Austin Kleon

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HARRIGAN ISN’T AFRAID

harrigan isn't afraid / after years of waiting / to be her husband...

I found this blackout poem while I was going through some things to compile my portfolio.  People ask me if I’m getting nervous about the big day.  I feel like this poem says it all.

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photo of Austin Kleon by Clayton Cubitt
Photo credit: Clayton Cubitt

I’m a writer who draws. I make art with words and books with pictures.

Here’s a longer, more official-sounding version, suitable for copying and pasting:

Austin Kleon is the New York Times bestselling author of a trilogy of illustrated books about creativity in the digital age: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going. He’s also the author of Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poems made by redacting the newspaper with a permanent marker. His books have sold nearly two million copies and have been translated into over 30 languages. He’s been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS Newshour, and in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. New York Magazine called his work “brilliant,” The Atlantic called him “positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet,” and The New Yorker said his poems “resurrect the newspaper when everybody else is declaring it dead.” He speaks for organizations such as Pixar, Google, Netflix, SXSW, TEDx, Dropbox, Adobe, and The Economist. In previous lives, he worked as a librarian, a web designer, and an advertising copywriter. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and sons. Visit him online at www.austinkleon.com

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To get in touch, contact me.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

B. June 16, 1983, Circleville, Ohio

Education: B Phil. in Interdisciplinary Studies, Miami University

Pronunciation: Austin, like the city. Kleon, rhymes with neon.

Origin of name: “Austin” was a family name before Texas was a state. “Kleon” is Romanian.

What advice do you have for young artists starting out? It’s pretty much all in Steal Like An Artist.

How do I get published, famous, etc.? My book Show Your Work! is a guide to getting your work out there, and my book Keep Going is how to stick with it for the long run.

How did you come up with the idea to make your newspaper blackout poems? There’s a brief history on the blog and the full story is in the book.

What are your favorite books? Here are my favorites from the past +15 years.

What kind of notebooks do you use? Here’s a bunch of gear I use in the studio.

 

Video

This interview with photographer Chase Jarvis is a great introduction to my work, as is our most recent conversation.

You can watch more of my talks on my speaking page.

 

Selected Press & Interviews

More recent interviews on the blog.

3 recent newsletters

I’m doing some of my best writing, I think, in my Tuesday newsletter.

This week, I wrote about “entering into the spirit” of the holidays:

For artists, we get to play at Halloween all year. That veil between the material and the immaterial stays razor thin. Every day, we get to step into our costumes, don our masks, perform our rituals, and enter into the spirit.

Two weeks ago, I shared three poems from the sports section:

For years, my favorite section of the New York Times for making newspaper blackouts has been the Sports section. (Ironic, considering they recently disbanded their sports department.) This isn’t because I’m a huge fan of sports, but because you find good nouns and verbs there: I like the way coaches and athletes talk in plain language — and sometimes clichés! — and how they speak a lot about “seasons,” etc.

I stitched those poems them together with quotes from my commonplace diary and the result was really fun. I’m going to try to do more letters like this soon.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the art of forgery:

Because I wrote a book called Steal Like an Artist, some people think I’m really interested in plagiarism. Actually, I’m much more interested in forgery.

“Plagiarism is the flip side of forgery,” wrote Andrew Potter in The Authenticity Hoax. “Forgers pass off their own work as that of someone else, while plagiarists pass off the work of others as their own.”

In other words: Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else’s work. Forgery is giving someone else credit for work you create.

The difference is you doing the work.

Though I love having the deadline and the form to play with, what’s best about the Tuesday newsletter is the comment section — a sane corner of the internet that makes me feel better about the world. (See our recent “What’s Good?” discussion thread for a lift — there’s a free trial at the paywall.)

RIP Tom Phillips

@tomphillipsart

The great Tom Phillips has died. (Here is a very good obituary in the Guardian.)

My blackout work is indebted to his masterpiece, A Humument.

He was extremely prolific, and I have it on good authority that he was working up until the very end on a collage. Here is one of them:


One of the great art experiences of my life was visiting Marvin and Ruth Sackner’s penthouse in Miami, Florida to see their archive, which included a ton of Humument pieces but also really rare pieces like this globe:

tom phillips globe
I never got to meet Tom, but we did exchange emails. He thanked me for “the nod of honest debt” I paid in a talk about the history of blackout poetry, and then he sent me something remarkable, a “skeleton version” of a slide lecture he used to give, called “Raphael to Eno,” tracking the lineage of his student, Brian Eno (another hero of mine), all the way back to Raphael in 20 moves.

