Do you have a box of treasured momentos, a drawer of unfinished artwork or a notebook of ideas you never quite started and definitely didn't finish?
Author and illustrator Carson Ellis tells us how she uncovered a forgotten journal from her 20s and how it informed an entire series of work, with a little help along the way from some other past projects.
This interview is creative inspiration for how to tell stories using pictures, capture nostalgia and perhaps even create art today as a time capsule for the future.
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SHOW NOTES:
Co-Writing / Editing: Sophie Miller sophiemiller.co
Audio Editing / Sound Design: Conner Jones pendingbeautiful.co
Soundtrack / Theme Song: Yoni Wolf / WHY? whywithaquestionmark.com
https://www.carsonellis.com/
https://www.chroniclebooks.com/products/one-week-in-january
Picture book mentions: What is Love, Du is Tak and Wildwood
TV show mentions: Mad Men
Band: https://www.decemberists.com/
Author Kazoo Ishiguro https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/14137/kazuo-ishiguro/
Julian Glander https://glander.co/
Past episode with Carson Ellis and Mac Barnett: https://creativepeptalk.com/355
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[MUSIC] >> Hey, you're listening to Creative Pet Talk, a weekly podcast companion for your creative journey. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. The New York Times bestselling author and illustrator in this show is everything I'm learning about building and maintaining a thriving creative practice. [MUSIC] Carson Ellis is on the show today. I am a huge fan of Carson Ellis's art and illustration and her picture books like do his talk in home. I'm so thrilled to have her back on. She was on an episode of Creative Pet Talk with Mac Barnett back on 355. If you like this episode, go back and listen to that one. We talk about a book that they made together that is really great called What is Love. She is here today to talk about her new project, which is one week in January, which is a very interesting, gorgeous book which is her taking a journal from 2001 that she kept for only a week and then using that almost like an illustration prompt to create a body of work or a gallery show and share the journal. It's a really, really interesting project and I had a blast talking with Carson about so many questions that I had about the book. I've been a fan of hers for a long time and of her husband, Colin Malloy, who is the frontman of the band Decemberists that I'm also a big fan of. Had a blast chatting with Carson, it's just a such a privilege to talk to artists that you respect as much as I do Carson. In this episode, a couple of things to look out for. There are a few themes that I think you should tune in to. One is the ongoing theme of this year, which is the independent spirit, the DIY spirit, this book catalogs, a period of time when they were early in their creative journey and they were just throwing a lot of stuff around like collaborating with friends and just making stuff without anybody's permission. And a lot of that stuff went on to be really great, important to me works of art and important to a whole lot of other people too. And I think that you're going to catch a little bit of that DIY independent spirit in this. Two other things that this episode is great for finding prompts on what to make work about. That can be a really difficult thing for some folks, myself included. Like, "Okay, I have time to make something. What should I draw? What should I paint? What should I make? What is the substance of the work?" And I think there's a lot of interesting prompts throughout this episode. And also, if you're intimidated by writing, I feel like Carson Ellis' books that she's written are beautifully written. They're funny. They have personality. And yet, she started her creative journey much more firmly within the direction of being a visual artist. And so we talk about that, how to think creatively about writing, hopefully to help you feel a little bit less intimidated, if that is how you feel. Stick around for the end. I'm going to come back with a little tiny, called-to-adventure CTA, a way to put some of these ideas to practice in your own creative work called "What's in your metaphorical pockets?" That sounds interesting. And we'll get to that to the end. And it is a different way of approaching how to infuse meaning into your work. That's a little bit more, you know, maybe mystical even or hard to explain. Abstract, not as literal. And it's something that I think happened in the work in this book. Anyway, without further ado, let's get to the chat. Here is my conversation with none other than the great Carson Ellis. Against all odds, I have become someone who has learned to love planning and dreaming and goal-setting and journaling my thoughts. And my to-do list is really important to me. Externalizing your inner world is really essential to getting out of vicious cycles of rumination and getting past those really difficult obstacles. Some people like to do this on paper, some people like to type it up, but I also know a lot of you are iPad people. Zinnia is a journaling app that is the best of both worlds. And you can use your apple pencil, write and draw, use digital washing tape stickers, make it your own type, plan out your week, organize your to-dos. This hybrid digital journal is something I know a lot of you are going to be obsessed with. Go check it out, download Zinnia on the App Store. Today, that's Z-I-N-N-I-A on the App Store. Use pep talk, all one word for 20% off. Massive thanks to Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one website platform that makes making a website easy peasy. For a moment, creative websites were kind of looking all the same and I really wanted to break out of the templity look. Then I heard that Squarespace has this new fluid engine and boy am I glad I checked it out because this thing is what I always dreamed making a website could be like for me. Drag and drop stuff and then drag it all over the place, text, images, videos, you can put it wherever you want. Layer it up, tear it up. Everything I cooked up in my mind, I could figure out how to do without any knowledge of coding. Got a lot of comments like, "Hey, who helped you build this?" And I was like, Squarespace is fluid engine, baby. You can see it at antijpsi.com and head to Squarespace.com for a free trial and build your own site. And when you're ready to launch, you can get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain with promo code pep talk, all one word, all caps. So I'm really excited to talk to you. As you, I think you probably know because you've been on the show before. I'm a really big fan of you and of your husband. Thank you. And so I feel very squarely in the exact target market of your new book, probably more than most. And so I really loved it. And I'm excited to talk about that and other things. But the first thing I just want to say that I was, I loved a ton of things about this book, but the thing that stood out to me is that probably more than other books that I've encountered, it feels really illustration forward in that that feels like such a substantial part of what this is about. Did that feel true to you? Yeah, I don't think it's a book that does much without the art. It's a huge part of the story, which as an illustrator, that is just really valid and interesting. I think about illustration as writing with pictures. And so I do, you know, and I don't really think about it like fine art. And so I think this book is such a great illustration of what illustration can be. Well, thank you. Yeah. So I love it. I don't know if you could just start by talking a little bit about what the book is. And then I've got a bunch of questions I'd love to kind of pick your brain with. But yeah, that was about sure. Sure. So the new book is an illustrated journal that I kept in 2001 when I was 25. And it only covers one week of my life. And it happens to be the week I moved