Austin Kleon

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Corita Day

“‘The Uncommon’ is a better name than ‘art.’”
—Corita Kent

If you’ve followed me for very long, you’ve probably heard quite a bit about the artist and educator Corita Kent. She’s showed up on this blog many, many times, and she was a huge influence on Keep Going: not only does she show up in chapter 5 and 10, she looked down on me from the top of the bulletin board when I was writing the book.

The city and county of Los Angeles have named today — November 20th — Corita Day in honor of her 101st birthday.

There are two books related to her that I think are really terrific:

1) Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent is a lovely introduction to her work (and unfortunately out of print)

2) Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit is a book I rank up there with some of my very favorite books about making art. 

Learning By Heart has so much to teach not just the artist, but the parent. (One of the assignments is “Borrow a kid.”)

Here is luke 2.14, 51 — a gift from my wife that hangs in my office. Corita sent it to LBJ in 1963 “after reading that his wife Ladybird had been telling him to slow down.”

“We have no art,” she said. “We do everything as well as we can.” In this letter to the editor, she says she doesn’t think of what she does as art. “I just make things I like bigger, assuming that if I like them some other people might too.”

“to understand is to stand under which is to look up to which is a good way to understand”

She taught her students to learn to see by looking at the world one piece at a time.

She took from advertising, but then she produced, it too — here are advertisements for Westinghouse Broadcasting Company.

Her pieces include quotes written in her own handwriting…

…pulled from all over the place — that’s Emerson, above, and here are pieces with quotes from Camus and Thoreau.

Here’s the thing she’s probably most famous for these days — the list of 10 rules for the art department at Immaculate Heart.

For more, the Corita Art Center has a great website, and the Hammer Museum has a wonderful digital archive of her work, too.

Happy birthday, Corita!

Questions for The Producer

Owen (6) in the studio

Yesterday I was on the phone with a music producer I know. He’s starting an interview series with other producers and wanted to know if I had ideas for good kinds of questions to ask them.

I thought this was an interesting question itself: Is there a set of questions for creative people that are always interesting?

Much depends, I think, on the audience, and whenever I interview someone, I try to find some Venn diagram of what I’m interested in that the interviewee would be interested in that the audience would also be interested in.

It’s tricky.

Some things I came up with:

1. Media diet: what creative people watch, read, listen to, etc. Their input, how they fill the well. (I love, for example, reading Steven Soderbergh’s Seen/Read list at the end of the year.)

2. Storage and retrieval: How do they capture and keep track of ideas? Do they keep a notebook? Voice memos? (I recently read that Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes ideas down in a big draft email on her phone.)

3. Daily practice: What their day-to-day routine is like, any rituals they have, favorite tools, etc. (See: Daily Rituals.)

4. Troubleshooting: Overcoming block, what people do when things aren’t working. Weird tricks and constraints they come up with. (Example: Oblique Strategies.)

5. Hobbies: What people are interested in outside of work, how they recharge, how they spend their time away from the studio.

6. Personal life: What their parents did, how they grew up, did they go to school, did they like it, what they wanted to be when they were younger, etc.

7. Collaboration: I’m not much of a collaborator, honestly, so I’m interested in how people warm up to each other, the balance between making things comfortable and getting people “out of their comfort zone,” how much of your own aesthetic and ideas you inject into a project.

This last item was particularly funny in hindsight because this morning my son, Owen, who’s a budding music producer at the age of seven, asked if he could listen to a piano track he asked me to add to one of my songs.

“Yes, but I’m not sure if it’s any good,” I said.

“Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “If it’s not good, I’ll make it good.”

Philip Glass on lineage vs. legacy

Here are my clippings from a profile of composer Philip Glass in the Sunday NYTimes. (Whenever you publish a book, you can be sure that in the years following you’ll find several tons of stuff that should’ve gone into it.)

Glass had the right spirit from his beginning: “I had the naïve but probably correct idea that if I wrote enough music, I would start to get better,” he wrote in his excellent 2015 memoir, Words Without Music.

The online version of the profile has the headline, “Philip Glass Is Too Busy to Care About Legacy,” but he’s spoken at length about the subject before.  In a 2015 interview, Terry Gross asked Glass about his experiences with death. “What kind of afterlife do you want for your body? Do you want to be buried? Do you want to be cremated?” He answered:

I’m not so interested in that so much. But I’ve had other thoughts about that lately, which are quite interesting ones. I’ve thought of the lineage of music that goes way into the past and the future of music, which we hope will go into the future, and where does my life fit into that? I think just expressing it that way: What is the meaning of an artist’s life? Or of anybody’s life? A doctor’s life, a teacher’s life, or a radio interviewer’s life — what is the meaning of that? I’m more and more coming to the idea that it’s the lineage and the connection to the past and the connection to the future — that is the real connection. Everything else, I think, is kind of imaginary. Is there a heaven that is waiting for us or some afterlife of some kind? We have no idea. In fact, it’s not even important.

The important thing is how [you are] connected to the past. Does that represent not only continuity, but does it bring us closer to something that’s richer, that’s more interesting? What have we brought to the world and what do we leave behind us and what does the future have for us? The future … is in our children. It’s in our friends. It’s in our work. It’s all around us.

I find that the most reassuring when we contemplate living and dying, that [it] really misses the point: It’s not the living and dying, it’s the continuity of the lives that’s important.

