And then, he gave a talk outlining 10 things he wished he had known when he was younger, dubbed “Steal Like an Artist.” It went viral, and launched Kleon’s career as we know it today-the sage of word and image, author of the subsequent books Steal Like an Artist Show Your Work! and his latest, Keep Going, which Kleon says he wrote because he needed to read it. As he told The Great Discontent, “I was trying to explain what the book was like, so I took out a piece of notebook paper and drew a map of London as I drew, I said, ‘Here is what happens when the characters are in these parts of London, and this is how the narrative maps.’ It was a really crude map, but my professor looked at it and said, ‘This is better than anything you’ve turned in for me.’ That crummy map was better than any of the writing I had done! I knew that I had to bring drawing back into my life, so I bought a sketchbook and started drawing again.”Īfter graduating from Miami University, Kleon began making poems by redacting lines of text in the newspaper-leading to his first book, Newspaper Blackout. Austin Kleon exists at the brilliant intersection of word and image-but as a schoolkid in the small town of Circleville, Ohio, the two were neatly torn into “art” and “English.” It stayed that way for Kleon until he had an epiphany while studying a Charles Dickens novel at Cambridge University.
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