Austin Kleon and His New Book, Don’t Call it Art (Ep. 521)

On this week’s Art Ed Radio, host Tim Bogatz sits down with bestselling author Austin Kleon! Austin is a writer, artist, and creative thinker behind Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going, and his brand-new book, Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again, is out now. In this episode, Austin unpacks his deceptively simple “algebraic equation” for unlocking creative play (time + space + materials = play) and explains why losing even one of those elements is enough to make any artist feel stuck. He and Tim also explore how to fight perfectionism, why copying is actually a natural and powerful stage of creative development, and how blind contour drawings, printmaking, and collaboration can all serve as tools to silence your inner critic.

For art teachers heading into summer, this conversation is essential listening. Austin and Tim discuss the power of becoming a “curious elder”, approaching what your students love with genuine curiosity, not judgment, and why that openness can unlock new ideas in your own practice. Austin also shares thequestion he believes every creative person should ask themselves, makes the case for 15-minute daily habits over long uninterrupted blocks of time, and offers practical, liberating advice for teachers who want to reconnect with the artist inside them.

Full episode transcript below.

Resources and Links

• Check out AustinKleon.com and his Free Friday Newsletter
• Learn more about the new book, Don’t Call It Art
• Tiny Acts, Big Impacts: The Power of Creative Play for Art Teachers
• Dear Art Teacher, You Deserve to Be the Artist Too!
• 4 Summer Books to Help Art Teachers Fuel Their Creative Process
• Four Ways to Steal Like an Art Teacher
• Come join the Art of Ed Community!

Transcript

Timothy Bogatz: Austin Kleon is joining me now. Austin, thanks for coming on. How are you?

Austin Kleon: Hey Tim, I’m well. I’m happy to see you.

Timothy Bogatz: Yeah, it’s good to see you again. For those of you unfamiliar, which I think is very few people, I would love for you Austin to give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do. And most importantly, tell us about your new book that was just released last week.

Austin Kleon: Okay, so I call myself a writer who draws. I make art with words and books with pictures. And I am best known for this book called Steal Like an Artist, which came out like 14 years ago. And it kind of led to this whole series of books about how to be more creative in the digital age. So I have a book called Show Your Work. I have a book called Keep Going. And then I have a new book in the series that’s coming out now, which is called Don’t Call It Art.

And my other books were written for — I don’t know, the other books had — the last book of mine had a little bit of my kids’ work in it, but this is a book that’s completely inspired by me being around my kids when they were about four or five. I think that four-year-olds are natural artists, natural scientists, natural creative people. And getting to be around two of them kind of gave me a good kick in the pants when I needed it. And so I wanted to bottle that sensation and that energy of being around them when they were that age. And so that’s what the book is supposed to do for the reader. It’s kind of like, how can we give ourselves the love and care that the creative kid inside of us needs so they can come out and play, basically?

Timothy Bogatz: Yeah, I love that. And I just finished reading it. Loved it, by the way. And there are so many lessons, I think, that we can draw from it, so much inspiration I took from it. And I guess one of the big things I wanted to ask you about — one of your chapters — is about giving yourself time and space and materials, and just the idea that we inherently have that creative play inside of us. If we can go back to our four-year-old selves and kind of tap into that, but we also need to give ourselves time to do that, space to do that, and give ourselves the materials as well. Can you just talk a little bit more about those things and why they’re so important for us to tap into our creativity?

Austin Kleon: I think they form a kind of algebraic equation. I know we’re talking about art, but I think there’s a kind of math equation at work where it’s time plus space plus materials equals play, which is the work of the kid and the work of the artist. Trouble begins when one of those elements is taken away or it’s reduced somehow.

So if you have space and you have materials, but you don’t make any time to go there, you’re in trouble. If you have time and you have materials, but you have nowhere to work, well, that’s difficult, right? And if you have space and time, but no materials, you don’t have anything to play with. So I think a lot of times when we’re kind of bottomed out with our work, one of the things we can do is kind of run ourselves through that equation and ask, do I have the right amount of these things? And material — when I’m talking about materials — those are like toys, you know, those are like our pen and paper, that’s scissors and magazines, that’s whatever — paint and canvas, whatever it is that we use to do our stuff. But it can also be like material in the sense of like a comedian or a writer gathering material, you know, like the stuff of life. And so I think that this just is an equation. Like if you’re having trouble in your work, I think there’s a way to kind of do an audit where you’re kind of like, am I giving myself enough time? Am I giving myself enough space? And do I have some fun materials?