I don’t think he’d mind if I reproduced it, so here it is:

Brian Eno to Raphael in 20 moves, in the words of Tom Phillips:

  1. BRIAN ENO (b. 1948) the pupil of
  2. TOM PHILLIPS (1937-2022) the pupil of
  3. FRANK AUERBACH (b. 1931) the pupil of
  4. DAVID BOMBERG (1890 – 1957) who studied with
  5. W.R. SICKERT (1860 – 1942) who studied with
  6. EDGAR DEGAS (1834 – 1917) who studied with
  7. J.A.D. INGRES (1780 – 1867) who studied with
  8. J.L. DAVID (1748 – 1825) who was the pupil of
  9. J.M. VIEN (b. Montpelier 1716 d. Paris 1809. He was head of the school at Rome and also designed masques etc. Buried in the Pantheon. Stiffish neo-classicist who studied under
  10. C.J. NATOISE (b. Paris 1700 d. Paris 1777) who also directed the French School at Rome. Designed tapestries and decorations and was unusual in that he provided a garden of classical sculpture for his students to draw in. He was the pupil of
  11. F. LE MOINE (b. Paris 1688 d. Paris 1737) who painted the Hercules Room at Versailles and was Premier Peintre du Roi. Committed suicide after a period of setbacks and emotional turbulence. He was the pupil of
  12. L. GALLOCHE (b. Paris 1670 d. Paris 1761) who was also a musician. Made a journey to Rome. Lodgings in Louvre. Pupil of
  13. LOUIS DE BOULOGNE LE JEUNE (b. Paris 1654 – d. Paris 1733) who copied Raphael Frescoes for the Gobelins Tapestry works. Also Premier Peintre du Roi. Studied under his father
  14. LOUIS DE BOULOGNE LE VIEUX (b. Paris 1609 d. Paris 1674) who worked at Versailles and was one of the founders of The Academy. Pupil of
  15. JACQUES BLANCHARD (b. Paris 1600 d. Paris 1638) who was called “The French Titian” and had been much influenced by work seen on a trip to Venice. He was the pupil of
  16. NICOLAS BOLLERY of whom little is known except that he died in Paris in 1630 and studied under his father
  17. JEROME BOLLERY who was active in Paris from 1530 onwards. He was the assistant to
  18. PRIMATICCIO (1504 -1570) when he worked on The Louvre. Primaticcio was the head of the School of Fontainbleu and was the assistant of
  19. GIULIO ROMANO (1499 – 1546) in the decoration of the Palazzo Té etc. G.R. the only non-English painter mentioned by Shakespeare. He entered at the age of 10 the studio of
  20. RAPHAEL (1483 – 1520) of whom little need be said by way of explanation.

Phillips claimed Eno was the only decent student he had.

“I used to teach,” he said. “Gave it up as soon as I could.”

If you consider Phillips’ work + his pupil’s, his influence on the culture is huge.

I cannot claim to be his pupil, but I studied him, and as I have written elsewhere, the thing about the masters is they can’t really refuse you as a student. They leave their lesson plans in their work.

Thank you, Tom.

Blogging as a forgiving medium

a poem from Newspaper Blackout

Artists speak of unforgiving mediums.

“Pastel is the unforgiving medium,” wrote Irving Petlin, in Notes on Pastel: 

I am attracted to pastel as a medium because of the gamble involved in its execution. There is a fascination with the processes of control and risk enacted on a surface, a surface building toward the last plunges of color that bring everything already developed there into focus—the color bolt that finishes a picture.

I am on Twitter, still, despite my better judgment, and it seems to me to be The extremely unforgiving medium in my life. 

It is risky compositionally. You can delete a tweet, but you can’t edit a tweet. You can add to a tweet, but it’s hard to improve upon it.

It is risky socially. Every tweet is an invitation for scrutiny if not consultation if not correction if not misunderstanding if not rancor. Forgiveness, even if we agreed it still existed in the wider culture, I think we could probably agree it doesn’t really exist on Twitter. (“Never Tweet” is not terrible advice.) 

And yet, like Petlin, I think I am attracted to “the gamble involved” in the unforgiving medium’s execution. Sometimes it yields gold. Sometimes a tweet leads to the next good idea or a new friendship or mutual appreciation. Sometimes tweets become blog posts that become book chapters. 

If Twitter is the unforgiving medium in my life, where are the forgiving mediums?

My notebooks would be one.

Even my published books, since they go through a long editorial process of people who care correcting me, and if there’s a typo, we can fix it in the next printing.

Another forgiving medium? Compared to Twitter, I’d make a case for blogging. 

Blog posts can be edited, added to, improved upon.

If you missed something, you can fix it.

For example, a few days ago I posted about Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers. One reader pointed out (on Twitter) that it wasn’t a tree in the poster, it was a utility pole.

Fixed!

Another reader pointed out (on Twitter) that there was an The Art Assignment video about Russell’s work.

Added! 

The ability to “move it around for a long time” is what I’m looking for in a writing medium — I want words and images to be movable, I want to switch them out, copy and cut and paste them, let them mutate. 

But most importantly, I want to be able to be wrong. I want to change my mind! I want to evolve. 

Being wrong publicly is the easiest way to learn what you need to know. The trouble is: it’s also the easiest way to get yelled at or shamed or “canceled,” as they say. 

To do the exploration that growth and change requires, one needs a forgiving medium… but what one really needs forgiving readers.

Every newsletter I send, for example, is a gamble. It can’t be edited, only issued a correction in the next one. But my readers, on the whole, tend to be a caring bunch. (If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t subscribe.) Corrections are often made privately, over email. 

In the book Fare Forward, a collection of letters David Markson sent Laura Sims, Markson begs Sims not to send him any print-outs from the internet.

“HOW CAN PEOPLE LIVE IN THAT FIRST-DRAFT WORLD?”

Twitter, to me, is very much that “First-Draft World” that Markson bemoaned. But blogging feels to me like a world of endless drafting, endless revisioning.

A much more forgiving medium.  

(I look forward to editing this post.)

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