7 books that helped me learn from my kids

Some recommended reading that inspired Don’t Call It Art

Hey y’all,

We are finally one week away from the release of Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again, a book of art lessons I learned from my creative kids. Today I wanted to share a handful of the books that inspired the book:

1. Heidi’s Horse by Sylvia Fein

Sylvia Fein took a break from painting to raise her daughter, Heidi, and wound up with two of the most interesting books about drawing I've ever read.

The first, Heidi’s Horse, published in 1975, is a book collecting Heidi’s drawings from her very first marks at the age of 2 up until the age of 17. The second, First Drawings, published in 1993, attempts to show how the progression of how children draw actually follows the progression of human art over time.

Here’s a page from Heidi’s Horse showing the progression of how she drew horse heads from age 4 to age 11:

Fein’s books — along with the story of Dahlov Ipcar, who was actually the first woman to have a solo show at MoMA thanks to her artist parents who saved her childhood artwork — inspired me to keep close track of what my kids were making.

Both books are, sadly, out-of-print, but you can see more from Heidi’s Horse in my post, “What pictures of horses can teach us about art.”

2. Making Comics by Lynda Barry

Every one of my books has been inspired in some way by Lynda’s work, but this is the first book in which I’ve written about Lynda’s work. (Specifically, Drawbridge, a university program in which she pairs 4-year-olds with PhD students.)

Making Comics incorporates many drawings by such 4-year-olds, and Lynda explains that when she draws with kids, “I don’t say much about drawing and I’m not there as a teacher. To me it’s a language immersion class. Kids speak image.”

Lynda gave me the idea that I could turn my kids into my teachers, along with…

3. Learning by Heart by Corita Kent and Jan Steward

“If you have a child of two or three, or can borrow one, let her give you beginning lessons in looking.” Learning by Heart inspired the “Borrow a Kid!” and “Lessons in Looking” sections in Don’t Call It Art.

“For so many years we have been learning to judge and dismiss—­ I know what that thing is—­ I’ve seen it a hundred times—and we’ve lost the complex realities, laws, and details that surround us,” wrote Kent and Steward. “Try looking the way the child looks—­ as if always for the first time—­ and you will, I promise, feel wider awake.”

Kent also liked to quote the Balinese saying, “We have no art. We do everything as well as we can.”

There’s more over on my blog about how Learning By Heart was written.

4. Moomin by Tove Jansson

When my son Owen was born, all I seemed to be able to read was old collections of Nancy comics. When my son Jules was born, I would lie down and read a few pages of Moomin.

It might sound strange that a fictional comic strip inspired me more than any parenting book, but the world that Jansson depicted in her Moomin comics was really the world and the household full of weirdos that I wanted to live in. (Perhaps the influence of Moomin on my parenting is less strange in the sense that the comics are fairly autobiographical: Jansson’s parents were both artists and she grew up in a bohemian, artistic household.)

5. How Children Learn by John Holt

How Children Learn was my introduction to John Holt. As Cory Doctorow once summarized the book: “Holt's basic thesis is that kids want to learn, are natural learners, and will learn more if we recognize that and let them explore their worlds, acting as respectful co-learners instead of bosses.” 

I went on to read many more of Holt’s books. One of my pandemic projects was reading old issues of Holt’s newsletter Growing Without Schooling and tweeting out my favorite bits.

Funny enough, I don’t think a single quote from Holt or How Children Learn actually made it into Don’t Call It Art! Though one of my favorite lines did serve as a secret sentence for the book: “It is not so much a matter of technique as of spirit.”

6. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write by Sarah Ruhl

I read so many great books about art and motherhood while I was working on Don’t Call It Art — books like Sally Mann’s Hold Still, Jenny Offill’s Dept. Of Speculation, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts —  but I think Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write was my very favorite of the batch for all the interesting ways she depicted how art making and child raising can influence and provide insight into one another:

Theater in its most basic form is a kind of reading aloud. When children are small, we tell them to make a circle and we read to them. When they grow up, we tell them to sit in a corner and read to themselves. In the theater, we ask adults to be children again, to sit in a circle and be read to.

(There’s a great Ruhl line from this book in my deleted zine, “Mothers!”)

7. American Elf: The Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka

I can’t believe these American Elf collections are out-of-print! I was reading James Kochalka’s comic strips about his life with his family way before I had my own, and he planted the seed in my brain that the comic strip is the perfect way to capture some of the one-liners that kids seem to serve up every single day.

His influence got a little scrambled with the comics of my kids I drew in my sketchbooks: the only characters James drew as humans in his strip were his kids, and yet I drew my son Owen as a robot in all my little strips, some of which are collected in the back matter of the book:

James quit sharing the strip in 2012 (the year I became a dad) but he continues to share some strips on his Patreon.

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Okay! Thanks, as always for reading, would love to hear from y’all in the comments:

And please, if you haven’t yet, pre-order Don’t Call It Art! Pre-orders help a ton — they let bookstores and libraries know about interest in the book and they help a book get on the bestseller lists with a big spike from first-week sales.

Thank you for all your support!

xoxo,

Austin