to Portland, Oregon from San Francisco. So it's like me moving into my new house. And it doesn't read so much like a journal. It's not very, it doesn't reveal much emotionally. It's really more like a catalog of everything I did every single day for a week. And I couldn't initially figure out, I found it, I happened upon it in like late 2020. I must have been looking for something because I found it in a box full of letters and photos and stuff that I hadn't looked at in a long time. And it was just eight single spaced pages like on printer paper and a box. And I was like, what is this thing? And I read it. And it was like this perfect time capsule of this week because I had just written down every single thing I had done. I had like left nothing out. It was like everything I ate, everything I watched, every book I read, every person I saw, every time I checked my email. And I just, I just really liked it. I thought it was funny. And I read it to my husband. He thought it was funny because it was like this perfect snapshot of our life at the time. And I also thought it was sort of moving because I was like, Oh, look, there's me at 25. It's like this very clear picture of me and what I was up to, not a lot of what I was feeling because it's really, you know, spare and dispassionate. It's like I've sort of gone out of my way to not say what I'm feeling in this journal, but it's so it's just kind of like a record. And it turns out I couldn't figure out what it was or why I had kept it. And so I reached out to this friend of mine who's in it a lot. And I was like, Do you remember anything about this? And she was like, I do you were worried when you were 25 that you were losing your memory. And so it was some kind of memory exercise where you're writing down everything you did all day. Yeah. In an effort to like, roof, I if you remember your sleep, I really know, improve it train your brain. Yeah, I was trying to train my brain. I can't remember where the idea came from or I definitely didn't remember that that was the point. I needed someone with like a better memory. So it didn't work per se. You just can't remember what it was for or what the purpose of what of it was memory didn't stick. But these all these events did. Yeah, they did. Thanks to the fact that I wrote them down. Otherwise, I wouldn't remember any of this stuff. So I found it and I thought it was interesting. And I just had this desire to illustrate it and turn it into a book. I don't know about you. But for me, that desire can be elusive. Like, I can I can miss that. I don't know. To me, when I've heard you do talks, that's all you had icon to a talk. And I think 2014, maybe. And just have followed you and heard you talk about art. It seems like you're, I think of you as someone more in touch with that. When that desire comes up, for me, I have to do a lot to catch those feelings of, Oh, I want to make pictures about it. But was it really obvious? Or are you just kind of more in tune with that? Well, I think I am just sort of like a consummate illustrator always looking for things that could benefit from visual art. You know, like anytime, anytime you could add pictures to something to make it more interesting or sophisticated or complex or to have it say more, I feel like I am sort of attuned to that. And I think when I read this thing, I loved it on a very personal level in a very personal way that I knew probably wouldn't translate to the rest of the world. I don't think this would be much of a book without the pictures. But I think mostly I was really taken by how much was left out emotionally. There was so much going on in my life at the time that was very charged and sort of difficult and, you know, I'm kind of like in love in it, but not it messing up to that or acknowledging it. And so there's all these unspoken feelings. And I felt like, you know, like the best illustrated texts work well when the illustration is doing something that the text is not certainly that's the case with picture books, right? Like a great picture book manuscript is going to leave a lot out so that the illustrations are telling part of the story. And I read this thing and I was like, Oh my God, so much of the story is missing. Yeah, that could be told in pictures. So I sort of wanted the pictures to be like the emotion and the psychology that was missing from the text. That's really interesting. Yeah, like it makes total sense. Like, I am as a picture bookmaker. I think the first person I've really heard talk about this is your friend john classin who talks about I've heard him talk on a few different occasions around the idea of the pictures really telling half of the story and how essential that is in a picture book that, you know, if the text says it all, you don't really need the images and how you can also do the kind of mismatch pictures and words for funny effect, which he does really well. And so it's interesting to from coming from that world to recognize this as almost a prompt because you're like, Oh, there's so much missing. That's perfect for pictures. And I think the other thing that's funny is that, you know, you said this in the intro to the book, and then also you've said it a couple times here about like the the lack of emotionality in the text. But the funny thing is, I completely forgot that as I was reading it. And I think it is something about the combination of pictures and text. It kind of reminds me of like madmen where it's like a show don't tell thing. You're not telling us this is what I was feeling. But in madmen, there's so much like any great show really like they're not saying, I'm angry or I'm in love, like you don't need any of that. You just need this is what happened. And this is what they looked like. Like this is what you know, this what they're showing on screen. And because all the way through, it's it is very like factual, but it's also really funny. Like the times where you talk about, you know, back when this is back 2001, right? That's what it was. This back when like your inbox was like a place where you kept going back to, and there was nothing there. And you're like, Oh, I'm gonna go back again. And so there's all like funny stuff happening. And and you can't, you pick up on all of, you know, maybe some of its context of like kind of knowing where your story goes later. But yeah, I do think that there it doesn't feel, you know, the energy between the pictures and the text, it doesn't feel void of emotion. It just feels like much more. It also makes me go back to similar times in my own life and knowing what I must have been feeling to be spending my days this way. You know, yeah, I mean, that I like you said about mad men, though, I would expand that to like all good literature and writing and film that. I don't know why mad men was the I think it's what it kind of feels like. It's an excellent example. Okay. And I would say like another excellent example would be the novels of Kazbo Ishiguro. Okay, these these books where like, you know, like remains of the day, these books where everything is in the dialogue and everything is watching these characters sort of like, weren't fully go about their business. And nobody ever expresses emotion, but you know exactly what they're feeling. And I feel like that's just good writing. Yeah. Right. And so I think we do and like, yeah, I guess I read this thing and not to say I wrote something brilliant when I was 25. But I think there's there's there's so much that I'm not saying, but you can just watch this sort of like, broke love lorn, aspiring 25 year old artists go about her day and you're like, yeah, I know, I know what she's going through. It doesn't, I don't need to be like too tired today. I woke up and had a cup of coffee and cried because I was lonely and broke, like nobody cares about that diary. Right. But also go ahead. What were you saying? No, no, it's I'm done. I'm just gonna say the other thing I thought was really that I think people that listen to this show will really appreciate is, you