And I think fun is really a really important thing with materials because materials don’t have to be fancy. They don’t have to be like really high end, but what they do need to do is they need to speak to us in some ways. This is something that I think a lot of people misunderstand about doing creative work — that sometimes the material tells us what it wants to be. And I think that textile artists, potters, people who really work with physical materials know this, that cardboard wants to do something different than clay and wool wants to do something different than silk, that kind of thing. But I think we can learn from those tactile artists even in terms of writing. So I think that was what I really learned with my kids — that you kind of have to have all those elements together.

Timothy Bogatz: Right. Right. And another thing that I wanted to ask you about, just kind of along with materials but also moving past that too, is just — you know, when we’re working with different things, we want to do things in the right way or use the materials in the right way. And another thing you talk about in the book is, when you’re four, you don’t worry about making things perfect. And eventually, as we get older — and as art teachers, you know, we see this all the time in our kids — that kids feel like things need to be perfect or they at least need to be right. And I’m just curious about what advice you have, either for teachers who are creating their own art or teachers who are working with students, about getting past perfectionism and getting past that fear of making mistakes.

Austin Kleon: Well, I think one thing to do is to focus on quantity instead of quality. There’s a parable in the book Art and Fear that I love. It’s about a pottery class and the teacher comes in and says, hey, half of the class is going to be graded on how many pots you make, and the other part of the class is going to be graded on the perfect specimen. And as the parable goes, all the best pots were thrown by the people who were in the quantity group — the ones that were making a bunch of pots versus the ones that were trying to get the perfect one. So I think working in volume is really great. Instead of like, come to me with one poem tomorrow, bring me 10 poems that you made in five minutes. And then maybe we can tear those apart and make a whole poem out of it, you know, that kind of thing.

Like in the studio here, I get myself in that mindset because I love printmaking. And so printmaking is a great way to just like, let’s make a bunch of the same image. Let’s not worry about whether we get the perfect pull. Let’s just be fast and quick. And then let’s see what mistakes we make that we can actually use later. Because one of the things I’ve learned from printmaking is it’s usually when I’m trying to use up the last of my ink and then maybe I run out of paper and I’m trying to find some weird material — that’s when something happens where I discover something that I should have known when I first set out. So I think focusing on quantity versus quality, making a lot of work, and using time constraints in particular. Time is a really interesting constraint — to say, hey, make as many things as you can in 10 minutes. And then you don’t have time to worry about it.

Timothy Bogatz: Right. I like that a lot. And I think those constraints can be really helpful because then you’re not able to focus on making everything perfect. You’re way more focused on — I have 15 minutes left, I got to get this done. I think that’s a good mindset shift.

Austin Kleon: Yeah. I think another thing I learned from my kids is how much they like to collaborate. At one point they were kind of drawing together, or we would draw together, and we learned that if we would kind of have like a factory system going — I think collaboration is a good way to get out of your perfectionist zone too. Just be like, hey, we’ve got five minutes, you need to do this piece. And then you’re going to turn and give your piece to the person next to you and they’re going to add the next color, that kind of thing — bringing in collaboration, using time constraints, that kind of thing. Just so the individual doesn’t feel like it’s all on them to come up with this like perfect, beautiful thing.

Timothy Bogatz: Yeah, no, that’s really good advice. I’m just thinking about how that applies to the classroom and all the different ways that we can do that. I think that’s definitely something that teachers can run with.

Austin Kleon: Yeah. Someone who’s a big hero of mine is Lynda Barry, and anyone who is listening — if you’re not aware of Lynda’s work, I think the stuff that Lynda does in the classroom has been really, really influential on me in my own studio, but also with my kids. I do a lot of the same drawing exercises and stuff like that. So one of my favorite things to do personally, as a drawer, is I love doing blind contour drawings. I love to draw without looking at the paper. That’s one way that I get out of my perfectionist zone. I was just at a music show the other night and I was doing blind drawings because I get bored after a while — but it is something that really gets you out of that perfectionist mode. And I think when you learn it, so much is about tricking yourself and your body into learning what it feels like to be free, and to make a mark that is true and honest. Especially with drawing, there’s a thing where you can kind of tell when you’re faking a drawing, when you’re not really looking, when you’re not really laying down the right line. It happens in writing too. When you put down a sentence and you’re like, I don’t really believe that sentence, this isn’t really coming out right.

