Austin Kleon – Page 557

THE IMPORTANCE OF DOODLING

Friday, November 10, 2006

To loosen up in the morning, I pull off a huge sheet of trashy sketch paper and doodle with my sumi-e brush. Sometimes I copy cartoons out of other books, just to get the flow going. Sometimes I work on the easel, sometimes I work on the coffee table, sometimes I work on the floor in the sunshine…
I can’t express how elated we are to be finished with the GRE. Pythagorean triangles are no longer invading my dreams. Take that, ETS.

But oh, will it be a race to the finish line for the rest of the year. The wedding, the applications, the book…one thing ends, and twenty other things take it’s place.

We’ve got company coming this weekend, so we’re gonna spend it celebrating! You should too!

R.E.M. PERSON

Thursday, November 9, 2006

I promise tomorrow I’m going to post a nice pretty picture up here, but for now, The Dems won, Meg and I just finished kicking the GRE in the nuts, and it’s 60 degrees outside, so we’re going to relax and get the apartment ready for the company we’re having this weekend.

In the meantime, there’s a great article from Slate about R.E.M. versus U2. Sorry Don, but I’m on the R.E.M. side of the fence. I went through my big R.E.M. phase in high school, when I ~~stole~~ borrowed a copy of Reckoning from my girlfriend’s brother. I hadn’t listened to them lately until I found a mint copy of the Murmur LP at Half Price for four bucks. Ooh, did it sound good.

Other things that sound good: Exploding Hearts and this dude.

THE MIDWESTERN, MARRIED LIFE

Tuesday, November 7, 2006

Our house is a mess of GRE books right now, so I really don’t have the time to post much anything of any substance.

But I did come across a really great paragraph from an interview with my hero, Lynda, about being married and artistic, and a setup that sounds like everything Meg and I one day hope for:

My husband is a really good painter and a really good sculptor, and the first floor of our big old funky house is his studio. I have the third floor. We mainly live an the second floor, but there isn’t a room in the house without some sort of project going on in it. He works during the day restoring prairies and oak savannas. So at the end of the day there is always a lot to talk about. He drives a tractor around and wears bib overalls and then comes home and we eat dinner and then we both make things in out studios and run up and down the stairs and look at what the other is doing. We work on the house together – we tiled the bathrooms and put up a ceiling in my studio and painted all the walls and do all the things hardcore do-it-yourself types do. We both love to build things and fix things, and we like to hang out together. He makes me laugh really really hard. I have a Casio keyboard I got at a garage sale, and I’ve taught the dogs how to “play” it. They can select rhythms and chords and then they do nose solos. We roll around on the couch laughing a lot at the dog music. It’s a happy active household with occasional explosive scream fights that are also kind of fun. I lucked out with my home life.

And she also talks about why she chooses to live in the rural Midwest:

Well, like Goldilocks, I was looking for the place that felt just right, and it certainly is the Midwest….my first sense experiences were here and whenever I came back to the Midwest, I felt a certain unnameable excitement. like I had found a world that was lost to me. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’m living now where the light is like it was when I was very young.

And though they have nothing to do with being married or living in the Midwest, I am really digging the work of two other female cartoonists, Hope Larson and Lilli Carre. There is an interesting blog called Comic Tools where Hope has disclosed her methods/tools.

Ok, back to the flaming inferno of GRE hell…

MP3 MONDAY: MOULTY!

Monday, November 6, 2006

I remember the days when things were real bad for me
It was right after my accident, when I lost my hand…

The Barbarians – “Moulty”

[audio:http://www.austinkleon.com/mp3monday/moultybarbarians.mp3]

* * *

“Moulty” was a song by a Cape Cod garage band called the Barbarians, who in 1964 grew shoulder-length hair, wore sandals, and were fronted by a one-armed drummer with a hook.

Moulty was drummer/singer Victor Moulton, who at the age of 14 had lost his left hand while he was building a pipe bomb, and this 1965 single is a recitation by Moulton (backed not by the other Barbarians, but a cadre of New York session musicians including, allegedly, members of Levon and the Hawks, soon to become the Band) about his accident and how it changed his life. The monologue, written by producer Doug Morris, is sappier than a sugar maple in March, but the combination of the cheesy recitation and the sloppy rock and roll backing, with its drunk-sounding, ragged massed backing vocals, is oddly appealing. The Barbarians didn’t think so, and left Laurie Records soon after the single was released without the band’s consent.

I can’t get enough of this song. It’s so goofy and hilarious, but so earnest. It makes me happy.

If you head over to Rbally, you can listen to a version of Yo La Tengo doing it live with Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith’s guitar player, and the compiler of the original Nuggets collection on which “Moulty” was collected) in 2005. Also, be sure to check out some video of Victor’s one-handed drumming.

“Moulty!”

HOW DO YOU SHOW THEM WHAT YOU’VE DONE?

Thursday, November 2, 2006

A little exercise in information design/gallery hanging today:

What’s the best way to let total strangers know what it is that you do? If you’re a multi-disciplinary artist, how do you express the range of your work? How can a portfolio page engage a viewer/newcomer as well as a piece of art?

I like the blog format because I never feel limited by what I can post…but I do think that it can get fairly daunting sifting through a lot of the material that’s up here. And as an advertising device to grad schools it’s probably ludicrous. (Although I have had people say, “I’m having fun making my way through your site…”)

Right now, I’m working on a new portfolio page that’s a little more organized/intuitive than going down the sidebar and clicking on textual links. I’m trying to make it fun, graphical, and easy to use. This is a sketch of what I want it to look like.
This idea was a little inspired by McCloud’s pyramid chart of cartoonists in UNDERSTANDING COMICS (pages 52-53). I’m too lazy to scan it right now, but to way over-simplify it, the x-y axis of the pyramid showed the movement from realistic depiction of objects all the way to the abstraction of language.
Because I find myself constantly oscillating between pictures and words, I figured that might be the best way to show the range of what I do:

PICTURES <---------------|-----------------> WORDS

Comics are right in the middle.