austinkleon:

ArtWork: Seeing Inside the Creative Process

Art Work reveals the artistic notetaking habits of an astonishing range of artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, and other creators by granting rare access to the journal pages and other visual materials they use to capture and foster their work.

From Sasha Frere-Jones’ forward:

As artists, we often prefer the note to the final product; it is an object that is ours alone, free of explanatory fuss and ornament. A mundane list next to three pages of earnestly revised text—shouldn’t we have published it just like that?

From Ivan Vartanian’s introduction, the distinction between journal and notebook:

Where the journal is meant to serve as a daily (or intermittent) record of observations and reflections on a life and its experiences, the notebook is meant as a place of work—for solving problems, jotting an idea, figuring a sequence, determining a position, shaping a phrase. Where the journal documents the life of its owner, the notebook documents the life of an artwork or artistic process.

Here’s Tony Kushner, talking about writing by hand:

Most of my best ideas have not been things that I knew I had in my head. I’ve been surprised by them…and it’s always the case that if you just start moving words around on a piece of paper…if you start limbering up your fingers and get going, you will find your way in.

And Richard Hell:

Notebooks, it seems to me sometimes, are the ultimate art form… Notebooks might be as good as art gets in our time.

(images via grain edit)

aidanwaiting:

lkjvd;lkfjd;lakfja