A collage from a few weeks ago. My six-year-old liked it so much he demanded it for one of his albums.
A reader mentioned that the piece reminded them of Jack Kirby’s collage work:
Filed under: Sunday collage
A collage from a few weeks ago. My six-year-old liked it so much he demanded it for one of his albums.
A reader mentioned that the piece reminded them of Jack Kirby’s collage work:
Filed under: Sunday collage
The cruel irony of book tour is that I go around talking about creativity when I myself am at my least creative. Tour leaves me underslept and exhausted, bereft of any kind of reliable routine or workspace, barely able to concentrate on a book… pretty much the opposite condition of the one I need to be in to sustain any kind of decent work.
Here’s musician Brian Eno on why he quit touring:
I noticed that touring — which is wonderful in some ways — is absolutely confining in other ways. It’s so difficult… you just can’t think about anything else. You try your hardest: You take books with you and word processors, and you’re definitely going to do something with the time. And you never do. It’s so easy for it to become your exclusive life, this one and a half hours every evening that you play. And I just thought, “I’m losing touch with what I really like doing.” What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that. I think you could probably sum up nearly everything I’ve done under that umbrella. Understanding something that’s happening in painting, say, and then seeing how that applies to music. Or understanding something that’s happening in experimental music and seeing what that could be like if you used it as a base for popular music. It’s a research job, a lot of it. You spend a lot of time sitting around, fiddling around with things, quite undramatically, and finally something clicks into place and you think, ”Oh, thats really worth doing.” The time spent researching is a big part of it. I never imagined a pop star life that would’ve permitted that.
How wonderful it is, now, to be off the road, and back home, not just isolated in my bliss station, but surrounded by my favorite artists, my boys, six and four, who are churning out all sorts of wild work all day.
(Above: Owen photoshopping an album cover. Below: Jules’ comic of the Three Little Pigs.)
I love these two dinosaur skeletons the six-year-old drew at the museum yesterday…
It’s pretty damned inspiring to wake up in the morning and there’s your six-year-old already at the hotel room desk hard at work.
One of my favorite little art books to show the kids is photographer Inge Morath’s Saul Steinberg Masquerade, a collection of portraits of people wearing Steinberg’s paper-bag masks. (More from the book here.)
Here’s a mask Owen and I made when he was pretty small out of a Trader Joe’s bag:
Steinberg also made these funny little single sheet masks with just a spot for your nose. I’ll make one sometimes if we’re goofing around:
My pal Wendy is a big Steinberg geek, too — here she is entertaining Jules with a napkin a year ago in San Francisco:
The other day I reminded Owen of the book’s existence, and the next morning he surprised me in the bathroom:
Never gets old.
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