Austin Kleon

SHOWING PIGS, EATING PIGS, DRAWING PIGS

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These are research sketches of pigs I did for a new comic called “Showmanship,” which is going to be about my experience raising 4-H hogs for the county fair. They were inspired by a lame-ass interview I saw of Jonathan Safran Foer describing why he’s a vegetarian that I came across while researching Everything Is Illuminated for our book discussion on Wednesday:

There’s no paradox when you’re a child between loving animals and eating animals because you don’t realize that they’re one and the same. Then when you do, people move in one of two directions, either finding ways to reconcile that in their lives, or saying, ‘I don’t have to reconcile it, I just won’t eat animals.’ And that’s what I did.

Foer became a vegetarian when he was nine, which was exactly the same age I was when I started showing hogs. Growing up in Southern Ohio the son of an ex-meatcutter and the grandson of a farmer, I don’t think I even MET a vegetarian until I got to college. And even then, I’ll admit that my reaction to vegetarians was pretty identical to Alex and his grandfather in Everything Is Illuminated :

“You should know…” “Yes?” “I am a… how to say this…” “What?” “I’m a…” “You are very hungry, yes?” “I’m a vegetarian.” “I do not understand.” “I don’t eat meat.” “Why not?” “I just don’t.” “How can you not eat meat?” “I just don’t” “He does not eat meat,” I told Grandfather. “Yes he does,” he informed me. “Yes you do,” I likewise informed the hero. “No. I don’t.” “Why not?” I inquired him again. “I just don’t. No meat.” “Pork?” “No.” “Meat?” “No meat.” “Steak?” “Nope.” “Chickens?” “No.” “Do you eat veal?” “Oh, God. Absolutely no veal.” “What about sausage?” “No sausage either.” I told Grandfather this, and he presented me a very bothered look. “What is wrong with him?” he asked. “Hamburger?” “No.” “Tongue?” “What did he say is wrong with him?” Grandfather asked. “It is just the way he is.” “Does he eat sausage?” “No.” “No sausage!” “No. He says he does not eat sausage.” “In truth?” “That is whht he says.” “But sausage…” “I know.” “In truth you do not eat any sausage?” “No sausage.” “No sausage,” I told Grandfather. He closed his eyes and tried to put his arms around his stomach, but there was not room because of the wheel. It appared like he was becoming sick because the hero would not eat sausage. “Well, let him deduce what he is going to eat. We will to go to the most proximal restaurant.” “You are a schmuck,” I informed the hero.

Of course, I really don’t care whether someone is a vegetarian or not. And I’m fully aware of all the ethical, moral, and health issues involved in meat consumption. I just don’t dig on self-righteousness.

What I do dig is the few authors who love to eat meat and have done some really good writing on the meat-eater’s dilemna.

The first is David Foster Wallace in his essay on the Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider The Lobster ,” where he poses the question “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” and after trying his best to answer it (considering everything from a lobster’s neuroanatomy to the difference between pain and suffering) admits, “I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and…I haven’t succeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.”

The second is Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, whose book is all about tracing the origins of our food, and whose solution to the problems of meat-eating is to find local, organic meat suppliers who feed their animals well and treat them humanely.

Who wants a cheeseburger?

IT SOUNDS GREAT WITH THE VOLUME DOWN

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My friend Brandon (who keeps refusing to answer my e-mails now that he’s a fancypants graduate student — maybe he’ll read this and feel guilty) once told me that in the lazy afternoons, he’d been watching soap operas with sound off, writing his own dialogue for the characters on the screen. I thought that sounded like a fun writing exercise, but wasn’t sure what the equivalent would be for drawing.*

Then, a few weeks ago I came across a crappy-looking movie that was shot in the same whaling town one of my characters lived in. So I picked up the DVD, sat down with my sketchbook in front of the TV. But instead of watching it, I used the fast forward and pause buttons to freeze-frame scenes that I thought were pretty decent. Then I super-imposed my own characters over those scenes.

