Austin Kleon

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Drawings have the right to exist

Lynda Barry, who we’ve all known was a genius, but is now officially one, posted these images on Instagram from “The Night We All Got Sick,” the first comic in The Greatest of Marlys, with the following caption:

These are the first drawings of Marlys. I didn’t know who she was or that I was about to spend the next 30 years with her. I was just making a comic strip about cousins getting sick after a parade. I didnt know who any of them where when they first showed up that day. And I was on the fence about them, wondering should I keep this drawing or not? It scares me to think how easily I could have thrown her away on this first day because I didn’t like the way she “looked”, because the drawing didn’t please me. I believe drawings have the same right to exist as I do. I’m so glad I kept the drawing. I’m so glad I didn’t throw her out.

“I believe Maryls conjures me as much as I conjure her,” Lynda writes in the book’s introduction. “The portable between her world and mine is a pen line made by the living mystery of this hand, this hand that looks like yours.”

We create our drawings and they create us.

A bag of words

In my favorite writing book, What It Is, Lynda Barry explains how to make a “Word Bag.” A word bag is basically just a bunch of words you like that you write down and stuff in a bag and pull out randomly when you need to begin a piece of writing and you’re not sure where to start. (Here’s Lynda, taking you through the exercise.)

This is pretty much how Ray Bradbury got started, too.

INTERVIEWER

In Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas: the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton. Do you still do this?

BRADBURY

Not as much, because I just automatically generate ideas now. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.

Here’s more from Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity, about about how these “long lines of nouns,” these lists, helped him figure out who he was as a writer:

These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull… I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.

He encourages other writers that making “similar lists, dredged out of the lopsided of your brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.”

(I talk more about the magic of making lists in chapter one of Keep Going.)

A four-year-old will get you unstuck

Bob and Roberta Smith

I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.
—John Baldessari

When I talk to artists who are “stuck” I often think they should be prescribed a session with some four-year-olds. (Borrow a kid!) Four-year-olds are the most “unstuck” creatures around. To watch a four-year-old draw is to watch some kind of magic happen, magic that, even in two or three years, will not come naturally, but will need to be conjured, somehow.

Lynda Barry does this at the University of Wisconsin:

“When I came to the university… one thing that struck me was how miserable the grad students were. I thought, I wonder if I could pair them up with four-year-olds?” She started a program called Draw Bridge that did just that. “What I hoped would happen was my students would learn to borrow the kids’ state of mind and learn to approach problems in a way that was less tight and focused, a way that was happier and set the conditions for discovery.”

If you follow Lynda on Instagram, she often posts her collaborations with four-year-olds:

https://www.instagram.com/p/ByGER_QgzuS

Here’s one about drawing Batman:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxyh16rl1Ke/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

And here are some 4-year-olds doing a copying exercise:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxeFX6KDKEf/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

I’m lucky right now because I live with a four-year-old and I get to spend a lot of time with him, watching him draw. (Although, I’m telling you: it’s a lot easier to just borrow one and hand them back!) If you came to one of the Keep Going tour dates, you saw this slide of Jules drawing when he was three:

(I write more about his drawing in the “Your Work is Play” section of the book.)

This is my second time around living with a four-year-old. This one is a little more introverted than the first one. I did a lot more collaborating with the first. I remember transcribing some of his wild monologues:

He was basically an ecstatic poet!

I have two daughters that could both draw like Albrecht Durer when they were about seven years old, before the teachers got ahold of them.
—Kurt Vonnegut

I’m also reminded now of illustrator Mica Angela Hendricks and her collaborations with her 4-year-old daughter, which started out when her daughter saw her sketchbook and asked if she could draw, too. She eventually started draw unfinished heads at night so her daughter could finish them in the morning. “Do you have any heads for me today?” her daughter would ask.

