Austin Kleon

I can’t stop printing

The last few newsletters have shown off how obsessed I’ve become with printmaking — I can’t seem to stop!

From “All is not well (but some things are”:

“Not everything will be okay but some things will.” Years ago, I saw that phrase on a slide at the end of a Maira Kalman talk. It has stuck with me. I wanted to put my own spin on it, so I made a block print with the words, “All is not well (but some things are.)” I was looking for material to print it on, and settled on a few thrifted copies of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation.

I made these prints after writing today’s newsletter, “The subtle art of showing up”:

I get several forms of the question, “What good is making art in times like these?”

There are many decent answers, but the one that rings truest to me, I think, comes from art coach Beth Pickens: “Artists are people who are profoundly compelled to make their creative work, and when they are distanced from their practice, their life quality suffers.”

If I don’t show up for creative work, I suffer. I’m not a whole person. If I don’t show up to the studio, it’s harder for me to show up for the people in my life.

And, really, that’s all, sometimes, you have to do: just show up.

I’m getting many “what are you going to do with all these prints?!?” questions… so that might be the subject of next week’s newsletter…

A Satisfied Mind

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube

Here’s another monthly mixtape made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork.

I wrote about the mix’s origins and shared some of my custom “dub” tracks in today’s newsletter:

It began when I read novelist Elizabeth McCracken’s latest dispatch from Barton Springs pool here in Austin. She titled it “One Rich Man in Ten,” which is a line from the country song, “A Satisfied Mind”:

How many times have you heard someone say
‘If I had his money I’d do things my way’
But little they know
It’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
with a satisfied mind… 

You can read more here.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

Here’s the tracklist:

Side A

– Porter Wagoner, “A Satisfied Mind” (dub)
– Hiroshi Yoshimura, “Over The Clover” (dub)
– Mac DeMarco, “Chamber of Reflection”
– Augustus Pablo, “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown”
– Unknown Mortal Orchestra, “That Life”
– The Congos, “Congoman”
– Sly and the Family Stone, “If You Want Me To Stay”
– Frankie Knuckles, “The Whistle Song”
– Chet Atkins and Dolly Parton, “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?”

Side B

– Arthur Russell, “That’s Us / Wild Combination”
– Yellow Magic Orchestra, “Gradated Grey”
– Mekons, “Last Night on Earth”
– Upsetters, “Three in One”
– Branko Mataja, “Tesko Mi Je Zaboravit Tebe”
– Little Joy, “No One’s Better Sake”
– Radiohead, “Weird Fishes”
– Kim Deal, “Are You Mine?”
– Carlton Haney monologue about Pythagoras and bluegrass

Filed under: mixtapes

Block printing and dub reggae

After I got back from New Orleans a few weeks ago we launched right into spring break mode, and pretty much all I wanted to do was listen to dub reggae and make block prints.

In a Tuesday mailbag, “The point of this world,” I wrote quite a bit about music:

Music is a form of transportation. A joy in the past year has been the way our vacations with the boys have synced up with a particular kind of music — every time I hear Yellow Magic Orchestra, for example, I’m back driving around in the deserts of New Mexico. Whenever I want to be driving around Oahu, I put on our Oahu mixtape.

On Friday, I shared some images of a print I made: “Be the weird you wish to see.”

There are terrible things happening in the world, but you can’t let it rob you of getting joy out of your day-to-day living while you can. One thing that never fails me: Stepping away from the screen and leaving the house. This week I found some major treasure on one of our daily walks. I took my kids to a baseball game. I shopped for records and art supplies and chatted with strangers. I know I’ve said it over and over and over again but I’ll say it again: the more I make an effort to engage locally with my neighborhood and my city, the better I feel about life.

A bunch of folks asked me how I do it, so I shared “an unofficial guide to block printing”:

I want to emphasize that I am a total amateur at this stuff, and I will miss a bunch that you can learn elsewhere in tutorials by more qualified people. That said, I wrote a whole section in Show Your Work! about how there’s a lot of value in learning from beginners. Because beginners have only recently figured stuff out, they know what a beginner needs to know better than an expert does…

And tomorrow’s newsletter starts out with an animation made with a bunch of the block prints I made for Tuesday’s posts.

This is how the newsletter comes together: just one thing leading into another.

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