Austin Kleon

Return of the pansy sailor

Last night I was flipping through They Knew What They Wanted, a book that collects poet John Ashbery’s collages, I zoomed in on this 2008 collage, Chutes and Ladders I (for Joe Brainard):


It’s the Pansy Sailor from Vick’s Floral Guide!

So not only did Ashbery write about the “seed-packet look” of Brainard’s paintings and collages, he actually took an image from an old seed catalog to make this tribute. (Who knows, it might’ve been one of the clippings Brainard used to send Ashbery for his collages.)

Nice tricks to make friends


Another zine made from the book, How To Entertain With Your Pocket Calculator.

Someone on Instagram commented that they hoped I chuckle to myself while I’m making these as much as they do while reading them. Probably moreso! They are made entirely for my own amusement, that is for sure.


I feel, actually, that this is still an entirely underrated reason for making stuff: simple diversion and amusement to entertain one’s self. I mean, honestly, if we can’t find some pleasure in making, why bother?


Other zines in this series: How To Talk To Someone With A Missing Imagination and How To Draw What is Invisible.

Read more of my zines here.

Airplane mode to stay grounded

On Nina Katchadourian’s “Seat Assignment,” from chapter 2 of Keep Going

I did so much flying for book tour last year — I think I took 50 flights? — that I don’t really miss flying at all, but I do miss Airplane Mode! Here’s how Rob Walker put it in his most recent newsletter:

I love the feeling of being so out of pocket that I may as well read a novel, or make notes about some long-shot future project, or fully focus on an episode of Snap Judgment, or whatever — basically do anything besides work that somebody else wants me to do. To borrow from a prompt in the book, plane trips are a great venue for “an appointment with myself.” […] I’m working on how to recreate this, and any answer will vary by the rules wherever you are. But consider blocking out a few hours of virtual “airplane mode” time — for you and you alone.

Rob also linked to this this NYTimes piece on rituals athletes use to stay grounded:

Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers said rituals are a support system for the mind. His 90-minute ritual before an N.B.A. game is full of activities that families can try at home, like yoga, stretching and listening to mellow, atmospheric music by the band Hammock.

“I named the playlist ‘Airplane Mode’ because it’s a way for me to just shut off,” he said. Families might want to create their own airplane mode ritual on weekend mornings where they play songs they’ve chosen together and do their favorite exercises or yoga poses.

I like that idea. Here’s what I wrote in Keep Going:

You don’t need to be on a plane to practice airplane mode: Pop in some cheap earplugs and switch your phone or tablet to airplane mode, and you can transform any mundane commute or stretch of captive time into an opportunity to reconnect with yourself and your work.

Less doomscrolling! More airplane mode!

A blackout from Show Your Work!

How I start a notebook

First, a link to what kind of notebook, because otherwise, dozens of people will ask.

Then, the weighing in:

This is a silly ritual, but sometimes silly rituals are all we have.

Next, the selection of a guardian spirit to look over the notebook. I picked Durër’s Saint Jerome in his Study for this notebook, which is aiming a little high, but that’s what guardian spirits are for:

And that’s that. All you have to do now is fill it.

A pandemic diary

Here is a peek inside the second diary I’ve completed since we went into lockdown in March. It runs from May 2nd to July 2nd, exactly two months long. (That rarely happens!)

If you follow along with this blog, many of these pages will be familiar, but I think it’s interesting to see pieces in their original context. People often ask me of what use is my diary. If you follow the links I’ve included under many of the posts, you can see just how much of this blog comes directly from my daily diary work.

Here is a closer look at this collage, which I made to set the tone.

I spent a good part of spring obsessed with the blossoming of our cactus plants out back.

This collage was the real beginning of my house collages for Meg. The drawing was part of my series of 100 blind self-portraits.

I wrote more about Sam’s piece in the post, “Advice from a Caterpillar,” and here are more Humpty Dumpty collages.

Printmaking… with vegetables!

Every time we make a thing, it’s a tiny triumph.

Another house for Meg. (I made two dozen of these in this notebook.)

And yet another, with thoughts on how important keeping a diary is to me.

Usually I put guardian spirits in the front of my notebook, but this nun (who I gave sunglasses and cool hair) hung out in the back, maybe to egg me on.

Now it’s time to hold a weigh in and start a new notebook.

Exquisite corpse

Above are three “exquisite corpse” drawings my boys and I made this afternoon. (Top: Jules, 5; middle: Owen, 7; bottom: me, 37.) Exquisite Corpse was a game invented by the Surrealists:

Participants play by taking turns drawing sections of a body on a sheet of paper, folded to hide each individual contribution. The first player adds a head—then, without knowing what that head looks like, the next artist adds a torso, and so on. In this way, a strange, comical, often grotesque creature is born.

Today went more smoothly and resulted in more inspiring results than last week’s session, which, if I remember correctly, ended in tears. One problem is that we swapped which body parts each drawer was responsible for each time, which I think was confusing:

I’m trying really hard to get the boys to be more improvisational with their play together, particularly the 7-year-old, who tends to art direct everyone and to fly off the handle when things progress in a way that doesn’t align with his vision. (I’m not a particularly good collaborator myself, come to think of it.)

We got a good tip from this video: draw the neck and the legs slightly over the fold so the next person knows where to begin…

3 bits of Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser’s poster for Olivetti, 1977

Designer Milton Glaser died last Friday on his 91st birthday. In addition to his visual work (check out these album covers!), here are 3 verbal bits of his that have stuck in my brain over the years:

1. “The model for personal growth is antithetical to the model for professional success.”

I have had that line tacked on my wall for years. Glaser, like many great creative people, got clued into the fact that success can mess your creativity up way more than failure, because if you succeed

people will continue to ask you for what you have already done and succeeded at. This is the way to professional accomplishment–you have to demonstrate that you know something unique that you can repeat over and over and over until ultimately you lose interest in it. The consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn’t aid in your development.

In order to have a more meaningful and fruitful creative life, you often have to be ready to walk away from your career successes, or find a balance between what people want from you and what you want to chase after.

“I believe that Picasso as a model is the most useful model you can have in terms of your artistic interests,” Glaser said, “because whenever Picasso learned how to do something he abandoned it, and as a result of that, in terms of his development as an artist, the results were extraordinary.”

I quoted the emphasized part of that line in the last chapter of Show Your Work!

2. “My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, ‘Prove it.’”

In a 2003 interview with Chip Kidd, Glaser described the influence of his parents on his work:

In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

I quoted that story in my SXSW interview with Debbie Millman, a student and friend of Glaser’s.

3. “Can you imagine calling someone a creative?”

An aside from his talk, “10 Things I Have Learned”:

[C]reative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow…

I liked that so much I stole it for the “Creative is not a noun” section of Keep Going.

RIP. (For even more, check out this thread of advice to his students.)

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