Hanging out with his four-year-old niece led animator Don Hertzfeldt to some of the best parts of his absolutely incredible short, World of Tomorrow. Here’s how it went:

My niece, Winona, contributes the voice of little Emily. She was 4 when I recorded her. You can’t direct a 4-year-old, I learned that really fast. I couldn’t even get her to repeat lines for me. So I just recorded audio as we drew pictures together, played with stuff, talked about the world. I was pretty aware that if the recordings produced nothing, the film would have been dead before it even began. She lives in Scotland and I am in Austin, so I usually only get to see her about once a year. After a weeklong visit, recording five minutes here and there, I had about an hour or so of total recorded time with her. So the first step was finding all of her best reactions and questions, and I began to figure out what her character could be talking about here, or looking at there.

“You can’t direct a 4-year-old…” Truer words never spoken! All you can do is set them up and hit record. And hang on for the ride…

The page is a place

Collage by Lynda Barry

“Long ago we learned to think by using our hands, not the other way around.”
—Gary Rogowski, Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction

Lynda Barry is the artist who taught me the real value of glueing one thing to another, so I was delighted she posted some of her “weird collages” on her Instagram account.  Here is what she wrote underneath them (emphasis mine):

My weird collages help me in the time when I just don’t feel like drawing or writing. There is a strangeness in them that starts to make me want to write and draw. For me the trick is to see the page as a place rather than a thing. I’m just wandering in this place as a stranger.

This is what I do every morning in my diary: I try to think of the page as a place that I go to explore and discover what’s going on in my head. (Thinking with my hands.)

Lately, I’ve been anxious about this upcoming book tour, so I’ve been making what I call “sad teenager” collages. (Sad teenagers know what’s up!) The point of these is not to be good or clever,  just to glue scraps and bits and pieces down to the page quickly and let some kind of meaning accrue.

Here’s one from yesterday:

Here’s one from this morning:

One last thing: you’d be amazed by how autobiographical seemingly random images become when you’re doing this. That’s the magic of collage. Of cut & paste and selection: you can’t help but show your hand (and your heart and your head.)

Writing advice for artists and visual thinkers

Yesterday designer Jessica Hische tweeted, “I have it in my head that I should pursue an MFA in creative writing to be a better writer and find more space for writing in my life. Really, I should find a way to carve out time to focus on writing without paying tens of thousands of dollars to do so.”

Unsolicited, but here’s my advice for visual thinkers (and others) who want to be better writers:

1) Get Lynda Barry’s What It Is and do the exercises every day in a private notebook.

2) Start a blog and write something there every day.

3) Find or start a writer’s group. (I don’t have one, but I’m married to a fantastic writer and editor.)

4) Become a better reader. Read way more than you write.

5) I believe that the creative process translates across disciplines, so the real challenge to a visual artist who wants to write is learning to operate with words the way you do with pictures. (For example, my blackout poems started out as my attempt to write like a collage artist.)

6) Here’s cartoonist James Kochalka talking about creativity, and how if you can draw, you might be able to write, if you can write, you might be able to make music, etc.:

7) I don’t think most academic programs are set up to help creative workers make these kinds of cross-disciplinary transitions. (Some do or did exist: Carnegie Mellon, for example, used to have an information design program that helped designers learn to write and writers learn to design.)

8) One of the reasons I started the list with Lynda Barry is that she speaks of “The Image” (learned from her teacher Marilyn Frasca) — the thing that is alive in the work. If you can learn to work with The Image, it translates to any art form.

9) I should add that I went to an explicitly “interdisciplinary” college, so I was actually exposed to these ideas in an academic setting. (Lynda went to one too, Evergreen, and she is now a “Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity” at the University of Wisconsin)

10) Cartoonists, because their work demands work from two disciplines (writing/art, poetry/design, words/pictures), are highly instructive when it comes to visual people learning to write, writers learning to make art, etc. (Check out Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for more.)

11) Read a lot. Write a lot. Repeat.

