Austin Kleon

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Book walkthroughs

If you make the kind of visual books I do, they really have to be seen to be understood. I came across these “art book walkthroughs” by Graeme Franks a few days ago. Simple, perfect online advertisements for my kind of books. Here’s the one for Steal Like An Artist and here’s the one for Show Your Work!

I had my six-year-old do (a more hurried & shaky) one in the trailer for Keep Going:

And way back in 2010, I did one for the Newspaper Blackout trailer. I think I used some sort of HD camcorder, but now, of course, you can just use an off-the-shelf iPhone. (And get better quality, too!)

UPDATE: Graeme made one for Keep Going, too!

What we did when you went to bed

I made this list when my oldest was only 3. He’s 6 now.

Before I closed his bedroom door last night, I said, “Happy reading!”

“Happy… whatever it is you do after I go to bed,” he said.

“Goodnight!” I said, smiling and tiptoeing away…

Maps of Miró

After reading my post on maps of scenius, my friend Julien sent me these photos of a wall in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona.

Last year I read Joan Miro: I Work Like a Gardener, which re-publishes a 1958 interview with the artist interspersed with images of his work. He said: 

I work like a gardener or a winemaker… Things come slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for example, I didn’t discover it all at once. It formed itself almost in spite of me.

(See: “The gardens where ideas grow.”)

As if providing a future commentary on these maps, he also said, “An artwork should be fertile. It must give birth to a world.”

Reminds me of what Bruno Munari said about trees: “A tree is a slow explosion of seed.”

I’m here now


I took a picture of this deteriorated sticker at the airport yesterday and thought of Bertha Truitt, the mysterious main character in Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway, who, whenever she’s asked where she’s come from, answers, “I’m here now.”

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