By the time I’d made it through the movie, I had several pages worth of comics panels (without dialogue — but you could certainly add dialogue), and it occured to me, you could do a whole comic like this, if you really wanted to.

* Though, come to think of it, Kenneth Koch used to give his poetry students comic books that they’d never read, and order them to white-out the speech balloons without reading the dialogue, and write their own….

THE GATES OF PARADISE AS A COMIC

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Ever since I saw this bit from Art Spiegelman’s PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG %@?*! where his mentor Ken Jacobs tells a young Art to just think of paintings “as giant comic panels,” I’ve had a new eye towards paintings and all kinds of visual art. I spent a good part of our recent visit to the Art Institue of Chicago thinking, comic…comic…comics!

When I was 20, I had the good fortune to study renaissance art in Florence, Italy for a few summer months. My teacher was Kevin Murphy, an expert on Italian Renaissance Art who teaches at the British Institute of Florence. (His other claim to fame is giving art tours to Mel Gibson whenever Mel’s in town.)

Florence has been my favorite city in the world ever since. (And consequently, Meghan’s, too.)

So I was really excited to hear that three of the newly restored panels from Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise” are going to be at the Met while we’re on our honeymoon in New York.

The “Gates of Paradise,” are actually gilded bronze panels on the door to the Battistero di San Giovanni in the Piazza del Duomo:

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Their 10 panels depict scenes from the Old Testament, intricately illustrated in high and low relief. When the three-ton, 20-foot-tall doors were completed, in 1452, Michelangelo pronounced them grand enough to adorn the entrance to paradise, and so they became known as “The Gates of Paradise.” They have for centuries been considered one of the masterpieces of Western art.

Of course, it’s impossible for me to not look at those panels and think, “A huge comic!”

The individual panels themselves have a really interesting art history lesson to tell. See, in medieval times, before the invention of perspective, individual figures were compartmentalized into boxes, sized according to importance, and depth of field was weakly displayed by overlapping. With the adaptation of perspective technique, all of the sudden artists were able to fake the illusion of depth, and squeeze several different figures into the same scene.

Now here’s the bizarre part, courtesy of my old textbook, A. Richard Turner’s Renaissance Art:

We assume that a represented fictive space will contain narrative events understood to be happening simultaneously. For instance, a picture may show several events, say a friar preaching, a man leading a train of donkeys across a square, a fishmonger purveying his wares. We do not necessarily assume that these events have any narrative connection with one another, but because they occupy a common space, we assume they are happening at the same time.

Take a look at the “Isaac” panel from “The Gates”:

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At first glance, it looks like a single moment frozen in time, right? Lots of people standing around.

But that’s not what the viewer of the fifteenth century saw, or what the artist intended! What you’re really looking at is the sequence of a story (Isaac’s unintentional blessing of Jacob) spread out across one compositional field, or panel. When you understand the story, the panel can be read sequentially:

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Perspective, in this case, isn’t just used to fake the illusion of depth and space: it’s actually used as a storytelling device. So if you look at The Gates as a comic, each panel doesn’t represent a moment of a story, it represents a complete story in itself, and the panels together tell a bigger story.

For some reason, this really blows my mind.

To see more really cool pictures of “The Gates,” check out this site.

A MARRIAGE GUIDE FOR WRITERS

Meg and I have this Peanuts strip taped to the fridge:

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Relationships are hard enough, but it takes a real champion of a person to be married to an artist. Lots of times you have to be a maid/cook, motivational speaker, a mother, and an editor — all at once.

Lucy would never cut it.

We have a few marriage books scattered on the coffee table, but none of them touch on the trials that await the spouse of an writer.

So, if you’re an writer and you’re thinking about getting married, or if you’re thinking about marrying a writer, I’d recommend checking out Bruce Holland Rogers’ book, Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer.

There are lots of writing books out there, but Word Work is unique in that it’s all about the practical, day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts of a writer’s life. There are three chapters about relationships: “Writers and Lovers,” “Writers Loving Writers,” and “Writers Loving Non-Writers.”

Lucky for me, my non-writer is a champion, and she could have written the last chapter.

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