Austin Kleon – Page 312

Shelf life

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Here’s a photo of Steal Like An Artist on sale at a Target in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by my cousin.) Sure, it’s on sale at all kinds of places, including some of the best bookstores and museum gift shops in the world, but there’s a kind of weird fun knowing that my aunt saw my book while doing her grocery shopping and texted it to my mom. (And a kick for my mom, I imagine: There’s not a whole lot of social currency in small-town Ohio when you tell your friends your son is a writer.) Even my wife said she got a little thrill seeing it in our local store.

In this Sunday’s New York Times, Jason Segel gives it a shout-out in his By The Book interview:

The book is 8 months older than my oldest son, and he reads chapter books, writes songs in Garageband, and tells poop jokes. He has a whole life of his own now! So does the book. I was 28-years-old when I wrote it. I’ll be 35 next year. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like it was me who wrote the thing. How strange to see it still making its way out into the world, to have people reading it for the first time. I am lucky. And grateful.

The simplest cut

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

The art of collage, for me, is mostly one of contextomy and juxtaposition: you put two things next to each other that aren’t really supposed to be together and you get a new thing. (1 + 1 = 3.)

I’ve been obsessed lately with the simplest cut: what’s the least amount of cutting or folding or editing that you can do for maximum effect?

I really got thinking about this when a woman in one of my workshops made the newspaper headline collage above. (An exercise from The Steal Like An Artist Journal.) It was so simple and funny it was like a gag out of a Nancy comic strip.

For a more visual example, here’s a picture of a sunset and moon that I took at the same time, but edited together with Instagram’s simple Layout program:

The simplest, cleverest expression of 1+1=3… that’s what I really love.

Guardian spirits

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Back in January, I decided that my new notebook needed a guardian spirit to watch over things. Emily Dickinson seemed right.

I felt like Emily D kept a good watch, so when I finished that notebook, I decided to continue the practice. I burned through 8 notebooks this year, so I had to pick 8 spirits…

I’d never heard of Carl Craig, but I loved this photo of him in The New Yorker, and it was the perfect size.

For the next notebook, the collage artist Hannah Höch.

Then, since summer is a hateful season to me, I went with H.W. and Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood.

George Strait’s hat, swiped, again, from The New Yorker.

Walt Whitman, with my 2-year-old’s scribbles over his face.

A drawing of a robot by my 4-year-old.

Finally, for my last notebook of the year, here’s Jack Lemmon from The Apartment.

The demons hate fresh air

Monday, December 11, 2017

That’s Linus taking a walk, from a Peanuts strip published on October 8, 1970. Here’s Linn Ullmann, in an interview with Vogue, on her father Ingmar Bergman:

My father was a very disciplined and punctual man; it was a prerequisite for his creativity. There was a time for everything: for work, for talk, for solitude, for rest. No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk and then work, he’d say, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed, demons hate fresh air. So when I make up excuses not to work, I hear his voice in my head: Get up, get out, go to your work.

Get up, get out, go to your work.

(Thanks to Matt.)

This post became a chapter in my book, Keep Going.