Books › What It Is
What It Is
208 pages
A vibrant, chaotic scrapbook of memories and prompts that coaxes your inner child out of hiding and hands them a paintbrush.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping inside the brilliant, cluttered, and endlessly fascinating mind of a favorite eccentric art teacher. It is a deeply visual experience, demanding a meandering pace as you pore over pages bursting with neon watercolors, vintage magazine clippings, and handwritten notes. The mood is simultaneously nostalgic and fiercely inspiring, wrapping you in an atmosphere of radical encouragement. Rather than offering rigid rules, the narrative asks profound, playful questions about where ideas come from and why we ever stop drawing. It is a chaotic, beautiful balm for the creatively blocked, designed to delight anyone who wants to bypass their inner critic and rediscover the pure, unadulterated joy of making things just to see what happens.
- Mood
- nostalgic
- inspiring
- dreamlike
- visually chaotic
- Tone
- playful
- encouraging
- inquisitive
- eccentric
- sincere
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- overcoming creative block · childhood memory · the power of play · visual thinking · art as survival
- The writing
- Fragmented, poetic, and handwritten, the text acts as a visual element that dances across densely collaged pages.
- The arc
- Begins with deep, existential questions about memory and imagination, moving toward a joyful, liberating embrace of the creative process.
- Who it's for
- Creatives, blocked artists, and anyone yearning to reconnect with the uninhibited imagination they possessed as a child.
Content notes
- childhood neglect
- family dysfunction
About the book
What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or remember. Bursting with full-colour drawings, comics and collages, autobiographical sections and gentle creative guidance, each page is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: 'The ordinary is extraordinary'. Lynda Barry explores the.......depths of the inner and outer realms of creation and imagination,......where play can be serious,......monsters have purpose and......not knowing is an answer unto itself. How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like?
These types of questions permeate the pages of What It Is, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Her insight and sincerity will tackle the most persistent of inhibitions, calling back every kid who quit drawing to feel alive again at the experiential level. *
"Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+" -Salon
Description from Open Library.
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