Austin Kleon

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Drawing at the skate park

After our adventures at the Texas Book Festival, Jules and I walked west all the way across the Capitol grounds and down to the skate park by Lamar Blvd. I’m not sure Jules had seen anybody skateboard before. We watched the skaters and drew in our sketchbooks.

I’m not a skater myself, but I love to watch skaters. “I’m not familiar with the scene of skateboarding,” Werner Herzog said when he was shown a video of skateboarders. “At the same time, I had the feeling, yes, that’s kind of my people.”

One of my quarantine hobbies was watching skate videos of skaters in cities I wished I was in — I particularly love the Instagram of these dudes in San Francisco: @gx1000. (My friend James also sends me gnarly videos of hill bombing.)

Over time, I’ve been learning more about the sport, mostly by watching documentaries. I enjoyed Tony Hawk: Until The Wheels Fall Off. I also watched Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, which gives you the context of the scenius around Hawk. The skater who steals the show in both documentaries is Rodney Mullen, who has become a sought-after consultant and public speaker. (His TED talk is worth watching.)

I also love to listen to skaters talk about how they see the world. Skateboarding seems to reconfigure your molecules and changes the way you look and the kind of attention you pay to the world. (Exactly what we hope for when practicing any art.)

Here’s Ian MacKaye in his Library of Congress lecture talking about skateboarding:

Skateboarding is not a hobby. And it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you. For most people, when they saw a swimming pool, they thought, ‘Let’s take a swim.’ But I thought, ‘Let’s ride it.’ When they saw the curb or a street, they would think about driving on it. I would think about the texture. I slowly developed the ability to look at the world through totally different means.

This is echoed by my friend, the photographer Clayton Cubitt:

Skateboarding irreparably changes the way you perceive the built physical world and structures of power that guard it…. It’s hard to ever have respect for authority again after you’ve bombed a rail and glided away from a security guard chasing and yelling at you.

“Skateboarding is neither sport nor art,” writes Bret Anthony Johnson. “It’s a path, a perspective, and a practice—a habit of being.”

Jules thought it was funny how many times the skaters fell down. He was kind of like, Who would choose to fall down over and over? (Bret Anthony Johnson, again: “Learning to skate is, in fact, tantamount to learning to fall.”)

I told him it was like kind of like drawing: You turn to a blank page and you take a ride on your pencil and then you turn the page and try again. (“Fall” and “fail” don’t have the same etymology, but they’re only one little dot apart.)

Not sure if any of that sank in, but we had a good time.

Brains in your tentacles

Here are some diary pages I drew while listening to Alison Gopnik talk about her research and her books The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter on the podcast The Ezra Klein Show. Like Klein, I despise most parenting books, especially the “hey bro” tones of most of those aimed at dads, but Gopnik has not only helped me think differently about my kids, she’s helped me think differently about my own creative practice.

Gopnik was talking about childhood as evolution’s solution to explore-exploit tradeoffs and how children and adult are different kinds of creatures. The child mostly explores, the adult mostly exploits. (Children, she says are the R&D departments for the human race.) Then she brought up the octopus. The octopus has a split kind of brain. There’s a big brain in their heads, exploiting, basically, and then there are lots of little brains in their tentacles, exploring.

So, my thought is that we could imagine an alternate evolutionary path by which each of us was both a child and an adult. So imagine if your arms were like your two-year-old, right? So that you are always trying to get them to stop exploring because you had to get lunch. I suspect that may be what the consciousness of an octo is like.

After she said that, I thought, you’ve just described an artist.

The octopus has intelligence in its tentacles. When an artist (or a two-year-old) is drawing, there is intelligence in their fingers. The hand is moving beyond what the brain is telling it to do. The brain is being told as much by the fingers as the fingers are being told by the brain.

Later in the conversation, Gopnik says, “Going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake.” This was the very advice of the artist Corita Kent: “Borrow a kid.”

A podcast episode well worth your time.

Author Edward Carey on writing and drawing The Swallowed Man

One result of the pandemic is that I’m actually able to attend author events at the same frequency I did before I had children. Last week I watched Edward Carey discuss writing and drawing his re-telling of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale, The Swallowed Man (and one of my favorite reads of last spring), while highlighting treasures from the Ransom Center here in Austin, Texas. (You can watch the whole talk on YouTube.) Here are my notes:

The lamp vs. the sun

It’s been one year since Jason Polan died. I am re-reading my diary entry from August 8, 2018, the last time I saw him. It is no coincidence that seeing him made me think about seeing — he was one of the great see-ers of our generation, always looking, always seeing.

I have been practicing a lot of Debussy on the piano, and read a letter he wrote to his friend, quoted in Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise:

I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work-table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun…. I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people think! … It would be enough if music could make people listen….”

Jason’s work smelled of the sun, and if it ever smelled like a lamp, it smelled like a lamp in Taco Bell: absolutely delicious.

If you don’t know his work, watch this video, narrated by his friend, Fritz Swanson, for the new site by UNIQLO, which features a letter from Jason’s mother. Jen Bekman also wrote a remembrance at 20×200.

Then pick up a Uniball Vision Elite Bold  and a Strathmore 4×6 pad, take a walk, and draw what you see.