know, knowing that you went on to get a Caldecah honor and make books like Wildwood that are congrats being turned into a movie, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And, you know, and seeing things that Colin has done and all this incredible stuff to people that are fans are legendary. It feels like those earlier days are deeply relatable to most creative people. And I think the thing that I found feeling really like inspired by was, I remember in my own ways, the earlier days feeling like, what the hell am I doing? Like, what is going on? Like, does this matter that me and this person are writing characters and like, whatever. And it just made me feel like, it just made me feel like, oh, this is super validating to any artist at any stage to just see the value in their friends and making stuff together and not knowing where it's going to go, because you really don't. I mean, I'm sure you were enthusiastic about what all your friends were making. But at the same time, there feels like there's a sense there. We're like, we don't know. We're like doing, you know, we're just like living in a warehouse, doing stuff, drinking. Does that feel accurate? Yeah, it feels accurate. We're definitely just living in a warehouse and drinking and doing projects, some of which places and some of which don't. And I think like, yeah, another thing that maybe would be affirming to it, I'm very curious to find out who will actually read this book, because I think, like you said, you're sort of the target audience, right? Like, people of a certain age who, and especially people, I would imagine Portlanders of a certain age, because it's very Portland, Oregon specific, like Portland 2001. But I also think if younger people who are creative did read it, maybe there would be some. I would hope that one thing they would get out of it is that I was just doing all of these things. And so many of them went nowhere. And I look back at that 25 year old artist and I have a lot of tenderness and also envy for her ability to just like try whatever pops in her head. And and that my art practice is not structured and my days are not structured. I am just like getting ideas and following them until I tire of them and then abandoning them and some of them become things and most of them become nothing. But it's all just laying the groundwork for the practice I have today, which is a bit more boring. I love my job and I love the artists that I am and I like the art that I make. But I also don't really know how to be that 25 year old like flailing super experimental artist anymore who doesn't know what she loves to do yet. And I miss being that artist. So maybe people who are more in that stage of their art careers could see that there's so much goodness in that. And like while it's great and miraculous to be able to at some point figure out how to make a living off your art, there's also something very free and wonderful about not making a living off your art and figuring out what kind of artist you are and what kind of art you make. Yeah, and there's a trade off to where you know later on you get some certainty about like there's lots of things I like about having somewhat of a sense of how I approach something. There's a lot of stuff I really love about that and I make a lot of stuff now probably more consistently that I like. But it's this trade off of I also see so much less possibility both in life and in creative work. And then like you know when I was in my 20s it was much more like who knows what's going to happen and who knows what I could make or what I could become. And that's really you know energizing. I think that the other thing that I felt really strongly so one thing I kind of stumbled into a theme on the show recently which was you know being really frustrated by the way that tech and businesses have moved in on creative spaces on the internet especially. And you know just kind of what always happens where early on maybe they're doing more help than hurting and then eventually it just kind of strangles out the creativity. Which is just a pattern I think that happens over and over. And then also just watching bands that I love go back to independently releasing records and just seeing like feeling strongly that like DIY, indie aesthetic and indie spirit is potentially a way forward beyond some of the ways that it's all kind of got choked out in the world and online. And that's the other thing I loved about the book is that this is at least from what I imagine this is an era where that was a little bit more at the center. It's before a lot of this culture became you know by the time it hit me in like 2004 even I was in Indiana and for it to travel that far it already had gone way more mainstream. And so I love this feeling of you know when I was a kid I was like or when I was a young artist I was like always thinking about I want to work with this artist or be a part of this culture or whatever it is and realize looking back like it was the ways that you know your friends were trusting you to make the band posters and commission you on things and like getting excited about each other's work even that I'm like man like what was I was like I wonder what your work was to where these friends were excited for your stuff to be the face of it. You know like it's cool. It's funny because well you've read the book so you know that the whole time I'm working on this poster for a movie called Pi Fight 69 and it's probably my first proper illustration gig. I don't think I was paid for it but a friend of mine in San Francisco who I worked with made this film and it was going to Sundance which was very exciting to me. I still don't really know what that means but I really didn't know what it means when I was 25 but I was just like Sundance you know and so they had me make a postcard for it and so I had forgotten all about this until I found the journal and reread it and I was like what did that postcard look like so I Googled it. Yeah. Is it out there? It's out there. Okay now everybody else is Googling it thanks to everybody. I would like everyone to Google it because it's really really bad. It's really bad and it's so funny because the whole time I'm like it's like one of kind of the centering things in this book is like this thing that I'm just plugging away and I'm very excited for the opportunity and I was like what did that look like. I think I was making some cool art around that time but I also was making some very very bad art. Your listeners should definitely Google Pi Fight 69 Google image search the movie screen. Just find that postcard. Do it and then there was like I feel like I was making kind of an interesting leap then too but so was everybody at 25 you know Colin was a musician who was kind of just get figuring out what his music sounded like too so for everyone around me it was like a kind of transitional creative period and I think so much of the collaboration that comes out of that time is just like who do you love hanging out with and how kindred do you feel to them creatively not necessarily like how evolved are there illustrator skill illustration skills because mine were not at that point I was like drawing exclusively with Sharpie I think and gel pens and stuff and had just moved from San Francisco so I was very inspired by the street art scene in San Francisco which is not really it's still up there in my brain as like a sort of formative inspiration but it hasn't really it doesn't inform the art I make now 20 years later very much so I think I was still trying out all these different hats and ways of working and all this to say I don't think I was an amazing artist and that's how I got the job making working for free and for pizza for the decemberous in 2001 I don't think it looks bad it looks really different to what you make now I don't think it's bad that's cool it's got its own thing but it doesn't people wouldn't associate it with you or what you know I think it's unrecognizable to me as my own art I also think that font at the bottom