Austin Kleon is a writer who draws.

Who’s having fun?

Monday, October 7, 2019

“I am determined to have fun doing my work… if I’m enjoying myself then that feeling is passed on to the reader.”
—Ed Emberley

I read an essay about why Eve Babitz is having such a moment right now, and at the end I wanted to shout at someone, “IT’S BECAUSE SHE WAS HAVING FUN.”

In life and on the page.

Barely anybody around is having any fun right now, and we need people to show us how it’s done.

I ask myself this question all the time now: “Who seems like they’re really having fun with it?”

I try to identify who’s having fun with it and then I try to see if there’s something I can steal from them.

My 4-year-old leaves so many drawings lying around that sometimes I steal them and add my own captions. I made the mistake of showing this batch to him — he was absolutely furious that I added the wrong words to his pictures!

Everyone can be Batman

Saturday, October 5, 2019

You ever get bored and draw Batman masks on everybody in the New York Times Book Review?

I joked about this on Twitter and @philipkennedy blew my mind with this story:

When producer Michael Uslan was first thinking about how to bring a darker version of Batman to the big screen, back in 1980, he saw a photo of Jack Nicholson from The Shining in the newspaper — and he started drawing on it. Uslan turned Nicholson’s famous “Here’s Johnny!” face into the Clown Prince of Crime. And, just nine years later, the rest was movie history.

Holy White-Out, Batman!

See also: “Draw a picture of Batman”

Notice when you are happy

Friday, October 4, 2019

Despite the news and our country being run by utter turds, I have to say I am really enjoying my life right now.

The older I get, the more I try to say these things out loud.

It’s something I learned from Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country:

The lesson of grace

Thursday, October 3, 2019

I don’t know why, exactly — laziness, perhaps? — but I was moved this morning to just take photos of my diary with my Quickscan app and post them here without further comment, just links:

Francis Su, “The Lesson of Grace in Teaching” (h/t @mattthomas)
Tom Junod, “Can You Say…Hero?”
Wendy Murray Zoba, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

Drawers

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

I’m not sure why it took me so long to figure this out, but when I moved into my new office, I realized it’d be really handy if I kept my pocket notebooks and logbooks and other materials in drawers that I could easily access, instead of on a shelf or in a box somewhere out of reach. (In the past, I’d stored blank notebooks and new pens and other supplies in there, but those are things I only need once in a while…)

The top drawer is my favorite: it’s where I keep little bits and scraps of paper that I can use for collages later…

In other news: I like words.

Digging and scratching

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

In a recent edition of his excellent newsletter companion to his book, The Art of Noticing, my friend Rob Walker wrote about the spirit of DJs digging through record crates featured in the documentary Scratch:

You have to spend the time to sort through the junk to find the treasure. There is no shortcut…. I like to try to apply this spirit of crate-digging to everyday life. The only way to find the good stuff, the special stuff, the genuine moments and the true inspiration, is to first engage with the everyday, the mundane, the seemingly useless, the things nobody else seems to care about. So engage. There is no shortcut; there is no algorithm. If all you do is track what’s trending, then all you’ll ever know is exactly what everyone else already knew. To discover, you have to dig.

I was reminded of chapter six of Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, entitled, appropriately enough, “Scratching”:

You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you’ve won? That’s what I’m doing when I begin a piece. I’m digging through everything to find something. It’s like clawing the side of a mountain to get a toehold, a grip, some sort of traction to keep moving upward and onward….. Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity. It’s primal, and very private. It’s a way of saying to the gods, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just wander around in these back hallways…” and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell.

(Emphasis mine.)

Discovering the masterpiece right in front of you

Monday, September 30, 2019

While reading Alan Jacobs’ newsletter, I came across the story of a woman in her 90s who’d kept a painting above her hotplate that turned out to be a Cimabue worth six million bucks. (Cimabue was born in Florence in 1240. Vasari tells a story that he found Giotto drawing sheep from his flock on a rock and asked if he’d like to be his apprentice. )

I admit it’s not as exciting, but I also recently discovered a masterpiece hanging in my house. My wife and I bought this poster at a Botticelli show in Florence in 2004. We call her “The Botticelli Woman,” and she guards our front door:

In the 15 years that she’s hung in our entryways, I’ve never actually bothered to look up what painting she’s from. Then I was flipping through a book of Botticelli paintings at the thrift store and saw Pallas and the Centaur:

She’s always had a calming effect on me, and yet, I always had the feeling she should be guarding the place. Well, turns out my intuition was correct: That poster is a helluva crop! “The halberd,” that crazy axe-looking thing she’s holding, “was a weapon carried by guards rather than on the battlefield.”

How many things do we keep around our house whose histories we know nothing about?

More block printing

Sunday, September 29, 2019

The boys and I sat around the kitchen table this weekend and made some more block prints.

The four-year-old is still too little to do his own carving, so I had him draw on the block and I carved it for him. (His is the skeleton on the right, the others are by the six-year-old.)