And be nice to people.

Drawing to remember

“Harlan Pepper, if you don’t stop naming nuts…”

I was putting together a climbing dome for my kids out in the yard a few days ago (it’s December in Texas, you can still get a sunburn outside) and there were two kinds of nuts I had to distinguish between, and I thought, “How many damned kinds of nuts are there, anyways?” Many, it turns out, so I drew a bunch of them in my diary. Now I can name nuts like Harlan Pepper.

I copied those nuts from a diagram I found on the internet, much like I copied this timeline of composers a few years ago. It’s not enough, for me, to just print out a diagram and paste it in my diary. I need to copy it by hand, slowly, to really look at it and let the information sink in. Copying is how I learn, it’s a way to understand what’s really going on, and drawing is a way of slowing down long enough to really look at something. (It’s like I said in Keep Going: “Slow down and draw things out.”)

Here’s a drawing I made when I was trying to understand the moon phases. I thought I had it figured out, until I was playing with the Sundial app on my phone and realized that, duh, when the moon is full, it’s got the full sun shining on it from the other side of the earth, so lunar noon, when it’s at its peak, is at the opposite time of day from solar noon. (I think?) Again, drawing helped me understand:

If you draw something, no matter how mundane the subject, no matter how badly, you really look at the thing, and therefore, you remember it better.

If you want to remember something, try drawing it.

How to break in a Sharpie

I signed hundreds of copies of my books at Bookpeople in the past few weeks. Because of the pandemic, we sign masked and socially distanced on the picnic tables outside:

This cart is probably, oh, 1/3 of what I signed for the holidays:

As you can imagine, I go through a lot of Sharpies. Because I’m a weirdo, I have a technique to break in new ones, which I demonstrate in this video (also on Instagram):

Happy huffing drawing.

Keep calm and make ugly art

In his latest newsletter, L.M. Sacasas writes about the “emotional roulette” of checking social media. “You never quite know what news you’ll encounter and how it will mess with you for the rest of the day.”

Worse is “doomscrolling,” the endless surfing we do “when we give ourselves over to the flood of information and allow it to wash over us.”

Whatever else one may say about doomscrolling, it seems useful to think of it as structurally induced acedia, the sleepless demon unleashed by the upward swipe of the infinite scroll (or the pulldown refresh, if you prefer). Acedia is the medieval term for the vice of listlessness, apathy, and a general incapacity to do what one ought to do; ennui is sometimes thought of as a modern variant. As we scroll, we’re flooded with information and, about the vast majority of it, we can do nothing … except to keep scrolling and posting reaction gifs. So we do, and we get sucked into a paralyzing loop that generates a sense of helplessness and despair.

In his essay about Iago in the The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, W.H. Auden makes this life-changing distinction: Instead of asking yourself, “What can I know?” ask yourself, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?”

I’m usually good at avoiding doomscrolling and the Pavlovian pull and release of refreshing Twitter (ever notice how there’s very rarely anything refreshing about refreshing?), but the election has destroyed most of my willpower. I’ve been busying my hands with The Cube and soothing my brain with the calm of collage, especially “ugly” ones like this one:

Some kind souls on Twitter said, “How do you consider this to be ugly?” The product might not end up ugly, but the process is my attempt to make ugly or “bad” art, which I think is often much more fun and more helpful than trying to make “good” art. (“Every time we make a thing, it’s a tiny triumph.”)

I’ve also been doing a lot of doodling on notepads. (In addition to all my notebooks, I keep one of these little legal pads on my desk for random notes.) Drawing  is something to do and it is part of a cure and when you draw the world becomes a little bit more beautiful. (If you need some guidance, try a blind contour drawing or my friend Wendy MacNaughton’s four drawing exercises to help with a hard day.)

Here I’ve combined collage and drawing: I ripped a picture of Abe Lincoln in half, pasted one half in my notebook, and as I was copying the second half, got the idea to make his hair shaggy… and then add a barber? Who knows where these images come from…

Something to do

I was feeling angry and despondent yesterday, and I drew these two cactus plants on our back porch and immediately felt a little bit better. (Drawing is part of a cure.)

In this video, John Green talks about drawing and productivity and thinking about time and why he’s attempting to draw 170,000 circles. My friend @craghead, one of my favorite drawers, had a great response:

I love that he talks about drawing as more than representing – as a process, as discovery, as a battery recharger…. My wife says to me – “Go draw something” and then I draw a leaf or a synth or something and I fell better. Even drawing Trump helps. We are so lucky to have drawing.

There’s an essay in Zadie Smith’s Intimations called “Something To Do,” in which she thinks about why she writes. She comes around to this very simple truth: “It’s something to do.”

Of the pandemic and lockdown, Smith writes, “The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do with it… There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”

On a recent episode of Call Your Girlfriend, however, Smith says she discovered that writing was more than a hobby — Can you imagine? Being Zadie Smith and still thinking of writing as a hobby? — it’s something she needs to do to stay alive.

I, too, am grateful to have something to do, whether it’s making a zine or drawing a cactus or writing this blog. Like Smith, I am not by my nature an activist, and so, as she puts it: “I just do the thing I can do.” The work in front of me.

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