is like really a funny choice but anyway but at that time like right around this time right around the time I moved to Portland and I had been like drawing everything in Sharpie I started working with different mediums like pen and ink you know like indipan and brush and ink and just things mediums that I that were being used by the comic book artists I loved at the time and so I think I was sort of evolving a more sophisticated way of working as an illustrator so from 2001 to 2002 my work would get a lot better I think and just since you are so generous with your past self and past art I would just want to tell you I was going to tell you this at the end but just pass on my apologies because in some way I feel a little bit to blame for why the decemberous video on yo gaba gaba wasn't so great was it not great I don't remember great song it's the great outdoors but I did the illustrations for it you did it was a year out of school and I was not prepared at all and actually I talk about this on stage as like because I later got to work with Nickelodeon on a bunch of stuff and they were repeat client but that was like I was so I was all about the music and I was so I'm like a Nickelodeon kid and I just really blew it I just was not handy I don't recall anyone in our camp thinking that that was late it was mostly just very exciting for us because our kid our older kid is a teenager was like yo gaba gaba age back then so it was more just a thrill to be like look at dad yeah on your it could have been better it could have been so much better but I had to offer it up since everyone's going to be googling yours and now they can be googling one of my moments that I'm less than proud of I just wasn't I just wasn't ready fun show if we just kind of go back and forth telling your listeners to google stuff we're embarrassed about that's a weird podcast but yeah it's a really weird podcast something um one thing that I wanted to ask you that I don't feel like happens very often is you know when I get if I ever get interviewed about books I make or projects I do or whatever often the things that I like about it the most are not things that come up organically and I wanted to just see if for you maybe what your favorite part of this book is or part of the process of making it um was and yeah I don't know what possibly comes up for you with that well easily my favorite part of making it was that I illustrate books a lot right I illustrate a lot of picture books especially and novels for kids and as you know that involves at least some sort of editorial process with an editor and an art director and maybe also like a sales and marketing team and whatever um and so it always involves notes and revisions and revising and pushing back or not pushing back and all of that is my least favorite part of this job I think like I love so much too um and maybe every illustrator fills this way I love illustration it's like the thing that I was drawn to most immediately as a kid and I it was I mean I guess it's like the first art we're all seeing probably as kids anyway but I have always loved it and I've always wanted to do it but I also think I sort of have the heart of a unsatisfied uh fine artist you know like I want to make bodies of work yeah where nobody gets to tell me what to do and I make only what I want to make and and then I hang it all on a wall and that's the job and so I think I got to combine those two things with this book because I worked with Bridget Watson Payne who's uh she's a she wasn't editor at Chronicle she was working at Chronicle when I hit her up about this book she retired or quit she went on she's more of like a uh working as like a freelance editor these days but she um quit and kept editing my book for Chronicle so the book did come out with Chronicle but she's no longer a Chronicle editor but the point is she was very hands-off and she didn't give me any notes and I also didn't have to do sketches I didn't have to sketch out the whole book and be like here's what I'm thinking what do you think and then like get her feedback and take those notes and um the cover was sort of a different process which I knew inevitably it would be but um but all the art on the interior I did get to sort of read the manuscript and then sort of make a body of work inspired by it which feels a little bit different than illustration it's like illustration certainly illustrating things that are happening in the book but I think illustration to me also implies like a lot of editorial and revision work and this didn't so that was my favorite part just making a body of work exactly how I would make it in a vacuum with nobody giving me any feedback about it it was kind of a dream I totally understand that I don't know why but I'm exactly the same with notes like I try to be uh you know easy going and easy to work with and I think I probably am but I don't always feel like that like often especially if it's something that you feel strong about which most of the stuff I'm doing hopefully I do feel pretty strong about it I feel pretty like this is the thing I want to do and I actually got because I used to work a lot more in client work I feel a little bit spoiled by picture books where there's a little bit more authorship if I ever do client work now that notes are almost always so much heavier and I'm like this is what I wanted it to be so I totally get that and I actually just spoke with um uh Bridget a week ago and I was I was telling her that we were gonna talk I know her from the um work that I've done at Chronicle and people over there but I was I was gonna ask you about that too because I figured this was a more hands-off book and I wondered if there was any um what maybe the editor role looked like there or what kind of collaborative support looked like from that angle. Yeah it was an interesting process because I a Bridget wasn't hands off at all she was really involved yeah and she helped me make a lot of decisions and um but you know the text is pretty much unedited it is the eight single spaced pages that I found in a box yeah so there wasn't much editing that needed to go into it she helped me figure out things like practical things like hey do I need to change people's names in this like how do I navigate that whole thing she helped me figure out the um visual approach to it because initially I thought I might um work with a lot of different mediums um I kind of wanted it to be like a mishmash of mediums but um we both felt like as I started making work for it that the strongest work were these paintings and I liked that because it made the paintings kind of like a cohesive voice like the voice of the old painter lady who's painting and the voice of the young 25-year-old who's writing became two more kind of distinct you know distinct voices um and so I just she was a sounding board she's super smart and she's also really visually-minded she's a good visual artist as well as a good editor and so um she just helped me kind of shape it um and helped me make decisions but so she wasn't hands off but she also didn't make me give her sketches and she didn't give me notes on the art she gave me notes on the art like I was like should I scrap this and she'd be like no or yes that kind of thing but um but it was I felt very very autonomous in a way that I don't think I ever have before illustrating a book it was pretty pretty fantastic yeah I think that that is clear in the book too um my wife Sophie was reading it and she said something I thought was really true speaks to exactly what you're saying which is it almost feels like a gallery show in a book too yeah that was what I was trying to do of paintings in a way and then this is kind of the through line um text text wise that was exactly the vibe I wanted and I actually wanted the design of the book to be more like a exhibition catalog than like an illustrated book so that was that was something I kept pushing for what the designer was um picture this as like a like an art catalog so that we really feature the