'In the digital age, don't forget to use your digits'

'While I love my computer, I think computers have robbed us of the feeling that we're actually making things.... Just watch someone at their computer. They're so still, so immobile. You don't need a scientific study (of which there are a few) to tell you that sitting in front of a computer is killing you, and killing your work. We need to move, to feel like we're making something with our bodies, not just with our heads.

Work that only comes from the head isn't any good. Watch a great musician play a show. Watch a great leader give a speech. You'll see what I mean.

You need to find a way to bring your body into your work. Our nerves aren't a one-way street - our bodies can tell our brains as much as our brains tell our bodies. You know the phrase 'going through the motions'? That's what's so great about creative work: if we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motions kickstarts our brain into thinking.'

Austin Kleon

When I got a new phone and realised I could make images on it, I did a couple of drawings.

I found it very exciting, and I love what filters can do to my images, I use them all the time.

But somehow I've never really moved to working directly onto a screen. There's something about marks made with my hand that I find more intriguing.

Once the marks are there, the computer can add amazing riches.

Austin Kleon would say that this is a form of editing. For me it's more than that, the computer adds an additional layer of creative possibility. But it's true that the original idea is always created with my hands, onto paper or canvas.

'It wasn't till I started bringing analog tools back into my process that making things became fun again and my work started to improve. For my first book, Newspaper Blackout, I tried to make the process as hands on as possible. Every poem in that book was made with a newspaper article and a permanent marker. The process engaged most of my senses: the feel of newsprint in my hands, the sight of words disappearing under my lines, the faint squeak of the marker tip, the smell of the marker fumes - there was a kind of magic happening. When I was making the poems, it didn't feel like work. It felt like play.

The computer is really good for editing your ideas, and it's really good for getting your ideas ready for publishing out into the world, but it's not really good for generating ideas...

That's how the book was made - hands first, then computer, then hands, then computer. A kind of analog-to-digital loop.

That's how I try to do all my work now. I have two desks in my office - one is 'analog' and one is 'digital'. The analog desk has nothing but markers, pens, pencils, paper, index cards and newspaper. Nothing electronic is allowed on that desk. That's where most of my work is born, and all over the desk are physical traces, scraps, and residues from my process... The digital desk has my laptop, my monitor, my scanner, and my drawing tablet. This is where I edit and publish my work.

Try it: If you have the space, set up two workstations, one analog, and one digital. For your analog station, keep out anything electronic. Take $10, go to the school supply aisle of your local store, and pick up some paper, pens, and sticky notes. When you get back to your analog station, pretend it's craft time. Scribble on paper, cut it up, and tape the pieces back together. Stand up while your working. Pin things on the walls and look for patterns. When you start to lose steam, head back to the analog station and start to play'.

Austin Kleon

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'There's something immanent in the work but the circle is only completed by the viewer'

Anish Kapoor in conversation with John Tusa.


JT The moment you mention Barnett Newman I immediately think of his series 'The Stations of the Cross', which after all that is very strong subject matter. So how does this distinction between content and subject matter work out in the case of a series like that?



AK The important thing there is to look at the work. On the face of it you are absolutely right. The moment that you are, as we all had the opportunity recently to do, in front of those works, they seemingly have nothing to do with the Stations of the Cross. They are a series of black and white canvases with "zips": - these areas without colour, without painting; nothing to do with the Stations of the Cross other than that he has very carefully made the title part of the content. It's as if the words then act as another form in the process of looking. So therefore one has to ask oneself the question about where this content arises. Is it about whether the content is resident in the viewer, or whether it is resident in the work? Now that's a subtle yet very clear manipulation of the act of looking.



JT If it wasn't in the work though, you can't always invest what you take to it can you? There has to be something immanent in the work.



AK Precisely. There's something immanent in the work but the circle is only completed by the viewer. Now that's a very different position from a work with a subject matter, where the work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint.



JT It tells a story, you recognise that story, you tell it back!



AK But here is an incomplete circle which says "come and be involved. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story!": I believe that that's a complete kind of re-invention of the idea of art.

Anish Kapoor

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'making your unknown known is the important thing'

the echo box of the cosmos

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a private sketchbook

A thing that helped me a great deal over this period was the decision to start working in a series of private sketchbooks. I needed somewhere to experiment that I knew only I had access to. Somewhere to make images that didn't always have the unconscious intention of being a step on the way to somewhere, or a breakthrough, or the thing I was waiting for. Somewhere to just play with the things that interested me.

And then one morning, very quietly, while I was looking the other way, the dancers came through.

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make the paintings you want to look at

'My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist'

Brian Eno

'The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use - do the work you want to see done.

Austin Kleon

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'Examine where you fall short'. Or not.

 'So, copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short. What's in there that makes you different? That's what you should amplify and transform into your own work.'

Austin Kleon

Actually that wouldn't work for me. If I started looking for 'what made me different' I would go up into my head again and lose whatever comes through working.

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'Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We learn by copying'

'Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.

We're talking about practice here, not plagiarism... copying is about reverse-engineering. It's like taking apart a car to see how it works.... We learnt to write by copying down the alphabet. Musicians learn to play by practising scales.... Remember: Even the Beatles started out as a cover band

First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.

The songwriter Nick Lowe says, 'You start out by rewriting your hero's catalogue. And you don't just steal from one of your heroes, you steal from all of them.... If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism. If you copy from many, it's research.

What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes. The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds.

A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.'

Austin Kleon 

I had no idea that this was how it worked. I knew I had to 'do something' with what I felt when I looked at these images, but I no idea how to start, or why. I knew I didn't want to just copy them, but I couldn't think how else to start.

So I started.

I was totally frustrated. What am I doing, just copying these images?

After a while, I started to notice something. As I was drawing I was asking myself, how do these bits of stone manage to feel so alive? The answer was the tribhanga; a principle of Indian aesthetics which is the three planes that make up a figure with its weight on one leg, the hip jutting out.

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