I'm going to steal

Great artists steal.

A lot of people said it. Picasso, Bansky, the characters on Slings and Arrows, Austin Kleon. Me.

I've been perusing the archives of Austin's blog. It's great. This guy blacks out the large portion of New York Times articles, leaving only a few scattered words that form poems. He's got a book out on Amazon called Newspaper Blackout.

Here are a couple of my favorites:
"How To Be An Artist"

"Overheard On The Titanic"

Yesterday, Austin provided a snapshot of a recent presentation: "How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me). This post spread across Twitter like a zombie invasion.

I follow different art sectors. There's my Literary Peeps and the Theatre Folk (and everything in between). It was really neat to see how it spread across the web (and cross over from medium to medium). And this morning, the head of my soon-to-be acting program sent an email with the link to a bunch of folks.

For some reason, the resonance and sharing has affected me. It's great advice. It's comforting. It makes me want to do more. But it doesn't have to be polished. It can be rough, and no one has to see it.

Going through the archives, I kept thinking, I want to doodle and sketch more! Then, I realized I have about 5 different journals that have scattered notes and doodles. Heck, I even have a little Moleskine notebook that has some sketches. Perhaps I'll aim to be more deliberate about that. We'll see.

My friend Kate spent the whole month of March drawing. (If I had her blog URL handy, I'd post it in a heartbeat, but it gets sent to my Google Reader and...excuses, excuses, I know)

I love surrounding my world with creatives and artists. It's an awesome thing.