art it's not like it's little here with text wrapping around it it's like the art comes first and then we sort of fit the text wherever the text fits I love that because it's an interesting prompt uh for artists I always think about what interesting things happen when you kind of mash together mediums in ways that maybe they aren't usually done I have a buddy who just put out a film and in a way it feels like I mean the story is great it's hilarious his name is Julian Glander I don't know if you know this guy but um he has a film that just was at Tribeca and it's 3D animated and it's beautiful and the story is great it's hilarious but then in some ways it feels like a Trojan horse for his music too because there's like these long like music video cuts like in it and it works really well but I just love this thing of pushing a medium or coming at a medium like a book from the lens of a gallery artist um what why did you make that choice like what was it why not just do a gallery show is it because you're just familiar with books yeah yeah that's cool I mean that's very I feel like that's really liberating for artists to just because sometimes that's what makes something interesting is that you're coming at it from a different point of view yeah I mean it is also a gallery show and what's sweet about it is that the gallery it's a gallery show that's opening a few days after the book comes out and it's opening in a gallery in Portland my gallery the gallery that represents me and my gallerist is my old friend May who lived in this same warehouse with me and who I met like a few months after I kept this journal so it's it's like a long threads and really sweet and I did when I set out to illustrate this journal and to turn it into a book I had the gallery show as a in my mind the whole time from the beginning that um that I would make art that didn't only look like illustration that ideally could stand on its own and we would have a show and then we would also make the book but I think I just I think I'm just like a bookmaker it's just what I like to do so when I I saw I and I think that's how my mind is always kind of formulating projects is like how does this become a book um where are the pictures and what are the words and what in the show are these like the final paintings yeah they're the final paintings there's about 30 paintings in the book and we're framing and showing 20 of them and then there's another 10 that'll be on view at the gallery and yeah it'll all yeah and I'm I am more excited about the gallery show than about the book events that I have planned on a book tour like I think that'll be fun too um but but there's so many variables to it you just don't know it's just it can be complicated I think um and I I have had this same I I've been represented by this gallery for a long time like probably 15 years or something and a lot of the shows that I've done with her have been sort of piecemeal where I've been like oh time for a dark show what have I got you know and this feels so intentional I made this body of work and it's a lot of work and we had it framed by a really good framer and so I'm just excited yeah and I also feel like if I'm putting myself in your shoes and I'm thinking uh it's it's interesting I have to do a lot of like mind games on myself to start things finish things whatever you know whatever it is um pull things off and I can just see how knowing how to do a book not to say that you haven't done gallery stuff but knowing how to do a book was a way to also create this larger body of work that was cohesive yeah within this theme which is really cool people are driven by the search for better but when it comes to hiring the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all don't search match with indeed the hiring process can be slow and overwhelming simplify hiring with indeed indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors according to indeed data and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast ditch the busy work use indeed for scheduling screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide that use indeed to hire great talent fast listeners of this show will get a 75 dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com/podkattz13 that's indeed.com/podkattz13 terms and conditions apply. There's kind of two threads that I want to make sure I hit one's illustration but the other one's more on the writing side I relate to you in that I definitely feel like an illustrator like a visual artist and yet so many of the really important things that I've made have come from combining that with writing or just writing stories telling stories and but I didn't come into creative work through that so sometimes that or for a long time it was just really intimidating and so I think your practice is so inspiring because you've come at writing in such a creative way like I have a lot of illustrator friends or people who talk to me through the podcast and I'm saying you know if you're just like an actor that's not getting roles like think about writing your own script even if you're not a writer even if that seems intimidating to you and I just think a lot of illustrators just get stuck there and I feel like everything that you've written has been like a totally different take on writing and to an amazing effect like do his talk like my honestly very few books are as memorable for me like reading with my kids as do his talk and we went over that cracked what I think is the code to the whole thing and this and it's just one of my all-time favorite books and it's such a different take to writing there's not even an actual language that it's written in like that's as creative writing as you get how can you can you talk about like your relationship to writing versus pictures and how was that a journey to get to the place where you would write your own books I imagine like in some ways you're thinking Colin's a writer I'm an artist you know I don't know I don't know if any of that's at play but I'm curious about it I think that was at play like as you can if you've read this journal book that we're talking about it's like where we're just beginning our kind of collaborative life together and we're working on this story and I'm making pictures for it and he's writing it and it basically it's like the bones of what would 10 years later become Wildwood and I think there is something about that dynamic to have this like partner in all things in your life who's a writer and then I don't know I think I have so much respect for narrative storytelling and I have so much respect for great picture books that follow that structure and I think I am not wired that way I can't seem to tell a good narrative story that I'm really happy with and that I think is worth illustrating so that's I think where all of these kind of unconventional approaches to writing books come from is that I'm so picture-minded I'm so visual-minded I want to tell the story through pictures and so I think I'm thinking of a story with pictures first and then figuring out after the fact how to incorporate some text into it and in the case of do is talk it was going to just be all pictures and no words and I only added that invented dialogue because it just felt kind of static like there wasn't enough happening in it but that book totally works without the without the dialogue it just makes it a lot more funny and interesting and like home and in the half room which are the other two kids books I've written they are both just really simple poems which is something I feel I do feel comfortable writing a simple poem I don't feel comfortable writing a story really and I the book that I'm thinking about doing now I have a couple of picture books that I'm sort of thinking about mulling over and one of them is a sequel to do is talk and the other one is a store an autobiographical probably long picture book about living on a farm which I do and I've started writing this thing and it's the opposite it's not a narrative story but it is so like