Notes on writing and drawing

ED EMBERLEY’S MAKE A WORLD

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Here I am modeling my new favorite t-shirt:

Designed by Kyle Fletcher of Mutual Midwest and screen printed by our friends at the one and only Wire&Twine, this 5-color design features every illustration in Ed Emberley’s classic drawing book, “Make a World”. From dump truck to schooner, from forklift to dinosaur, every image is on the shirt.

Go here and buy one to support the production of the upcoming documentary, Ed Emberley’s Make A World: The Film.

I only came to Ed Emberley’s Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make A World last year, but it’s quickly become the #1 book I recommend to people I meet who say, “I can’t draw.” In it, Ed Emberley shows you how to “make a world” with just a few simple shapes, step-by-step. I love the emphasis on simplicity: if you can draw a triangle, a square, a circle, and a line, you’re good to go.

(Here’s a great little video review of the book by Chris Glass.)

And yeah, I have sat down with the book and copied all the exercises!

See more of my posts about Ed Emberley.

GEOGRAPHY IS NO LONGER OUR MASTER

Sunday, November 1, 2009

geography is no longer our master

I grew up in a small town. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was hang out with artists. All I wanted to do was get the heck out of southern Ohio and get someplace where something was happening.

Now I live in Austin, Texas. A pretty hip place. Tons of artists and creative types everywhere.

And you know what? I’d say that 90% of my mentors and peers don’t live here. They live on the internet. Which is to say, most of my thinking and talking and art-related fellowship is online.

Instead of a geographical art scene, I have Twitter buddies and Google Reader.

Life is weird.

CONTEXTOMY : QUOTING OUT OF CONTEXT

Sunday, November 1, 2009

contextomy
from The New Yorker’s profile of Wes Anderson

New word (for me) via Wikipedia:

Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as “quoting out of context”. The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context (as all quotes are) per se, but to the quoter’s decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become “context” by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words. Comparing this practice to surgical excision, historian Milton Mayer coined the term “contextomy” to describe its use by Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi broadsheet Der Stürmer in Weimar-era Germany. To arouse anti-semitic sentiments among the weekly’s working class Christian readership, Streicher regularly published truncated quotations from Talmudic texts that, in their shortened form, appear to advocate greed, slavery, and ritualistic murder. Although rarely employed to this malicious extreme, contextomy is a common method of misrepresentation in contemporary mass media, and studies have demonstrated that the effects of this misrepresentation can linger even after the audience is exposed to the original, in context, quote.

In other words, how I make all my art.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT UNITY

Saturday, October 24, 2009

don't worry about unity

Don’t worry about unity from piece to piece. What unifies all of your work is the fact that you made it.

I tweeted this a few days ago, and my Twitter friend John T. Unger (@johntunger) replied,

and after a decade or two you'll look back at seemingly disparate pieces and find that there are common threads after all

Keep making things. Don’t worry about how it all fits together right now.

INEVITABILITY, OR: WHERE IDEAS COME FROM, AND HOW TO MAKE THEM LOOK EASY

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

what sounds simple / never comes across as dense with effort / but try it and see

MODERN ART = I COULD DO THAT + YEAH, BUT YOU DIDN’T—“Modern Art” from More New Math by Craig Damrauer

It’s said in different sentences.

“An idea so simple I can’t believe nobody thought of it before.”

“I could’ve done that.”

“Any idiot could do that.”

“I’m sure you’re not the first person to put Sharpie to newspaper.”

(That last one came from a trollish e-mail I got last week.)

If you have a good idea and it’s well-executed, it looks effortless. It looks like it’s been around forever.

But I don’t want it to look effortless! you say. I want it to look as hard as I worked on it.

No, you don’t. You want it to look easy.

Bob Gill says it best, in Graphic Design As A Second Language:

There’s nothing more embarrassing than a juggler who always looks as if he’s about to drop whatever he’s juggling.

By my standards, however difficult it is to make art, it should always look easy, never labored. That’s what I mean by inevitable.

After the curtain came down on a Paddy Chayefsky play, the person sitting next to me got up and complained to his wife, “what’s the big deal? I cudda written that.”

I assumed that what he meant, was that he was not aware of anything the playwright actually did. It was as if the playwright simply pressed the on button of a tape recorder, so that the characters in the play were so convincing, was its strength.

This is what I try for. I like the idea that if I’m successful, the guy who sat next to me that night, would have the same reaction to my work, as he did with Chayefsky’s.

But perhaps the reason ideas seem “inevitable” is because they are:

Every idea is a juxtaposition. That’s it. A juxtaposition of existing concepts. —Steven Grant

The idea maker is a collage artist. You put two ideas together, and you get a third new one.

The trick, as Grant writes, is to fill your head with many ideas (reading is the best way to do this), and keep the ones that appeal to you.

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.—Jim Jarmusch

The next step is to put them up against each other—to find patterns. The third and final step is to do create your collage, to fuse the ideas so seemlessly that it seems effortless.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.— T.S. Eliot, 1920, The Sacred Wood

Of course, sometimes you don’t need a good idea. Sometimes the only thing you have to do is give an existing idea a good name (“an idea is gold / only if you name it“):

It was an idea that was already out there, but I shined a spotlight on it, named it, and everybody got it right away.— Sam Martin

It’s all very much like making a blackout poem, actually: you sift through words, pick the ones you like, find the pattern of words that work good together, and blackout the rest into one coherent piece.

If you did it well, it looks easy.