And so I think for the people who are listening — all art forms kind of mix together in my head, and that’s one reason I like to do a lot of different things. I find that one form talks to the other. And so I think another thing that would be really helpful in schools is to do cross-disciplinary work — I know this is hard to coordinate — but to bring writing class into art class, bring art class into writing class and vice versa.

Timothy Bogatz: No, I think those are great ideas. Yeah, there are definitely challenges, but that’s something that teachers have been doing or trying to do for a long time. So I think the framework is there. Another thing that I was reading and wanted to ask you about was the idea that, as far as your creative output — if you’re struggling, if you’re not creating, not coming up with ideas — the lack of output is likely a lack of input. And you’re talking about how we need to be reading, consuming, just interacting with other ideas. So can you talk about the importance of that, but also maybe give some advice on where you find inspiration or where people can look for inspiration?

Austin Kleon: Yeah, so this is really what the Steal Like an Artist book was about. The interesting thing about the kids is they did everything I wrote about in Steal Like an Artist naturally — I didn’t have to teach them about it. So that was what was so weird — my kids would look at something and they would immediately be like, I want to copy that thing. So they would watch SpongeBob and then they’d want to draw SpongeBob. And then they’d just draw SpongeBob a million times. And then they were like, what if we draw ourselves as SpongeBob? Okay, cool. Now we’re characters. And then it’s like, well, wait — what if we did our own version of SpongeBob? And suddenly it was like a parody of SpongeBob. And then eventually they kind of came up with their own thing. So they just kind of did this naturally. Kids are natural copy machines. And so what they kind of taught me is that this is the natural progression of things. You fall in love with something that you just can’t get enough of, and then you want to copy it yourself because you want to learn how it works. And then it’s suddenly not enough. You’re like, I want to go further. And so I think it almost goes from copying to parody to discovering your own thing.

I actually think in the classroom, copying and parodying could be used to a tremendous advantage. A lot of times in school, we talk about copying being bad and plagiarism and that kind of thing. But if you really think about the way that people used to be taught, especially with art — you would learn how to paint by copying old masters and old drawings and stuff.

Timothy Bogatz: Oh yeah, that’s part of the classical training, you know — take your canvas to the museum and yeah.

Austin Kleon: Yeah, exactly. But what was just so interesting to me is that my kids did that without me teaching them how to do it. Like everyone’s kind of tuned to do this. It’s just that you were told at a certain point that copying is bad, or you should come up with your own things, or you shouldn’t copy other people’s drawings. And so I do think a lot of the book is — kids, four-year-olds have this kind of internal authority that they lose at a certain point. The people who don’t lose it stay artists. But there’s this kind of internal authority that four-year-olds have that I think all adults could really learn from and get addicted to, which is: I have the permission to notice what I notice, and I have the permission to do things just as much as the person next to me or the person on stage or the person who I’m looking at in a magazine. And kids — they see someone doing something and think, I could do that. You know what I mean? There’s a great line in the book by this painter named Sam Messer and he says, people come up to me and say, well, my kid could do that. And he turns around and says, yeah, but you couldn’t.

Because kids have that authority, they have that confidence because they haven’t had it beaten out of them yet. And so I think that’s something that we want for all our students and in ourselves — to capture this kind of inner authority, this inner sense that we can do this too. That we’re not better than anybody else, but we’re just as good as anyone else. And if there’s something we want to do, we can do it.

One of my favorite books about writing is called Several Short Sentences on Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. And one of the things he says in that book is — and he teaches writing — who will give you the authority to know that what you notice is worth noticing and worth putting in your work? He says, it has to be you. You have to be the one giving you authority. But I think some of us need — that’s what a good classroom does. I think that’s what a good teacher does. I think that’s what a good book does — it gives you the authority. It gives you the permission. Hey, you can do this too. That’s why I always loved Ed Emberley’s books, because Ed Emberley’s books are such invitations for kids to make stuff, to make their own world. And I thought a lot about Ed Emberley when I was making this book because I learned so much from him.