rambly and discursive you know it's just all like and then this and then this and did you know that you can make walnut ink out of walnuts and here's how to do it and oh hey guess what let me tell you something about chickens like that's the whole book and so I'm sort of like I don't know who I am as a writer and maybe that's a good thing is that I can be sort of whatever I can sort of follow the whatever impulse I have that seems to best serve the art I want to make and then that's just kind of the writer I've become I don't think I have like a writerly voice that I am leading into or that I'm developing I mean yeah I mean from the outside I definitely think that you I'm not going to disagree with your take but I will say that you it's very distinctive to me and it's also very funny um I find almost all of your writing to be really um sweet and funny and also playful um but I just I think that that's really encouraging to people that are intimidated by words I think there are some really sophisticated minds that make visual art that when they go to work with words it just feels scary there's rules there's you know all these things that can make them feel like not getting started and yet I mean yours yours are like you said they're very poetic and they're also I don't know I'm a huge fan of both the art and and the the words in your books thank you Andy that's so nice I really I really mean it and the last thing I want to ask you about was the illustration side because the other thing I think is maybe a challenge for artists or illustrators is like knowing where to pull content from for their images like that can be also some people get stuck in a groove of getting a brief and then waiting to be told what to draw and I thought that this as a prompt like illustrating an old journal that you found created so much rich imagery and honestly some of the images in here I feel like I'd seen a couple maybe online before but there's some of my favorite things that you've made oh that means so much to me it's some very new feels like very different territory to me so I'm unsure really yeah really okay it feels right to me feels like your work but it does feel they do feel like paintings um in a in a really great way um I so I love that I feel like it's a great prompt for illustrators of go mine your past stuff um and and find just your life how did you I have two questions here one is how did you what were you pulling from like I think you had some photos but what were you how were you getting this imagery because it it feels dreamy in a way but it also feels still life so I imagined it was kind of maybe a mixture of both but where did these where did all this it reference come from it's totally both it's a lot of imagined stuff and a lot of remembered stuff and a lot of photo reference um like the picture on the cover of the book is totally imagined okay except I I maybe drew a real beer bottle because I wanted to like see where that wanted to see like how late like goes through a green bottle yeah um but other than that um and I think I took a picture of my sneakers but other than that it's imagined but but a lot of the imagery in the book is from photos there's a lot of interesting and funny stories about photo reference like the um this is a good story this is an interesting one because it's sort of about the what I was talking about before about the sort of things you get up to when you're 25 and the kind of artist you are when you're 25 um versus that kind of artist you are when you're 48 um I have in this box of photos I have this big box of photos and it's like got hundreds of pictures in it and then they just end in like you know 2002 no more photos it's all digital um and I in that box is like uh eight or ten portraits that I took with film camera and they're just people staring straight expressionless from the shoulders up and they're not very good they're like blurry I was never a very good photographer could never really figure out film photography but because I'm of a certain age and from a certain era I had to learn to do it you know I went to I was in an art school um so I took all these photos of people I knew and came in contact with in the uh because I wanted to do a series of portraits of them and I so I wanted these just sort of dead pan straight on photo portraits to use for reference and I never did them like so many other things that I had ideas about when I was 25 so many other things that I was like um maybe I'll do this maybe I'll do this what about this so I never painted a single photo or single painting from those photos and I kept them in a box but then I dug them out and I used them to make portraits for this book 20 something years later which I think is kind of neat um and so a lot of them you know there's like a picture um of me wrestling with someone on a futon in it which is this guy who came to visit who like you know drunkenly like knocked me on a futon and we wrestled but I painted that from a photo I had of me wrestling on a futon with another person I like happened to have a picture of me wrestling on a futon so something I was apparently doing a lot when I was 25 um yeah and like there's a there's a bar in this book called my father's place it's like a beloved dive bar in Portland and in this book I go to it for the first time but I will go to it many times after and so I wanted to find an image of it the exterior of it at night in order to um paint it for the book I wanted like the facade at night so I was googling trying to find that too lazy to drive into Portland from the suburbs where I lived to take that picture of course and so I only found two pictures of it and one of them was on map quest which I like I guess you still know it existed it's still there and there was this map quest picture that someone because you could like upload your own pictures onto map quest and it was a picture of my husband's bandmate Chris Funk like standing outside of my father's place smoking a cigarette is it the one that you're that you paint in it yeah it's like a take on that no I mean I used that and the only other photo I found online and I sort of combined the two and the person and then I put a person in that photo who's like a person who I guess is supposed to be homeless and he's carrying like a bunch of bags and stuff and that actually is from a photo I took in San Francisco like years before I moved to Portland so I had this photo of this person walking down the street in San Francisco carrying so many things like carrying so many bags and just so laden with stuff and I think something about like the shape of this person was interesting to me and I had actually done a bunch of drawings and paintings of this same using the same photo as reference over the course of like 25 years and then I used it once again to be the foreground of that photo of that bar so it's it's kind of a lot of like collaging photos imagining using my box of photos but also lots of Google image search always yeah that's amazing because it makes me feel it makes me realize that part of what potentially feels dreamy about the book is how dreamy the way that these references came together are like it you saying that it's like you describing a dream of I'm wrestling my roommate but it's not my roommate and it's you know I'm in front of this place but it's not that place and there's a different guy like I just feel like there's exactly where they come from yes and that's what it feels like it has a there's an interesting like even the thing that you were saying about the the portraits that are like straight on there's just a there's a very dreamlike quality that feels also like a memory it feels like what it feels like probably to read those things which yeah it's just really fascinating the last thing I want to ask you was for me when I started illustration got out of school in 2008 versus now what I you know I've kind of gone through different cycles of when I first started I was super interested in illustration and interest interested in the