Austin Kleon is a writer who draws.

Recent candor

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

It’s not like I was holding that much back before — unfortunately, I tend to do my thinking out loud — but for better or worse, I’ve been more candid than usual in recent interviews. I don’t know what’s brought it about, really, other than: Being truthful and open feels really good, but even more than that, it’s not boring. So many podcasts are so boring and who wants to be boring? I’m also just genuinely happy and relaxed right now, so, I dunno, I just don’t feel like bullshitting. (You’d think the opposite would be true? That I’d have more patience for bullshitting now that I’m happy and relaxed? Life is weird.)

My interview with Jonathan Small on Write About Now:

And my interview (in two parts) with Chris Do on The Futur:

Filed under: interviews

Start before you think you’re ready

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Here’s Stephen Harrigan (talking about his book, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas) and a reproduction of one of Botticelli’s paintings of St. Augustine. (Like almost all writers, St. Augustine, too, wondered about the problem of how to begin. )

In my experience writing books, it isn’t just a “resistance” thing or a “perfectionist” thing or a fear thing, it’s more about research and wondering if you’ve done enough of it. Research becomes your way of procrastinating, because, let’s face it, research is just more fun than writing. (Me, personally, I became a professional writer so I could be a professional reader.)

Steven Johnson says the answer is to “research as you go”:

Email and social media and games are obvious distractions. In my experience, the more subtle threat – particularly for non-fiction writers – comes via the eminently reasonable belief that you’re not ready to start writing, because you haven’t finished your research yet.

And here’s David McCullough:

There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.

Maybe that’s where fear comes in. As Greil Marcus put it in Lipstick Traces:

I began to poke around, and the more I found, the less I knew.

The biggest help to me with my books comes from something Stewart Brand said to Brian Eno, captured in his diary, A Year of Swollen Appendices:

“Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?”

Why it’s hard to fake kids’ drawings

Monday, November 4, 2019

A week or so ago, Robert Sharp wrote to me asking me about the quality in children’s drawings that seems impossible to fake. What I wrote back was: It seems to me that children, when they are drawing, are pushing the very edge of their abilities, while adults, when trying to mimic children’s drawings, are holding back somehow.

Lynda Barry had a much more interesting take during her interview on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast. She says it has to do with line, gesture, and the link between drawing and seeing and thinking:

A kid’s drawing isn’t line…. A kid’s drawing is gesture. It’s natural human movement. Another place we see that is in the sciences. If you watch a scientist… watch how they move their hands on the whiteboard when they’re thinking? It’s astonishing… the parallels between how their hands look and how their drawings look and four-year-olds. It’s amazing.

It would make the physicists just cry to show that it looks just like four-year-olds, but the thing that I’ve come to realize is: What if that’s what a line looks like, not just when you’re getting an idea, but that the line itself is giving you an idea. That’s the part people don’t remember or suspect about drawing: That drawing can go, not just from your head to the page, but definitely from the page up your hand and into your head. That’s the kind of drawing that kids are doing. They’re drawing and then seeing what it is that they’re drawing.

(This reminds me of how my son Jules, even now, will add a few lines, then sit back, admire what he’s done, pump his fists in excitement, and then keep adding lines.)

Some chalkboards from my files (though only one scientist):

Top to bottom: Feynman, Beuys, Albers, Beuys, Beuys, Beuys, Basquiat, Haring.

Two heads

Sunday, November 3, 2019

Here is a collage I made while listening to my hero Lynda Barry on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast.

Filed under: Sunday collage

5 good books I read this summer

Saturday, November 2, 2019

It was a wild summer for the Kleon family, and, unfortunately, I spent a lot of it not reading. But here are 5 good books I did read, in the approximate order I read them:

Educated
Tara Westover

I wanted to see what the fuss was over. The book is about many things, but one of them is the power of journals and diaries to help you cope with trauma and keep the facts of your life straight. (Westover has kept a journal since she was 10. “My journals supplied me with a level of detail I could never have had if I relied on memory alone,” she says. “I recorded meals I’d eaten, conversations I’d overheard, work I’d done for my father in the junkyard or my mother tincturing herbs.”)

Gringos
Charles Portis

When children are going through transitional periods, they’ll pull out old toys, old books, old stuffed animals. I do the same. This summer I re-read all of Portis’s novels, which is somewhat easy to do because there are only five of them. Gringos was the biggest surprise, and maybe the most underrated of all of his books? Such an interesting world and so many great sentences. I would love for another novel of his to turn up, but I also sort of hope he’s just kicking back on a porch somewhere in Arkansas, sipping bourbon, and enjoying his life.