And the spirit of his books is like, you can do this too. And it’s not a touchy-feely thing either. It’s not just a cutesy kid thing. Like, this is what punk rock is about too. It’s like, we’re up on stage, we suck — why don’t you get up on stage and suck too? That’s kind of the thing about punk rock — we don’t need to be good, we just need to have something to say. And my kids were punks. My kids had that punk spirit right out of the gates, and it was so infectious. It made me want that for myself. I wanted to steal it from them.

Timothy Bogatz: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that actually kind of segues into the next thing I want to talk about, because I think we can learn so much from kids and the way they do things. And you have a chapter in the book toward the end about being a curious elder. And that really spoke to me as a teacher, because as I was teaching high school kids, a lot of times our interests were aligned, but as I got older, I noticed that we were definitely separating and the things the kids like are not things I understand — they’re not things made for me. But you talk about how we need to kind of retain that curiosity when we’re working with kids, when we’re seeing what inspires them and trying to keep in touch with that. And that can really help our own creative approach too. And that really spoke to me as an older teacher and as a parent of teenagers. Can you just expand on that a little bit and talk about the importance of keeping that curiosity as we get older?

Austin Kleon: Yeah, I mean, it was something I had to develop for myself as a parent because my kids would just be into stuff that I just did not understand. Like, for example, my kids would love watching — and every parent just rolls their eyes at this — my kids would love watching other kids play Minecraft on YouTube. And I was just like, why would you sit here and watch another kid play video games?

So one day I literally made myself — I was like, I’m not going to sit down here and watch this with you, this is a waste of my life, whatever. But one day I was like, you know what, I want to know what this is. Let me sit down and watch. And I was watching and I was sitting on the couch with my kids, watching this video, this dude — and they, you know, it’s always some goofball who’s got a narration — and you’re watching and you’re like, okay, we’re watching someone else play a game. And there’s some goofball that’s narrating and chit-chatting the whole time. We’re sitting here on the couch with snacks. And I just suddenly was transported back in time to sitting on the couch with my uncles watching football. And I realized suddenly this is nothing different than sitting down and watching sports. But there’s an essential difference — if you watch Peyton Manning or whoever throw a touchdown, it’s not like you could go right out in your backyard and throw a touchdown. But if you watch someone build something in Minecraft, you can go right away from the screen, sit down, and do something with it. And I had this moment where I was kind of glitching out — and the only way I came to that was because I forced myself to be curious.

And you can’t ask kids directly why they love something, because a lot of times kids don’t know. They don’t know why they like something. And that’s a whole other topic — when we take kids to a museum, they have to be able to tell us why they like something. It’s not enough to take them and just say, hey, pick a piece that you like. Then you have to write an essay about it. You have to tell us in words what — even though so much of art is nonverbal — you know, I don’t know, I just liked this thing.

But to get back to the curious elder thing — now, did I sit down and watch Minecraft videos all the time? No. But I started thinking about short-form video content. I started thinking about YouTube and I thought, I’ll bet there are people that would watch me make a print or draw a snail or whatever it is. So just hanging out with my kids and watching Minecraft videos, suddenly I felt like I had something I could actually use for my own work. It was literally just because I forced myself to be curious. And I think that’s the thing — some of us are more naturally curious than others, but curiosity is something that you can fake long enough until you make it. Like, you can choose to be curious about things, even if you’re not naturally feeling it.

So with kids, I think the big thing about being a curious elder for me is: you just assume that the kids are all right. Like, “the kids are all right” is not an observation. It’s not a Who song. It is literally something you just choose to believe. And then you go forward from that and you assume that there’s something to what they were doing.

Now, I love the whole six-seven phenomenon. This feels like old news now, but I was right in the middle of it. And I loved how Dada it was — as an art person, I’m thinking, this is Dada, this is nonsensical. And this is kids having a little bit of like — they have this weird power, because suddenly they have this thing that adults don’t understand. They have this internal language that they own, that the people in authority over them don’t have. I found that really fun.