Emphasis mine. Glass has made the point that when it comes to artistic lineage, it “is often something chosen. Before choosing it, we have to become aware that there’s something to choose. When I first began writing music, I really didn’t know where to begin…. The lineage is something that became revealed to me through several remarkable teachers.”

Here’s Jay-Z in Decoded (quoted in Steal Like An Artist):

We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.

I like this idea of thinking about lineage vs. legacy, because it means you can sort of reframe any worrying about immortality and how you’re going to project yourself into the future, and think more about what you’re taking from the past and what you’re adding to it that creates a more interesting and helpful present. Whatever you keep alive or re-animate from the past in the present has that much better chance of surviving into the future. (This also explodes your options as an artist: perhaps, for example, your part isn’t to invent so much as it is to preserve?)

See also: Climbing your own family tree.

Time, space, and materials

Artists and children both need the right combination of time, space, and materials to do their work.

Here’s how Ursula Kolbe puts it in her book Children’s Imagination: Creativity Under Our Noses (emphasis mine):

The elements of time, space and materials make it possible for children to explore, invent and make their ideas visible. Thinking of these elements as invitations gets to the heart of the matter.

It’s the combination of unhurried and uninterrupted time, inviting spaces and materials that guides mind and hands, that invites creative thinking. Seeing, handling, and thinking are inseparable, as Rudolf Arheim, psychologist and scholar of art and ideas, reminds us.

Together, time, space and materials provide ‘invitations to act’.

Those adjectives are extremely important: unhurried and uninterrupted time, and inviting spaces and materials.

Years ago, my friend John T. Unger turned “time, space, and materials” into an equation for producing work. (Only he uses the word resources instead of “materials” — “Resources meaning materials and tools, or the money to get them.”)

Time + Space + Resources = Work

His insight was that you need all three at the same time, otherwise you fall into idleness. Here, in John’s words, are variations on the equation:

T+R-S=Idle: You have time and resources but no work space. Examples: a rock band with close neighbors, a dancer with a no floor space, any visual artist whose space is improperly ventilated, too small, or is not conducive to the use of their proper tools.

T+S-R=Idle: You have time and space but no resources. Example: you quit your job and moved into your parent’s basement, but ran out of paint & canvas. Or you saved up enough cash to rent a big space and take time off, but your welder just blew out it’s coil and there’s not enough cash left to fix it. Or you took a part time job so you’d have
more time to work, but you can’t afford materials after you pay the rent.

R+S-T=Idle: You have resources and space, but all your time is used to maintain them. Example: You have a great job that pays for a huge loft and you’ve purchased everything you need to do a big project. But every night when you come home, you’re just too burned out to get anywhere with the stuff.

“The trouble is,” he says, “it’s almost impossible to get all three at once.”

Time gets used to make money. Money gets used to pay for space. Space is hard to justify unless you have the time and resources to make it pay for itself. The whole equation can easily turn into a vicious circle in which you constantly have to rob Peter to pay Paul.

We can easily see this play out in the lives of children, too.

For example:

S + M – T = You provide a nice space and plenty of materials in the classroom, but the bell rings and it’s time to stop for the day, regardless of where the children are in their work.

T + S – M = You provide the time and space for children to work, but all you’ve given them to draw with is crummy old crayons and scrap paper.

M + T – S = You provide great materials and lots of time, but nowhere to spread out.

Etc.

My question is whether increasing the quality or amount of a variable in the equation can make up for a lack of one the others.

So, for example, you have very little time, but you have a dedicated space and materials ready to go so you can pop in at any opportune moment and work.

Or, you have no space to work, but you get up early when the kids are in bed, and use the kitchen table.

I’m scratching my head thinking about how space and time can make up for a lack of materials, which might reveal something about their importance. I suppose if you have lots of time, you can scrounge around for materials?

I’ll think about it some more, but until then, remember the equation:

Time + Space + Materials = Work

Pages from a finished diary

Every time I finish a diary it feels like I should mark the occasion. People ask me what I’m up to these days, and I say, “Working in my diary, mostly,” and they probably think I’m insane.

Looking back through this one, I notice how filled it is with drawings by my four-year-old: he is in that irresistible period where every single drawing they produce seems to be vibrating with life and you want to save them all. The ones in the diary are mostly discards that I “rescued” from the recycle bin to use in collages…

Collage, collage, collage. So many collages. That’s what I do when I don’t have anything to say.

If you want to see more, head over to Instagram, or I’ve posted the photo sets below.

ALSO: before anyone asks what brand I use…

Set one…

…and set two…

…and set three:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Pages from a finished diary (3 of 3) #kleondiaries 1. Sometimes I will work on a new talk by drawing a comic and let it go wherever it wants to go (you can tell how much I’ve taken from @thenearsightedmonkey) 2. Tape collage / writing about what I’m reading 3. Abandoned collage 4. Grey’s anatomy + sheet music from the thrift store collage 5. Drawing of my son in his lucha mask 6. I like to take text ads and make new messages 7. A postcard of @valeriefowlerart‘s work + stickers and a torn note from my friend’s daughter 8. Back matter 9. I don’t always decorate the back cover but I couldn’t wait for the next notebook to bless it with Bucee Hope this isn’t too boring. When people ask me what I’m up to, I say, “Working in my diary.” ? #kleondiaries

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