorite artists and compare horse pictures.
Here, for example, are some of Saul Steinberg’s drawings of horses:
The other book on my kitchen table is unlike any book I’ve ever read. Heidi’s Horse, originally published in 1975, is a book by the painter Sylvia Fein, collecting her daughter’s drawings from her very first marks at the age of 2 up until the age of 17. (Fein was inspired by the Henry Schaefer-Simmern’s The Unfolding of Artistic Activity.) It’s a wonderful record of how the visual mind develops over time.
The book can be hard to track down, so here are the sections summarizing Heidi’s progression:
Here’s another page focusing only on Heidi’s horse heads (the title is, admittedly, kind of terrible, at the very least it should be Heidi’s Horses, plural):
In 1985, Sheila Graber animated Heidi’s Horse into this 16-minute film:
https://youtu.be/0iKc3_wQpbE
And here’s a great video from 2006 of Fein talking about the progression of children’s drawings and Heidi’s Horse:
If you sit down with a kid and watch them draw, it’s the most wonderful experience in the world. You’re seeing transformation right in front of your eyes.
The book has been hugely influential on me as I track the progress of my youngest son’s drawing.
More about kid’s art and art history: “Caveman drawings”
Here is a remarkable woman I would like more people to know about: the painter Sylvia Fein. She turns 100 next month and has a survey show of her work made over a 70-year period at the The UC Berkeley Art Museum. (It’s been called “the show of the season” for the Bay Area, and I’m planning on getting tickets to fly out and see one or more of her talks.)
Here is a short bio from the BAMPFA site:
Sylvia Fein, who turns 100 in 2019, was born and raised in Wisconsin, where she attended college with another woman who would go on to become a legendary Bay Area centenarian, Anna Halprin. In the early 1940s Fein was among a group of artists based in Madison and Milwaukee who became known as the Midwest Surrealists. After living in Mexico for several years during World War II, Fein moved to the East Bay in 1947; she received an MFA at UC Berkeley in 1951. For decades, her painting has been strongly influenced by the highly detailed style of Northern Renaissance painters such as Hieronymus Bosch and by the fourteenth-century medium of egg tempera, which endows her works with a distinctive texture and transparent quality.
Perhaps ironically, I first became aware of Fein’s work through the books she wrote when she decided to take a break painting: Heidi’s Horse and First Drawings. (These books have had a big influence on me: I wrote a little bit about them last year in the post “Caveman Drawings,” and I’m going to write more about Heidi’s Horse tomorrow.)
Here is a piece of hers from 2012, called The Painting Told Me What To Do:
And here is a 20-minute documentary from six years ago called in which Fein talks about her life and work:
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