I think that with teenagers — you know this — but teenagers are really interesting because they hate you, but they need you all the time. That’s a very interesting tension: I hate you, but I need you to be there all the time. But I also think that teenagers are so great because they destroy you completely in the sense that they pierce right through every armor that you’ve built up to be an adult in the world and to move comfortably and get through life. They see right through it and they can see you for what you are, which is just a fool trying to get along in life. And so I think that is why people are so threatened by teenagers. But if you can also use that as a great reminder — I think that midlife and being around my teenagers has reminded me: hey, what did you want when you were a teenager? What were you like before all this happened to you? That’s why I think four-year-olds are fun too, because they really put you back in touch with what it was like when you were a kid. One of my favorite questions is from Carl Jung, and he said: what did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? And that’s one of the key questions of this book that I really want readers to think about. What did you do as a kid that just made time fly by — time wasn’t even around? What do you do now that’s like that? How can you do that more in your life?

Timothy Bogatz: Okay, so that idea actually leads me to my last question for you — just advice for people, for teachers here. We’re going into the summer and we might actually have time and space and materials to create. So what is your advice for people who have maybe lost touch with their creativity, or are just looking for more time to create or make art? Where should they get started? What kind of things do you think they should do over the summer when we have a little bit more time?

Austin Kleon: I think you should do something that seems completely unrelated to what you do all year. I think the furthest away from school you can get is good, because that will fill you back up. So if you have a hobby — and I wouldn’t stop at that — the other thing that I think is really important, especially for art teachers or people that teach creative stuff: you don’t have to practice art necessarily. I find that riding my bike is just as energizing. It gives me just as much energy as being in the studio for hours on end. So one thing I would say is, if there’s a hobby that you haven’t had time to play with, use the summer for that, and for relaxation, and for exercise. Because I think all of this stuff can heal us just as much as doing creative work.

But I also think — the problem with teaching is you don’t have a lot of time to do your own stuff. And so I personally am a person who thinks that long blocks of time aren’t as helpful as little repeated chunks of time. I believe in frequency a little more than mass volume. Like, if you can just give yourself 15 minutes a day to make your little play place, go there for 15 minutes a day and just see what happens — I have a feeling that if you can create that kind of creative habit, as Twyla Tharp calls it, over the summer, you could bring that into your school year. Because if you can find 15 minutes a day during the summer, you could probably carve away 15 minutes during the school year. And that doesn’t sound like much, but 15 minutes over the course of a week, over the course of a month, over the course of the year — and you might have to work in miniature, you might have to change your idea of what your output is, but I think that frequency and daily habit is just so much more powerful, at least in my life, than having like three weeks to paint or whatever it is.

So yeah — playtime. Summer should be playtime. It should be a kind of unschooling. What are the things you can’t get away from? And this is the other big thing I learned from my kids: kids are the most creative when they’re supposed to be doing something else. That’s when kids are the most creative. I also think that’s when adults are the most creative too, because I’ll tell you — there is nothing like having something you’re supposed to do to make other things get done. Like, when I have to write something, everything else gets done. If you want something done, hire a writer who has to write.

But just today, like this morning, before we talked, I was like, I have so many things to do — I have all these interviews, all these emails to answer. And I shoved all that aside for 30 minutes and literally made a stamp. I just sat there and made a little stamp with my hands. And that allowed me to show up then later. I felt better after doing that. And now we’ve had this nice conversation. So you’ve got to have playtime, because — Stuart Brown has this great line: the opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression. You have to find time to play and to get in touch with that playful spirit in everyday life. And summer’s the best time to do it.

Timothy Bogatz: Yeah. Absolutely it is. All right, Austin, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Loved every minute of the conversation. Before you go, can you tell everybody the best place to find your book?

Austin Kleon: Yeah, the best thing to do is to go to AustinKleon.com — just my name — and you’ll find links to everything there. You’ll find links to my books. Some of you might really like my free Friday newsletter. I put that out every Friday. I share a list of 10 things that I think are worth sharing. There are hundreds of thousands of people who read that thing and we have a lot of fun with it. So I would love it if you would join us. And the book can be found wherever you’d like to buy books. Don’t Call It Art.

Timothy Bogatz: All right, sounds good, Austin. Thank you so much.

Austin Kleon: Thank you Tim, this was really fun and it’s good to see you again.

Timothy Bogatz: You too, thanks.