Steal Like an Artist

It might seem silly to give this five stars, but it's absolutely brilliant and fun in its simplicity, a great “right before bed” read that gives you plenty to think about for at least a couple weeks and can be read and re-read time and again for continued inspiration. I look forward to reading his other books.

Honestly, I'd struggle to give this less than 4 stars anyway, but it's such a quick read that it would feel silly. Less than an hour for a quick one-two punch of inspirtation? Yes, please!

This is full of little bits of advice that Austin Kleon has collected (read: stolen lmao) over the years. Will I use all of his advice? Absolutley not! I live in a studio apartment! I can't have two desks!

But I will start doing the daily log. I'd like to start a swipe file. I'm about to go find a really nice email an old professor wrote to me and put it in my rainy day folder. In a few months/years/decades I might read this again and see what new tips I can glean from it. I'm so excited!

Probably more suited to artists/writers who are at the start of taking their creative lives more seriously, this book nevertheless contains good advice on how to “steal like an artist” ie, how to have the right mindset to create art without ending up an impoverished, half-crazed artist locked in a cockroach-infested attic room. Okay, I jest, but it's close enough.

I enjoyed this quick easy read. It was short and jam packed full of useful advice. There were some platitudes, but there were also many practical suggestions on how to improve your personal creative process. I respect advice more wrhen the author acknowledges that people are different and not ago the advice will apply to everyone. Kleon did just that. Not everything he suggested would work for me, but there were enough good nuggets for 5 stars.

Til alle litteratursnobber og filosofiske weltschmertzkonnosører der ute: Styr unna, for dette er banalt.
Jeg har nok av uleste bøker hjemme i bokhylla, men på flyplasser prøver jeg likevel å finne litteratur med så lave sidetall og så stor skrift at jeg skal klare å lese de ferdig i løpet av en to-timers reise fra Oslo til Stavanger.
Steal like an Artist passet perfekt til dette, og ga meg samtidig ti gode råd for hvordan jeg skal kunne bli mer kreativ på veien. Banalt? Ja, veldig? Nyttig, ja enda mer. Jeg tror faktiks jeg skal lage et lite sammendrag av boken og bruke den som en skisse til temaet “kreativitet” i mine egne timer. Det er jo tross alt det forfatteren ber meg om å gjøre: Stjæle som en kunstner.

Det er ikke mulig å finne mye dybde i slike bøker, men jeg sakset med meg et par sitater som jeg syns var verd hele boken alene:

“There's only one rule I know of: You've got to be kind!” Sitatet er stjælt fra forfatteren (Kleon) fra Kurt Vonnegut.

Og:

“If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.”

Og så videre. Plukk opp boka hvis du vil bli litt mer kreativ.

3.5

mmmmh..

I like it but didn't actually love it like everyone else...
Sure, the book presents a great pov and a “resumé” of good ideas and tips to develop yourself, and turn your creative dream into a goal, in a realistic way - like keep a real job, you have bills to pay and while you are doing it, develop your creative self. And it's funny how the author sounds like a good, regular and pretty common guy.

Also, it is indeed a good guide, with tons of good expressions, and a light text list to follow and launch your creative life.

Very simple ideas, very clear in how to apply them, very practical and completely brilliant. It feels like a book he sat down and wrote in one afternoon or one weekend in that it's easy to read, it doesn't wander or go around in circles, it makes it's point quick and concisely and moves on to the next. But at the same time, it still feels like a super-condensed package of real experiences. I love it!

The first thought about the book when I saw the cover was that it must be read and quickly, saddly it wasn't until a few days back when it was possible for me to get it. While reading it I found my self agreeing to most to it to not say all of it. Is beautiful to the point that I started today and finished an hour later, chuckled and actually responded to the book, full with quotes that make you think about the way you have lived and if you're really looking to wake your “creative” side then this is the book for you. Adore this book! helpful like you wouldn't believe.
I'm getting my log book and notebook right now.

Post-it grade inspiration statements to help give you a bit of a boost. Not super in-depth or deep but entertaining and pleasant with the right amount of can-do spirit.

Concerned that there's not enough substantive discussion on how learning from other artist's can help inspire without being plagirism or laziness especially in today's age of endless resampling and repetitiveness.

