Miscellany by Austin Kleon

The world keeps showing me these pictures

September 21, 2018

Rothko vs. moon landing in *Everything That Rises*

I become a little possessed when I read Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. Weschler finds threads between images and shows those images in juxtaposition. Once you start looking this way, you start seeing convergences everywhere.

Early Rembrandt vs. late Rembrandt in *The World Through Blunted Sight*

Books — especially hardcovers that lie flat on a table — are the perfect medium to show such juxtapositions. The pages face each other, like a showdown. The gutter in the middle is a natural break that makes the argument. When you close the book, the images press up against each other.

These are just three random books I happen to have read this week. But after reading them, I’ve noticed a change in my noticing. Some detector has been tripped.

In just the past 24 hours, I took these 3 photos with my cameraphone:

A page from a fan’s copy of *The Steal Like An Artist Journal*

*A Peanuts* board game my sons left on the coffee table

Some juxtapositions are uncanny, some a little farfetched. It’s easy to get carried away. “Sometimes I think I may be getting a little ahead of myself,” Weschler writes, “but the world does keep showing me these pictures.”

A willingness to be bad

September 20, 2018

“It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy; it’s that they make it look it fast.”
—Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments

This week I re-read a 2010 piece by David Wong, author of John Dies at the End, called “How The Karate Kid Ruined The Modern World.” Wong laments how movies with training montages give us a skewed vision of how hard it actually is to get good at things:

Every adult I know — or at least the ones who are depressed — continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.

We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.

Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder.

My 5-year-old son started piano lessons and I think it’s the first time he’s had to actually practice anything and he hates practicing already, and I’m not sure what the hell to tell him. If I say, “Well, don’t you want to be as good as Kraftwerk?” he’ll look at me like I’m a complete moron and motion to his Garageband tracks, like, “I am as good as Kraftwerk.”

Kids his age love to go around thinking that they’re the best in the world at things, and really, who wants to tell them otherwise? You don’t want to discourage them from doing things they love. But the switch towards taking on a practice and discipline is admitting to yourself that you suck and you want to get better.

I was chatting with my friend Adam and he mentioned he was taking drum lessons again after 20 years. He said he’d forgotten the joy of the practice –> suck a little less –> practice –> suck a little less loop.

Years ago I read an interview with actor Jason Segel and he talked about his willingness to be bad for as long as it takes:

I’m willing to be bad for as long as it takes, until I’m good….I don’t have a sense of shame. I just don’t. If I’ve hurt someone’s feelings, if I’m mean to somebody, I’ll lament over that for days. I’m that dude. I’ll lose sleep over mundane stuff. But I don’t really have the thing of, “Oh, I’ve embarrassed myself.” I just don’t understand why I would stop trying to play piano even though I’m not good at it. I want to be good at it. So why wouldn’t I keep playing?

How do you cultivate that willingness to be bad?

My parenting book

September 19, 2018

Whenever someone says, “You should do a parenting book!” I think of this tweet.

Look at your fish

September 17, 2018

“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.”
—David McCullough

In his Paris Review interview, David McCullough talks about how important seeing is to the writer and historian, and how much his training in drawing and painting has been of great benefit to him in his work. “Drawing is learning to see and so is writing.”

He has a motto tacked above his desk: LOOK AT YOUR FISH.

He explains:

It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, gave every new student. He would take an odorous old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, Look at your fish. Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the student what he’d seen. Not very much, they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: Look at your fish. This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. Samuel Scudder, who later became a famous entomologist and expert on grasshoppers, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, I see how little I saw before. Then Scudder had a brainstorm and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: Paired organs, the same on both sides. Of course! Of course! Agassiz said, very pleased. So Scudder naturally asked what he should do next, and Agassiz said, Look at your fish.

He tells that story in all of his writing classes, and then emphasizes that looking more closely helps you discover new things in old or ordinary material that other people have not:

The chances of finding a new piece [of the puzzle] are fairly remote—though I’ve never written a book where I didn’t find something new—but it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough.

Filed under: looking

Artisanal

September 16, 2018

Clayton Cubitt: “Once you see that ‘artisanal’ actually spells ‘art is anal’ you can’t unsee it.”

Museum club

September 15, 2018

“I never went to an art school. I failed the art courses that I did take in school. I just looked at a lot of things. And that’s how I learnt about art, by looking at it.”
—Jean-Michel Basquiat

My favorite part of the documentary Basquiat: Rage to Riches is Fab 5 Freddy recalling how he and Basquiat started a “museum club”: every week or so they would cab up to The Met and walk around with sketch pads, pretending to be art students, looking at the paintings.

Here’s a clip of Freddy joking about how they thought Carvaggio was “gangster” for carrying a sword:

He also points out how white artists were inspired by black culture — Pollock listening to jazz while doing his improvisational drawings, Picasso stealing from African masks — and how Basquiat took their influence and reclaimed it back into his work.

It’s a good watch. If you can, though, check out Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child, which I think dives a little deeper into his influences.

For example, in that documentary you’ll learn that Basquiat loved to have a bunch of books around when he painted. Above are two comparison screenshots, one showing a page from Gray’s Anatomy (his mother gave him a copy as a child after he got hit by a car) and one showing a page of hobo signs from Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook (a personal favorite of mine). He also had copies of Da Vinci’s Notebooks and Burchard Brentjes’ African Rock Art.

Here’s a bonus image from my Basquiat file: his hand-copied table of contents from Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Paper monuments to human effort

September 14, 2018

One thing I love about working on paper is that you literally end up with these gigantic piles of your effort. (Evidence of your days.) At some point, I started collecting photos of other people’s paper output.

James Kochalka’s sketchbooks for the 14-year run of *American Elf*

David Letterman’s paper cups (each one represents a completed show)

It strikes me how much these paper stacks look like buildings or skyscrapers… paper monuments to human effort…

Interview with Sketchbook Skool

September 13, 2018

A week or ago I talked to Danny Gregory (author of books like Art Before Breakfast and An Illustrated Life) in anticipation of my keynote at SketchKon in November. We talked about a variety of things: the power of paper, banker’s boxes, my notebooks, paper monuments to human effort, David Sedaris, something small every day, Thoreau, collage, zines, finding your voice, etc. Listen here.

Open every day of the week

September 11, 2018

The art of contextomy: you cut some words off a pizza box, tape them to the cover of your diary, and they become an imperative. A commandment!

Speaking of diaries, the 5-year-old’s diary is becoming way cooler than mine:

A follower on Instagram asked me how they should get their kid to keep a diary. I think in most situations, the most important thing is to model for your kids what you’d like them to do, first. Owen sees me cutting things up and glueing them into my diary every morning, and he always wants to look at my notebook, so one day I (as casually as possible) asked him if he’d like his own special notebook to keep a diary in. That’s how he got started. So: model, see if there’s interest, and then offer up the time, space, and materials.

A day of zines

September 10, 2018

It rained all morning yesterday, so I took the 5-year-old into the garage with me, made him a blank booklet, gave him a stack of NYTimes magazines, and let him go. Here’s what he made (with a little glue help from papa):

A few hours later, we headed over to Staple. We bumped into Katia Lara, who praised I Hurt (she’d just seen it on my Instagram!) and let us check out her skull: