Austin Kleon

COVID dreams

Like many people, I’m having lots of classic anxiety dreams. The most common one is: I’ll be in a public place or at a party and all of the sudden I’ll realize, I’m not supposed to be here.

I was channel surfing last night, and this shot from of Magnum, P.I. nailed it! (S04E04, “Distant Relative”)

Not everything will be okay (but some things will)

An image by Ryan Thacker at the end of Maira Kalman’s Creative Mornings talk

“There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided

You know you’re in a bad spot when passing sidewalk chalk platitudes on your daily walk makes you murderous.

For me, yesterday, the breaking point was a hand-painted sign that read “EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY.”

What fucking planet are these people living on? 

My favorite cinematic misanthropes started conversing with each other.

“Where do they teach you how to talk like this?” Melvin Udall asked.

“What absolute twaddle,” Withnail agreed.

I was reminded of the story of G.K. Chesterton’s book, Platitudes Undone:

In 1911, author Holbrook Jackson published a small book of aphorisms under the (mildly pretentious) title Platitudes in the Making: Precepts and Advices for Gentlefolk and gave a copy to his friend G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, it seems, sat down with the book – and a green pencil – and wrote a response to each saying in the book. Presumably he then set the book down, and somehow, someway, it turned up in a San Francisco book shop in 1955, where it was purchased by a certain Dr. Alfred Kessler, an admirer of Chesterton. Every book collector dreams of such a find. Rather than keep the book to himself, however, Dr. Kessler and Ignatius Press have produced a facsimile edition. Remove the dust jacket, and you have a reproduction, in every particular, of that 1911 volume, together with all of Chesterton’s remarks. It’s a remarkable project, and a real treat for readers of Chesterton.

People are dying. Our leaders are corrupt. Things are not good.

But there’s still sunshine and birds and Gene Kelly dancing.

If we are going to paint the neighborhood with slogans, let’s at least honor each other’s grief and intelligence.

everything will be okay.

NOT everything will be okay BUT SOME THINGS WILL.

Self-portraits

Here are four self-portraits I drew today, in the order I drew them.

The first was a blind contour like I’ve been drawing every day since Valentine’s Day. The second was done completely blind — from memory, not looking at the paper or a mirror. The third was done from memory while looking at my paper. The fourth was done while looking in the mirror and looking at the paper.

Taken together, they suggest to me that my latest blind drawings rely more on muscle memory than actual looking. Probably time to move on to another subject. Or draw myself upside down or something.

A friend on Twitter said they reminded him of these self-portraits done after taking different drugs. (Probably inspired by this famous series done during an LSD trip.) The way my face shifts and morphs over time makes me think more of these terrifying and sad self portraits by William Utermohlen “as he slowly deteriorated under the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.”

A final thought: like with all images and words, the meaning of these drawings shifts based on the words I put underneath them. It’s worth pausing to think about what these images would or wouldn’t have said, if anything, without words underneath them…

Circling the airport

John Waters called Anne Truitt’s Daybook “an intelligent, simple and moving record of what an artist’s day-to-day life is really like,” but when I started reading it last week it wasn’t really doing it for me.

My friend Julien has a rule that if a book/movie/etc. is “supposed” to be good but no one he personally knows has ever talked about it, he retains a certain amount of healthy skepticism.

So, as I often do, I did a “People You Follow” search to see if anybody I follow had written anything about it.

My search turned up this lovely thread by game designer Frank Lantz, who was a student of Truitt’s:

One of the things Anne taught me that I’ll never forget is the idea that you don’t need to immediately pass judgment on every new artist you encounter. You can let them “circle the airport”. You don’t have to bring them in for a landing or send them away, just let them circle.

And there you have it. Same goes for books: No need to rush to judgment right away. Just set it aside for a bit and pick up something else. A book that isn’t for you right now might be for you tomorrow.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.