scene that I felt like I wanted to be part of and all that kind of thing and then you know it ebbs and flows that passion I went back into a really really passionate phase recently but what I love about illustration now is so different to what I loved about it then and I wondered if you could relate to that or if it's just is it consistent like do does making visual art mean the same thing to you now is it dead then or is it changed I think a lot of these the the threads of it are lifelong yeah like I think my the thing that drew me to illustration when I was a little kid like reading the Chronicles of Narnia and seeing Pauline Baines illustrations and also flipping through the New Yorker and just looking at the art like those those threads run through my whole life and the that the thing that drew me to that art still draws me to it today and draws me to the work of other illustrators and also to make illustration I've like a way more complicated relationship with it now after working in this biz for decades because I have a lot of like you know I'm kind of jaded and tired of it but I also still totally love it and feel privileged to be able to you know figure out how to make a living doing it that always feels kind of like a wild miracle to me but I think like you I kind of go in and out with it I I become very reactionary about it sometimes like especially if I'm like knee-deep in a book I'm tired of working on it where I've gotten a bunch of nitpicky notes from someone and I will be like I hate this job and what I want to do is be a painter I want to be a painter and to like make paintings and show them in galleries or as often lately I'm like what I want to do is make quilts like pictorial pictorial giant quilts and do I don't know what people do with them but whatever people do with them want to do that and so it's like I'm always reacting to it it's such a deep complicated relationship but I love it and most of the time the way I feel about it feels very similar to the way I felt about it when I was a kid first sort of noticing it in my world which is like I see bad illustration and I'm like I see good illustration I'm like oh my god who did that you know like I'm just I have an I am always looking for it around me and my world and I'm always grateful for it when I find it in places where it's you know making the world a better place making art better I lied to you and I said that was my last question I have just one more and that's any of the I'm not about please just one more okay but as you're saying that I'm thinking like of the images in the book I don't I'm assuming you have some that you like more than others just because that's how I am at least of your favorites or of your favorite what is it that you like about it or what is it that's meaningful to you the one that I'm just coming that comes to mind I don't know if it's one of the ones you like but is the nighttime one where it's you guys going on time on top of the building and two of the people are smoking and they're just I'm not gonna fill in your words here but I just wonder what what makes it an image feel successful to you hmm well I feel like with illustration I think that my my guiding principle has always been like good illustration should stand on its own so which it should be doing something or my favorite illustration typically can stand on its own out of context you could see it somewhere and get something out of it there would have an interesting narrative quality but it would also be a good piece of art you know yeah like and so I think all of the paintings in this book I I tried to approach from that angle trying to make a piece of art that could hang on a wall that would look like it was meant to hang on a wall and also be in a book yeah and there's a few I think that don't kind of hit that nail on the head like there's like a picture of a TV and a VCR with a bottle of concha e Toro on the top and I'm like I don't know I don't know if that stands on its own that feels like that yeah but the one you're mentioning is that special that's actually speaking of source imagery yeah so I in the end of the book it ends with us climbing on top of this building and my friend Nathan makes this video of us of Colin and I climbing up this wild high scaffolding and so after I was almost done with the book and I had that illustration to do still and I was like please can you find that video to my poor friend Nathan my poor busy friend went to dig through like a bunch of ancient hard drives and find it for me and he did and it was like really moving to me to see this sort of weird dreamy grainy video and so that's actually a that's a still from the video he sent of Colin and I climbing this ladder and so I don't know I think maybe that piece I love how I love that it's so blue I love that blue in it and I love that it's really graphic and I think that it's got a kind of intriguing composition and everybody who sees it and doesn't know what it is thinks it's something different a lot of people think it's like a billboard that we're climbing up and it doesn't really matter but I think there is something also emotionally charged in it because when I watched that video I was so moved I hadn't seen myself and this person who would become my husband at 20 odd years ago in so long and so I think that that piece means a lot for a bunch of reasons and then my favorite piece in the book is actually the wrestling on the futon one weirdly which was the I love that one too thanks it was the very first one I made and I was like this is what I want the whole book to look like which is like that thing where you're just messing around and you make something that you really love and then you're like now I just have to duplicate this exact five 30 more times I just have to be like loose and cool and like nail it 30 more times and so like of course it's the first the first painting in the book that I was like that's the one that's the best one yeah that's the best one and it still feels like the best one to me as I got farther into the book I really got really deep into these paintings like sometimes I feel like I didn't quite know where to stop and to keep them loose but I'm still really proud of them as a collection of work but I think the first one where you're so excited about the idea and you're finally sitting down to make it happen with not a lot of expectation is like oh chef's kiss okay I'm back thank you Carson again for being on the show and just for being such an inspiration over the years I know so many illustrators are just mega fans of your work and and you just always do such interesting projects and make such interesting decisions and it inspires me to stay more in touch with my creative side because my practical strategic side can get out of control and kind of wreck that side of me um I'm back I told you I would be with the creative call to adventure it's called what's in your metaphorical pockets and the idea is I remember where I heard this but it was somebody telling a story about um who was it I think oh I think it was Ethan Hawk this sounds like an Ethan Hawk thing even um and I think it's Stanislawski never tried to say that word before and I just really fell and I felt stanis we're gonna leave it in though because it's just embarrassing for me Stan I can't remember how but I've never said that word anyway it's a school of acting um I'm told and he said that he had read read this and he was doing the stuff they suggest and he was in dead poet society and he's got the right stuff in his pockets and I'm just assuming what this means uh is that you've got the stuff in your pockets that the character would have in their pockets and I've heard this too from other actors talking about like think the thoughts that your character would think and it will come across in your expression and in your presence when you're on stage or or you're in front of the camera that something will translate subconsciously there even in just to the the faces that you're making and I've often in