Austin Kleon — Lynda Barry on her "Images" class with Marilyn...

…it was an images class, so there were sculptors painters and photographers in the class, and people who drew, and there were only 20 of us. My teacher Marilyn Frasca, her idea was that there is no difference between looking at a picture, making a picture, writing a story, that it’s all about this state of mind, the serial state of mind. I wish she had told me that earlier on, then I would have had a bigger clue.

In order to be in her class we had to do ten finished paintings a week, we had to write five pages a day, we had to memorize poems, and we had to learn how to look at pictures; for instance, the critiques in her class, when somebody would put up their work and nobody was allowed to say anything. We just had to learn how to look at something for 15 minutes and then it got longer to where it was an hour. That will get the frame of mind I was talking about, the thing where you go from looking at something and knowing what it is, to being very bored, to finally the picture looking back at you, where it’s reciprocal.

….Marilyn’s idea was once you understood what it feels like, like the serial, the form you give it is up to you. I was convinced by the end of the two years I studied with her that I could do anything; whether it was writing a novel, or making a painting, or doing a comic strip, or making a play.