Austin Kleon – Page 542

PLUG FOR MY WIFE

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

She keeps a really excellent little blog on green building and Cleveland. (If you’re into those two things.)

I’ve been seriously slacking on the book, spending most of my Work time reading (today it was Vonnegut’s GOD BLESS YOU MR. ROSEWATER and a great article on commuting in the New Yorker with a great spot illustration by Kevin Huizenga) or messing around with the sumi-e brush. Yesterday I just entered random junk into Flickr and drew whoever looked interesting (except for the third drawing — that’s from a picture of my dad and my brother Nick).

I really love working with ink and brush — I can be fast and loose, and everything just kind of flows out. Working with the woodcut style, on the other hand, is a real pain in the ass, but I like the results a lot better.

Best of all, though, is free-associating with a regular old gel-ink pen:

(Meg is mortified that I would publish a nudie drawing on my blog.)

Nothing beats straight pen-to-sketchbook drawing. Check out these pop-up drawings by Jim Woodring.

I keep thinking about serializing the book as a way to keep up work on it. I was going to write today a bunch about the potential to make a long book out of a weekly strips, but depressingly, I wrote about that last summer. (Almost a year ago, and I’m still stuck on the same idea.) That post has a Vonnegut quote, a George Saunders quote, and a Mark Newgarden comic in it.

Why can’t I write posts like THAT anymore? Yeesh.

ANOTHER ONE OF THESE STUPID THINGS

Monday, April 16, 2007

I was having coffee with Dan a few weeks ago, and he admitted to me that he didn’t think these things were Art:

the old-fashioned dream surfaced / wrinkle-free

As for this one, I agree with him.

Speaking of Art: seeing George Saunders at Oberlin on Wednesday.

DON’T GO WHERE I CAN’T FOLLOW

Saturday, April 14, 2007

This beautiful little book came out sometime around when Meg and I got married. It is a document of Anders Nilsen’s relationship with his fiance, Cheryl Weaver, who died of hodgkins lymphoma in 2005. It reads somewhat like a heartbreaking, full-color issue of FOUND magazine dedicated to a couple: there are scanned postcards, hand-written letters on notebook paper, ticket stubs, photographs, and of course, Nilsen’s wonderful comics.

For obvious (or not so obvious?) reasons, I stayed far away from this book until a good time had passed since our wedding. (It was difficult — until now, I’ve read every work of Nilsen’s as soon as I could get my hands on it. He is one of my favorites.) About a month ago, I read THE END, which is actually something of a sequel to DON’T GO. DON’T GO finally came in the mail today (yes, it arrived with the steaks), and I read it tonight in one sitting.

What to say about this book? What you say about all great books: as little as possible.

Buy it. Read it. It does what great art does best: makes you stop and look around. Makes you want to keep on living.

All day I had been thinking about Kurt Vonnegut, and after reading this book, I thought of a little something he asked of all of us: “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'”