Austin Kleon – Page 563

SIGNS OF ENCOURAGEMENT

Thursday, September 21, 2006

There are no mistakes.

I’ve been dicking around with India ink and a Japanese brush, and it’s been really difficult to get used to, so I made this sign to put up over my workspace to remind me to keep going. (It started out as a mistake — spilled ink!)

I like signs like this. I have a couple of them over my desk. One is the old Isak Dineson by way of Ray Carver quote, “Every day, without hope, without despair.” The other is Joyce’s “silence, exile, and cunning,” modified with the word “generosity.” (My old teacher gave me that one.) The third is “Apply Ass To Chair,” (also from my old teacher), but somehow that one got covered up with a James Kochalka comic. Oh well.

Anybody else out there have signs like this you put above your desk?

The one problem with signs is you have to mix them up: otherwise they become just like wallpaper, and lose their effect.

If you want to print out your own, here’s a nice big pdf of the sign above.

GENIUS!

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

“…genius involves the original formation of a new style….it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”

– Jack Kerouac, “Are Writers Made or Born?”

George Saunders’ response to his MacArthur Genius Grant? “I feel smarter already.” Dig also: David Macaulay, whose The Way Things Work was one of my favorites when I was a kid.
You know who else should be thrown a big handful of money? The National. Last night I listened to Alligator and Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers on the turntable back-to-back.

Those guys destroy.

ARMCHAIR ANTHROPOLOGY

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Yesterday, I was listening to an interview with David Byrne, and he was talking about the artistic benefits of living in America as a young immigrant (Byrne was born in Scotland, and moved to Canada and then Maryland when he was 8 or 9).

Even the small things…the fact that I’d go home and my parents ate with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other hand, instead of doing the American thing of switching hands around…[I knew there was] more than one way of doing lots of things, which I think gave me a slight outsider’s perspective.

In many ways, living with a woman as a partner has given me that perspective — that revelation that there’s more than one way of doing things, more than one way of thinking. She’s constantly coming at things from different angles, blowing my mind with her insight.

Anyways, the cool thing about life is that you’re always an armchair anthropologist. And when you live in such close quarters with someone, when you share so much, you get to watch this other specimen in action.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON PEANUTS

Monday, September 18, 2006

I’ve been on another obsessive Peanuts-reading tear. If you’re interested in listening in to the conversations of one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, I highly recommend Charles M. Schulz: Conversations. Particularly wonderful is the 100+ page interview with Gary Groth from 1997 that ran in the Comics Journal.

Two things that strike me right this second about the strip.

First, I’ve been thinking about the difference between reading comics in serialized form — in newspapers or seperately published editions over time — and reading them in book form. Schultz himself said that comics strips weren’t art because they were “too transient” to appeal to several generations. But the act of collecting Peanuts into books, or “treasuries,” basically has cemented their status as great art. Because the characters are so strong, and the world is so static over time, Peanuts is an epic of gag strips — in book form, it really does amount to what George Saunders called a “50-year novel.”

Second, I’ve been thinking about the way in which Schultz’s drawing led his ideas. His formal innovations with his drawing — dressing Snoopy up as a fighter pilot, for instance — led to his character and story development.

Take the character of Schroeder. Schultz said:

“I was looking through this book on music, and it showed a portion of Beethoven’s Ninth in it, so I drew a cartoon of Charlie Brown singing this. I thought it looked kind of neat, showing these complicated notes coming out of the mouth of this comic-strip character, and I thought about it some more, and then I thought, ‘Why not have one of the little kids play a toy piano?'” (*)

Schultz made sure to recreate exactly those Beethoven musical scores by hand, and it was the act of drawing — the simple aesthetic pleasure of musical notes in a comic strip — that led to Schroeder.
What this means to me is that drawing comics is its own particular brand of alchemy. You can’t just sit down and say, “I’m going to draw a character with a funny nose who has no father and always trips over his shoelaces.” The description means nothing. You have to draw that character into existance.

It’s the act, not the idea.

HEROES, ETC.

Friday, September 15, 2006

“I did a strip…once where Charlie Brown was wondering out loud. He was sitting on a bench with Linus. [They were discussing] War and Peace or Beethoven’s Ninth, or something like that. Then he gets up and strikes out. I think he sits down and says something like, ‘And I’ll probably never write War and Peace, either.’

“I always think about things like that. What is of importance? I suppose the most important thing is just to do what you can do best. You have no other choice, do you? You have a certain amount of ability. And do the best with your abilities.”

– Charles Schultz, in a massive interview with Gary Groth, 1997

mini-exercise ripping off Chris Ware from yesterday

* * *

I’m really disappointed that Art Spiegelman is withdrawing his work from the Jewish Museum’s Masters of American Comics exhibit, because it was going to be one of the places Meg and I visited on our honeymoon in NYC. The other bummer is that it’s a split show, so anything in the first half of the 20th century (including, gulp, Schultz, McCay and Herriman) is over at the Newark Museum, and we’re surely not taking the train over there on our limited stay. I guess we’ll have to settle (!!) for Crumb, Panter, and Ware.

Speaking of Ware, he was interviewed about the exihibit and asked, “Who was overlooked?” His response:

Lynda Barry. Her semiautobiographical experiments were pretty much responsible for the maturation comics experienced in the ’90s.

I thought that was pretty awesome of him to say, and come to think of it, I’m just amazed that Lynda isn’t better known than she is. What a genius. Meeting her and becoming exposed to her work (and this sounds overly-dramatic), in a lot of ways, changed my life, or at least my art, because I believe she’s the perfect model of the writer/artist — all her characters arise out of this wonderful world that is uniquely hers…

Anyways, speaking of heroes: George Saunders is coming to Oberlin in April.

For Monday, I’m trying to put together a post about musical notation, Schroeder, and sound effects in comics. Have a good weekend!