The means of resistance

When asked to comment on her nomination for a Reuben award, Lynda Barry said:

Showing people how to make comics and tell their stories by drawing and writing things by hand on paper in a way that is nondigital, non-searchable, non-‘scrapeable’ or monetizable now feels like something of a revolutionary act. Being a cartoonist and being recognized as a cartoonist means more to me now than it ever has.

More from her tumblr:

Writing by hand on paper is becoming a revolutionary act.  Reading a physical book is becoming a revolutionary act.  Protecting the books in our libraries, the arts and humanities in our colleges and universities is becoming a revolutionary act. Doing things with warm hand to warm hand, face to face, without photographing them, posting them, is becoming a revolutionary act.

Those two original digital devices you have at the end of your forearms are the means of resistance.  As is eye-contact with the world instead of staring at your phone….

The most valuable thing you have is your attention.  It’s also the most valuable condition for survival of the non-digital world.

I agree with her. We need our heads, our hearts, and our hands.

Cutting and pasting the comics

One of my favorite prompts inThe Steal Like An Artist Journal asks the reader to remix a comic strip:

My son got a daily Peanuts calendar for Christmas, so for fun I’ve been taking the old pages and making collages out of them:

I like to take two or three strips and mash them up: this one has a panel from January 16, 1968, text from Jan. 10 and 13, and most of the January 12th strip:

This one is made up of a bunch of extra leftovers:

I really love how surrealistic they get when you squeeze two images of the same character into one panel:

And how just swapping a few bits of text can change a strip’s meaning completely (and make it autobiographical — this was originally about Charlie Brown waiting for his dad to get off work):

This one starts with a piece of text from some litter I found on my walk:

It’s interesting how in the process of cutting it up, you really learn a lot about Schulz’s strip: how wordy the balloons are (something Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller famously complained about), how everything belongs to one world and is easily re-arranged and re-combined. Heck, even the characters can be spliced into each other: here’s Charlie Brown with Linus’s hair:

It seems like this kind of thing would be a great exercise for the classroom. I’ve done a variation in workshops in which participants take single panel cartoons from the comics section and swap the captions, like this example in Gary Larson’s The Prehistory of the Far Side:

The Far Side and Dennis the Menace used to be side by side in the Dayton Daily News. One day, back in August of 1981, someone “accidentally” switched their captions. What’s most embarrassing about this is how immensely improved both cartoons turned out to be.

Here’s a Lynda Barry caption from One! Hundred! Demons! pasted on top of Charles Burns’ “The Smell of Shallow Graves” (both reprinted in this NYTimes article):

Remember your heroes

This is one of my favorite pages from the new 2018 calendar. (You may recognize it from the journal, too.)

I’ve always kept pictures of my heroes above my desk to keep watch over me, like guardian spirits, to remind me who I want to be. These days they help me remember who I wanted to be when I first got started.

Man, there are so many things to push you off your path. Maybe you get a taste of success and say, “Oh, well now it’s time to get serious.” Or maybe you fall into a career you didn’t plan on. Maybe people start lumping you in with some contemporaries you never asked to be lumped in with. Maybe somebody dangles some easy-looking money at you. In my experience, at some point you will wonder what the heck you’re doing and what you should do next.

Your heroes can help. Much depends, of course, on the quality of one’s heroes, but looking to them can help you get re-aligned with yourself. Sometimes it’s a stern look to say, “Stop f***ing this up.” Sometimes it’s a wink, to say “keep going, baby.” (Some of them you need at eye level, which is why I have Queen Lynda keeping watch over my writing desk.)

One of my favorite writer/directors, Billy Wilder, he kept a sign in his office that reminded him of his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch, “How would Lubitsch do it?”

(The Paris Review asked him, “Well, how did he do it?” and part of Wilder’s answer was: “It’s funny, but we noticed that whenever he came up with an idea, I mean a really great idea, it was after he came out of the can. I started to suspect that he had a little ghostwriter in the bowl of the toilet there.”)

Anyways. Remember your heroes. They can help.

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