this show made comparisons between acting and illustration I don't know if I've ever heard anybody else make that comparison it might not be on the surface obvious to anybody else but to me you're you're illuminating a text most of the time um or illuminating a message or a purpose and you're making it come to life with emotion in visuals and um skin and bones to the thing so that you can see um this thing that's trying to be communicated and so I see and and also illustrators of the last people in the equation often to get brought on to a project and and make it come to life um and so I see a lot of parallels there and one of the things that Carson said that reminded me of that I want to say stand a slosque slosque why I can say it in my head but I can't say it in real life I need to go do some heavy research and some soul searching about not practicing that off mic okay anyway one of the things that Carson said was when she was making that image we talk about last which is um her and her friends climbing onto the roof at night that that was charged for her with all this emotion that she felt from watching the video of that night and I just thought it's really interesting who knows I don't know if I was picking up on that emotion but that was such a striking image to me and it had tone and it had emotion um and it felt even nostalgic it didn't feel of the moment and now that I think about it it feels almost serious in a way that's like looking back at a time that's gone and I wonder I'm just curious like let's get a little bit weird we're fricking artists for God's sakes let's get a little bit weird and try to make something with our metaphorical pockets aka our brain so when I go into making the artwork for any time I think about any of the illustration I've done especially for books I can remember the things that I want the music I was listening to or the podcast or the audiobooks and they're really linked in my mind and when I made invisible things the second half of making that book the artwork for it was me listening to the audiobook of bittersweet by Susan Cain who ended up being a guest on the show it's one of the most profound experiences that I've had as a person let alone with a book and I am not I don't think overstating that because it put me into a state that I'd never experienced before just and I can't even tell you exactly why other than it just felt like someone was articulating my thoughts that I didn't even know that I had in a way that I could never articulate and it's a great book I highly recommend it to but I when I look at those images they feel more weighty because of what I was consuming at the time of making them and so my prompt to you it's not a super practical one it's just to try to get into the emotional state that you are trying to produce in the image that you're making or the song that you're making you know try to it reminds me of Sir Ian McKellen another actor said you know acting isn't about pretending to feel an emotion it's about feeling an emotion on command and I just think that that is a that's a powerful tool that an artist has of how can you find how can you prime that emotion with music or videos or memories how can you get into that state before you make a picture because who knows some of that might translate and if it doesn't translate directly into the image it might translate into how you feel about it and that might translate into you doing whatever it takes to get it out there in the world it might just be more meaningful to you and hey that matters so do it stay in a sloskey it's something like that and I'm gonna go learn how to say it properly now and next time I say it on the podcast I'm gonna be a master it's just a word I've never said before and I hope you appreciate that I didn't edit myself out because you can all laugh at me now all right thanks everybody thanks Carson really really loved having this chat with you hope to have you on the show again sometime bye [Music] creative pep talk is a weekly podcast designed to help you build a thriving creative practice but that's the thing it only works if it's an actual practice it has to become a habit we make this show every single week so that your creativity can go from being a thing that you do sometimes to a creative discipline to immerse you in a world of creatives that are doing the same where those kind of behaviors are normal one way we help you stick to this is by sending you the new episodes via email to your inbox every single week so that you never miss a week and we often add bonus content like pictures and links and extra related stuff to the episode that you're not going to get just from the apps go to Andyjpizza.substack.com to sign up to the free email newsletter and I'll have the accountability to stay on the creative path and keep this street going and hopefully it will inspire you to do the same and if you sign up right now you'll get immediate free access to our e-booklet the creative career path it's a step-by-step roadmap for creating a project that is designed to unlock your dream creative clients and opportunities sign up at Andyjpizza.substack.com and let's keep this creative habit together creative pep talk is part of the pod glomerate network you can learn more about pod glomerate at www.podglomerate.com this has been another episode of creative pep talk a weekly podcast companion for your creative journey hey it's dangerous to go along take this podcast with you weekend and week out by subscribing to the show to keep you company and keep the best creative practices top of mind so that little by little weekend and week out you can make progress in your own creative practice i'm your host aj pizza i'm a new york times best-selling author and illustrator and i make this show not because i have it all figured out but because as a squishy creative artist type that's prone to big emotions it takes a whole lot of creativity to just get out of bed sometimes so every week i put out the ideas that are helping me stay disciplined and stay excited and have helped me stay on this creative path for the past 15 years plus in hopes that it might help someone else or at the very least help them feel less alone on their own creative journey massive thanks to yoni wolf and the band y for our theme music thanks to connor jones of pending beautiful for editing and sound design thanks to sofie miller for podcast assistance of all sorts and most importantly thanks to you for listening and until we speak again stay peped up hey y'all one more quick thing earlier this year i rebuilt my website using square spaces new fluid engine and i was so pumped about how it turned out that i have been really thrilled to find as many ways to partner with them and tell you about what they can do and bring you discounts as possible with social media going haywire i think having a site that feels as unique as your creative work is essential to building trust with your target audience or your clients i have had several clients point out how cohesive and fresh my site looks lately and if you want to check that out and what i was able to do without any code check out andiejpizza.com if you want to test it out go to squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out yourself and when you're ready to launch use promo code peptalk for 10% off your first purchase thanks squarespace for supporting the show and for supporting creative people how did american politics and our economy become so corrupt hi i'm david serota an investigative journalist at the lever former bernie sanders speechwriter and oscar nominated writer on the film don't look up join me on my new podcast master plan where we expose the secret scheme hatched in the 1970s that legalized corruption for the wealthy with the help of never before reported secret documents and a few special guests we'll look back at where it all began and figure out how to move forward listen and subscribe to Master Plan wherever you get your podcasts. 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