But I walked away from reading it with the same sense of enthusiasm that I get from a TEDTalk. Uplifted and enthusiastic about getting back to work.

Like Show Your Work, Steal Like an Artist is a lovely, super-short collection of aphorisms and quotes about creativity and inspiration that never quite crosses the line of ‘cloying'. Some great practical advice. I can see myself hitting this up for a quick dose of inspiration when I'm feeling creatively flat.

Steal Like an Artist, although it's a relatively short book, packs a lot of information and insight into it. The chapters are divided into smaller sections–almost like bullet points–to keep things succinct and to the point, and because of that, the book felt like a fun and lighthearted read. To condense the long list of ideas contained within it into one simple sentence: Steal like an artist is a book on how to keep creating things, whether those things be art, books, or even a business, and improving your skills in that. Kleon starts with telling us that we should all “steal like artists,” as the title suggests, so that we may move from imitation to emulation–like a painter copying the greats. He then goes on to provide more personal insight, like how we should be creating the things we want to see or how side projects are one of the most important things to have.

While I was already doing a lot of what the book suggests in terms of taking from the artists and the world around me, it gave me new ideas of things I could take note of and just how to go about that. For example, there's one section of the book where he talks about several musicians and artists that always kept spare paper and pens on them so that they could be sure to write down or sketch everything of importance–which really means anything that sparks some kind of inspiration. In another part, which I mentioned before, Kleon says to write what you want to read, which was essentially the mentality I had with my personal writing projects already. As a writing tutor, however, using some of the ideas he shares can be a bit tricky because the very nature of them requires creative writing, but there is one idea in particular that really stuck out as helpful: good writing comes from being hands on. Kleon notes that in his college courses, where everything was in a 12 point Times New Roman font, his writing was awful, but once he started including analog tools in the process, it felt better and more fun. This, I think, applies well to tutoring. It can be tricky to get an idea to stick with a student when they can't really get their hands on it.

The book itself feels a lot like a set of notes, with doodles scribbled in the margins and messy ideas that all connect to each other in some way or another, on how to be a creative, and that's something I really like about it, though I recognize that's definitely not for everyone. I also appreciate how personal a lot of this is. Often when reading things by successful people on how to be successful, they stand on this strange, disconnected high horse, like they're silently telling you that success is some kind of pipe dream, except for people like them. Austin Kleon, on the other hand, goes out of his way to tell stories of his own failures and explain that even though he has become a successful creative–so long as your standard for success there is the ability to create–he, too, has been in the shoes of the reader. He goes so far as to say that he is sharing things he still uses or thinks about to this day, so rather than getting the usual “I used to do this before I achieved success” talk, it feels like we're getting a much more honest view of creativity.

I think if I were to recommend this book to anyone, it'd have to be someone who thinks roughly the same way I do due to the format of the book. I enjoy how messy and short the ideas are; they keep my attention. I also think that there's a particular mentality behind this book that's only really useful to people who find writing or art to be a necessary creative outlet. For me, personally, I know that I would never be able to go without the ability to write, or even just come up with new ideas, and I think that's the mentality that the author has, too. In short, I would be hesitant to recommend this book to people only because the likelihood of them liking it to the same extent that I do is limited by how much the way they think of art and creativity aligns with the author.

While short in length (and with lots of images), this gem of a book is not short of useful ideas. Austin Kleon, an artist known for Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poetry made by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker, shares his secrets and that of others about creative life.

This book is not just for “creative types.” As he says, “They're for everyone.” And, as Ken Robinson, an expert in developing creativity in education and business, argues in his book Out of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative, we all need to learn to be creative in order to meet the challenges of living and working in the 21st century.

Much of his book focuses on dispelling the unstated myths that artists 1) are the blessed few who have been endowed with genius and/or talent, and thus 2) magically produce works of art without much effort.

Most interestingly, I found some of the other, perhaps, more tangential ideas of his book to be quite salient for women and parents. (Each month I write Book Notes on what I believe are useful to talented and caring women and parents and summarize insights that would be relevant to them.) To read my Book Notes on this book, please visit: https://lifejunctions.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/stacys-book-note-steal/