Good Talk
Mira Jacob

Real talk: I was initially turned off by this book, because at a first glance I thought the clip-art drawings and photo backgrounds were out of laziness. (This is, by the way, the trouble with comics: our initial response as readers is an aesthetic one, and if you only read comics you’re aesthetically attracted to, you will miss out.) But no, this is a smart and heartfelt and well-executed book that wouldn’t work the way it does if it was drawn “better.” The book is great evidence for the cartoonist Seth’s equation that comics = poetry + graphic design. (Here’s a good interview about the making of the book.) Other good comic debuts I read this summer: Ebony Flowers’ Hot Comb and Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream.

Range
David Epstein

This book is both a validation of how I’ve chosen to go about my work and a kick in the pants to not get complacent, stretch out, and go down weird paths. (It’s also, as Ryan Holiday suggested to me, a parenting book in disguise.) I have been planning on writing a “Range for Artists” post, because for every chapter I could think of an example of an artist I love that exemplified the subject, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

America
Andy Warhol

A book of Warhol’s photographs matched with his thoughts about the country. “We all came here from somewhere else, and everybody who wants to live in America and obey the law should be able to come too, and there’s no such thing as being more or less American, just American.”

Need more to read? Here’s the rest of my reading year so far and the past decade or so of my favorite reads.

A list of stories set in a future now past

Friday, November 1, 2019

Good morning. We can now add Blade Runner to the list of stories set in a future that is now past.

Footage of fireworks in LA last night + the Blade Runner soundtrack

(thx @claytoncubitt for the idea) pic.twitter.com/HLdlhuYmOX

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) July 5, 2018

What pictures of horses can teach us about art

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Here are two books about art and horses open on my kitchen table this morning.

The top spread is from Dr. Seuss’s The Horse Museum, which was produced from an undated, unfinished manuscript that Theodore Geisel’s widow found in a box. (In the 1950s, before his children’s books had become popular, Geisel had worked on a television series called Modern Art on Horseback.)

From Kirkus:

This posthumously published text recently discovered in Ted Geisel’s studio uses horse-focused art pieces to provide historical context to artistic movements. Showing art ranging from the Lascaux cave paintings to an untitled 1994 sculpture by Deborah Butterfield, Joyner’s playful illustrations surround the curated photographs of art pieces. By using horses as the departing point in the artistic journey, Seuss and Joyner are able to introduce diverse perspectives, artifacts, and media, including Harnessed Horse from the northern Wei dynasty, a Navajo pictorial blanket titled Oh, My Beautiful Horses, and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge.

My personal favorite part of the book is the appendix in the back which goes through each individual piece of art featured in the book and its creator’s relationship, if any, to horses.

I got to thinking how interesting it would be to go through the archives of my own favorite artists and compare horse pictures.

Here, for example, are some of Saul Steinberg’s drawings of horses:

The other book on my kitchen table is unlike any book I’ve ever read. Heidi’s Horse, originally published in 1975, is a book by the painter Sylvia Fein, collecting her daughter’s drawings from her very first marks at the age of 2 up until the age of 17. (Fein was inspired by the Henry Schaefer-Simmern’s The Unfolding of Artistic Activity.) It’s a wonderful record of how the visual mind develops over time.

The book can be hard to track down, so here are the sections summarizing Heidi’s progression:

Here’s another page focusing only on Heidi’s horse heads (the title is, admittedly, kind of terrible, at the very least it should be Heidi’s Horses, plural):

In 1985, Sheila Graber animated Heidi’s Horse into this 16-minute film:

And here’s a great video from 2006 of Fein talking about the progression of children’s drawings and Heidi’s Horse:

If you sit down with a kid and watch them draw, it’s the most wonderful experience in the world. You’re seeing transformation right in front of your eyes.

The book has been hugely influential on me as I track the progress of my youngest son’s drawing.

More about kid’s art and art history: “Caveman drawings”

The work of Sylvia Fein

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Here is a remarkable woman I would like more people to know about: the painter Sylvia Fein. She turns 100 next month and has a survey show of her work made over a 70-year period at the The UC Berkeley Art Museum. (It’s been called “the show of the season” for the Bay Area, and I’m planning on getting tickets to fly out and see one or more of her talks.)

