Austin Kleon – Page 563

DOODLES

Friday, September 22, 2006

“Doodling is a 20th-century form….You had the rise of bureaucracy and meetings and the demise of the secretary who would take notes for you.”

– Sina Najafi, editor of Cabinet Magazine

– doodle by Richard Nixon

Doodling is also, of course, the result of cheap and plentiful pens and paper.

A chronic doodler myself, I’m fascinated by the idea that you could psychoanalyze people by their doodles.

Kurt Vonnegut called Nixon “the first president to hate American people and all they stand for.” His doodles don’t seem to render him any better. I mean, isn’t that doodle just terrifying?

Check out other doodles by ex-presidents.

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.