We have talked the 5-year-old into keeping a casual diary of sorts, and, while it’s so fun to see his days summarized in his little hyphenated paragraphs, it’s also really surprising, too. For instance, we’d thought that he had a terrible time on the day mentioned above! He moped around and complained about the heat and all the walking. It’s a reminder that if you have a kid who keeps things close to the chest, giving them tools to express themselves (in O’s case it’s Garageband on the iPad to write songs, or a pen and a nice notebook for a diary) gives you this whole different glimpse into who they are and what they’re feeling and thinking.
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Ralph Steadman in the studio
I really love this 2013 video of Ralph Steadman in his studio making drawings, talking, and playing the ukulele. It’s basically what I want my life to look like when I’m his age:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6omL2ukk9c
There’s so much to learn. On the difference between him and his work:
People have said, “Oh, I thought you’d be a nasty piece of work because you’re so dark and trenchant,” and I say, “No I’m not! I’ve got rid of it — it’s all on paper!”
On mistakes:
There’s no such thing as a mistake. A mistake is only an opportunity to do something else.
On style:
I never went out of my way to invent a style. I haven’t got a style — I just draw and it’s that way.
In 2014, he Skype-d in to a room at SXSW to promote for his documentary, For No Good Reason. He was walking around the studio, and I saw this big book on podium next to his desk. It looked like a big Gutenberg bible or a dictionary or something. I started obsessing over what this book could be. So when it was Q&A time, I shot up my hand and asked him about it. He lit up and said, “Oh! That’s my idea book! Every time I have an idea, I go over here and write it down.” He started flipping through pages and showing us old bits and debris he’d pasted into it. (What I wouldn’t give to see it in person!)
Here’s another video of him drawing, because I can’t get enough:
The Scream (tracing an obsession)
My kids have obsessions. Deep, drawn-out obsessions. And sometimes, as with my 5-year-old and Kraftwerk, we get so far into the obsession that I can’t even remember when or how the obsession began.
Our 3-year-old’s latest obsession is drawing Edvard Munch’s The Scream. WTF?
It all began when he was inspecting Welcome to Mamoko and came across this picture of an art thief. (Oh, the irony of life.) he zoomed in and pointed it out to my wife. “Painting!”
So, my wife printed out a photo of the painting from the internet, and he immediately began copying it. (Copying is how we learn.) The above picture was drawn on June 15th.
Here’s a drawing from July 7th — four weeks later! He was still drawing the scream.
The next day, we took him to the Blanton Museum, thinking maybe we’d see some weird expressionist painting that would be a good substitute. No such luck.
But then we were walking past the window of the gift shop and he stops and shouts, “Mama!” What does he point to? A frickin’ finger puppet of The Scream. In a huge pile of other finger puppets!
So the obsession continues. Who knows how long it will last?
Yesterday, I was lettering the cover for my next book, over and over again. I tried to channel Jules drawing The Scream.
I kept thinking about how much of my work is just being obsessed. Giving myself over to things that interest me, not just for a few days or a few weeks, but for months and for years.
It’s thrilling to watch my kids have the time and space for their obsessions. To see where they go. They keep teaching me how to learn.
The distance I can be from my son
We took the 5-year-old docent and his brother back to the Blanton Museum this afternoon. My favorite piece was Lenka Clayton’s The Distance I Can Be From My Son (2013). In three short videos, Clayton films her son walking away from her until she can’t stand it anymore and runs after him. The videos were part of Clayton’s “Artist Residency in Motherhood:” an attempt to “allow [motherhood] to shape the direction of my work, rather than try to work ‘despite it’.”
In Hannah Gadsby’s devastating Netflix special, Nanette, she deconstructs how jokes work on a system of tension and release — the setup is “artificially inseminated with tension” and the punchline releases it. Each of these videos is structured like a joke: You see the son toddling away, and at the very end of the video, the mother bolts after him. Tension and release. Setup and punchline.
There are interesting layers here: Clayton is setting herself up to see how far she can let her son go, and she’s setting us up, too. (Gadsby points out that her job as a comedian is to build tension and release it and do that over and over again. “This is an abusive relationship!”) We watched the videos with our kids after spending an exhausting 30 minutes in the museum trying to keep them close, my wife restraining the 3-year-old from leaping onto the paintings. (Unfortunately, art museums do require “helicopter parenting.”) The joke, I think, is not on the kid, or the kid viewers: my sons laughed out loud during the videos — I think they were rooting for him to get away!
Then, you remember the news and the fact that our government has split thousands of families apart at the border. Suddenly, The Distance I Can Be From My Son takes on a completely different meaning. You laughed and now you want to scream.
Notebook vs. washing machine
I was searching for some earbuds and found this notebook in my walking fleece that I haven’t used for months now, sadly, as we have entered the hell season in Texas.
It was my “scratch” notebook, the one I carry around all day, scribbling notes that I then either copy into my logbook or my diary, so it wasn’t that great of a catastrophe.
One interesting thing: I used two different pens and a pencil for these notes, and the water washed out all the felt-tip Flair pen (I didn’t realize they use water-based ink!), but the Pilot G2 ink and the Blackwing pencil remained mostly intact. So now I have this weird object in which some things are erased, some things survive.
Usually with notebooks what survives is the quality of the idea — in this case, it was about the quality of writing tool!
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