Here is a short bio from the BAMPFA site:

Sylvia Fein, who turns 100 in 2019, was born and raised in Wisconsin, where she attended college with another woman who would go on to become a legendary Bay Area centenarian, Anna Halprin. In the early 1940s Fein was among a group of artists based in Madison and Milwaukee who became known as the Midwest Surrealists. After living in Mexico for several years during World War II, Fein moved to the East Bay in 1947; she received an MFA at UC Berkeley in 1951. For decades, her painting has been strongly influenced by the highly detailed style of Northern Renaissance painters such as Hieronymus Bosch and by the fourteenth-century medium of egg tempera, which endows her works with a distinctive texture and transparent quality.

Perhaps ironically, I first became aware of Fein’s work through the books she wrote when she decided to take a break painting: Heidi’s Horse and First Drawings. (These books have had a big influence on me: I wrote a little bit about them last year in the post “Caveman Drawings,” and I’m going to write more about Heidi’s Horse tomorrow.)

Here is a piece of hers from 2012, called The Painting Told Me What To Do:

And here is a 20-minute documentary from six years ago called in which Fein talks about her life and work:

Haunted house hunting

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

I loved this Kate Beaton twitter thread about her house hunting on Cape Breton. She looked at a house on a big blueberry farm but got extremely creepy vibes from the attic room. Later, she found out that it’s supposed to be haunted.

He said there’s a room at the top of the stairs and I said I KNEW IT and he said people hear these two ladies in there, weaving- they can hear the machine – or the spinning wheel, and the women are singing in Gaelic. And sometimes, you drive by and the light is on upstairs

— Kate Beaton (@beatonna) October 29, 2019

We’ve been watching a bunch of old black and white horror movies for the past couple of weeks, great stuff like The Old Dark House.

One of the funniest things about these old movies is how dumb the protagonists are.

Anybody who’s ever been house hunting knows that you can tell IMMEDIATELY upon entering a house whether it’s got the creeps or not.

In fact, that’s part of the fun of the movie, yelling at the screen, feeling superior. “This would never happen to us,” you think, as you squeeze your wife tight. “We’re a lot smarter than that.”

I wonder sometimes if House Hunters learned this from horror movies: that if you show couples visiting a house and saying dumb things (“I don’t like the paint color!”) or making bad choices it gets the audience whipped up. (This piece on The Cut from last year is the perfect blend of horror and real estate.)

One of my favorite Richard Pryor skits is “Exorcist,” where Pryor imagines the movie if there were black people in it. “The movie would’ve been about seven minutes long. [In The Devil’s voice] ‘Hello?’ [In Pryor’s voice] ‘Goodbye!’”

About a decade later, Eddie Murphy stole Pryor’s joke and updated it using Poltergeist: “Why don’t white people just leave the house when there’s a ghost in the house?”

The Ten Commandments

Monday, October 28, 2019

Here I am with Rob Walker yesterday outside the Texas State Capitol. We were walking back from our panel at the Texas Book Festival and I took us through a side exit so we could say hello to The Ten Commandments. I suggested a photo and someone suggested we point to our favorite commandment. (Mine was easy, Rob couldn’t decide.)

It might seem blasphemous to goof on the Ten Commandments on a Sunday, but the monument has a less-than-pious history: It was one of a series erected in a nationwide program cooked up mid-century by The Fraternal Order of Eagles and aided by director Cecil B. DeMille. Yes, that Cecil B. DeMille, the director of The Ten Commandments. He thought the monuments would make excellent publicity for the film, and several actors from the movie were present at the unveilings (that’s Yul Brynner on the left, Martha Scott, who played Moses’s mother, on the right):

(The second photo comes from a comic book the Eagles put out called On Eagles Wings, about a delinquent boy who goes on a camping trip to learn about God.)

The monuments have inspired many: some to legal action, some to website development, some to vandalism via automobile. (A deranged Arkansas man drove his Dodge Dart into at least two of the monuments.)

“Here’s my problem: Why are there ten?” George Carlin asked in his special, Complaints and Grievances. “You don’t need ten! I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It’s a padded list.”

“Ten sounds official,” he joked. “Having ten commandments was really a marketing decision.”

He then boiled down the list to two. (I won’t spoil it, just watch. Or listen.)

Shel Silverstein went the opposite direction in “The 20 Commandments,” and showed Moses chiseling off the second half of the list so it was light enough that he could carry it down the mountain. (You can read the whole thing in Different Dances.)

Sometimes people will ask me why I’m so fond of the list of 10 format.

“Well, it was good enough for Moses,” I say. “And it’s good enough for me.”