Consider a book's design if you want it to make your creative fires burn.
AI Overview suggests, “simple language, well-structured content, an engaging writing style, and appropriate formatting contribute to readability.”
Author Austin Kleon excels at all three of AI’s measures for readability. His books have exceptionally clean formatting, an engaging but authoritative writing style, straight forward language and content that links perfectly with the table of contents.
My own standard for book design is simply: how much risk of injury is there if I fall asleep while reading it?
Wait, read more to make better art? Heck yeah. Just ask megastar Keth Haring. Oh, wait...
Your imagination change agent library list follows. Counterintuitive perhaps when we’re talking about the visual arts, but for sheer volume and range nothing beats the insights of others when your visual genius is stuck in muck,
Reading creative or creatively reading - doesn’t matter. Bottom line is there are so many titles and ways. What clicks for me may not for you but surely there’s something.
My personal creativity collection includes 10 different titles by almost as many artists. I’ve collected these types of texts almost as long as I’ve been making art. Some I refer to on a regular basis. Some I haven’t cracked since I read them once through, or not. All of them have brought me to a greater understanding of what I want to do, think and say with my art.
My how-to-be-creative library is almost entirely paperbound. Many have driven me back to the studio and towards better art when nothing else could do that.
I’d like to say, “Here’s the one book you’ll want to put under your pillow as the imagination change agent for all your life. As Kristen Wiig says “Sorry.”
Some of my texts have way more annotations than others. Some are more dog-ear loved than others. One includes an illustration of a sheep drawn by my wife who’s mostly a writer. Those are the top titles I know work for me. See if you can find something for you.
Here’s some strong suggestions:
Make Your Creative Fires Burn With This Title
For annotations and flags and dog ears alone Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is the hands down winner among my creativity collection. His subtitle says it all: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.
Pressfield’s focus is on resistance; how we resist being creative and what to do about it. He divides his modest text into three books: Resistance, Combating Resistance and Beyond Resistance. The first two books lay groundwork and are essential for those of us expert at finding ways to avoid the studio including: the garbage, the dishes, the news, my extra long toenails, a psoriasis flareup, etc.
It’s in Book Three, Beyond Resistance that Pressfield reaches into the ether to give artists a path toward creative productivity. He writes, “Dreams come from the Self. Ideas come from the Self. When we meditate, we access the Self.” Meditation is a familiar and common theme for many of my preferred authors. We’ll meet the most unlikely proponent of meditation a couple paragraphs later.
Jerry Saltz Is Truly An Imagination Change Agent
Jerry Saltz ties for first place in my annotations and tabs competition with How To Be An Artist. It includes simple text with an overconfident title but the author’s career as both an artist and an art critic gives this tiny tome weight and gravitas. (He’s actually a very funny, impish sort of guy in his social media posts.)
His book is a scant 125 pages divided into six (not easy but fascinating) steps and 63 insights, some featuring exercises you complete. (Homework is good for you.) The tone of Saltz’s book is nonjudgmental, accessible and intelligent without bending too esoteric
Saltz is a Pulitzer prize winner for art criticism. I have no doubt he’s familiar with esoterica. But his goal seems to be something else. Midwifery perhaps. Saltz, according to the jacket blurb for his book, wants to give artists: “originality, persistence, intuition, knowledge and most of all, self-belief.” Amen. Gimme a heaping tablespoon of that.
This book was so popular in my house my wife bought a copy for her bookshelf and inscribed mine with an adorable ink drawing of a sheep. (Don’t ask) The book is beautifully bound and lavishly illustrated with tons of color plates.
After all the reading and meditating and annotating is done we might be left with the most sage creative advice of all. In a fit of poetic license, a bit of hubris and a dash of larceny allow me to Steal Like an Artist to mash up Jerry Saltz with Steven Pressfield paired up as imagination change agents:
Saltz: “If you’re an aspiring artist, I want you to remember: Nothing happens if you’re not working. But anything can happen when you are.
Pressfield:“When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us...we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.”
Now let’s consider the closest Keith Haring might ever have come to owning a bible: it’s Robert Henri’s “The Art Spirit”. Henri and his book influenced legions of artists including George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Rockwell Kent and of course Keith Haring.
Henri’s book seems as impenetrable as Haring's work was transparent. What Haring wanted to say was right there on the wall, in pictographs for God’s sake.
While Henri describes his outline for The Art Spirit,” as fragments clustered as composition and, “No effort has been made toward the form of a regular book.” Yikes-how very right he is.
As if to double down with his honesty, Henri goes on to acknowledge an “absence of chapters and sections and the general scarcity of heading.” He does generously include an index. Under “Colors” it includes listings for blue, black, yellow, red and white but somehow omits green. Nobody’s perfect.
Still if Haring got where he got with The Art Spirit why would I be without it? Don’t look for structure but do appreciate the insights.
Why Not Steal An Imagination Change Agent?
Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work by Austin Kleon are easily the most practical and specific titles in my arsenal. Combined, they offer the most powerful array of grit-your-teeth-and-do-it suggestions you’ll ever wish guilted you action. Kleon is both a working artist and an author and he’s got all the home remedies for what ails artists.
Kleon’s books are chunky little puzzle solutions to all your creative dilemmas. Steal Like an Artist came out in 2012 and deals primarily with ideas and imagination. It especially honors intuition. As in, if I see something that tingles, I take it and use it regardless of the source.
Steal Like an Artist chapters include: Don’t Wait Until You Know Who You are to Get Started and, The Secret: Do Good Work and Share It With People. In that first chapter, Kleon says, “...it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.”
It wasn’t until I had completed over 30 collages using vintage dental imagery that I realized my inbred taste for dark humor. Much of my current work focuses on the funny side of the Kennedy assasination. Thanks much Austin.
One of the great joys of reading Kleon is that he always gives you a bit of underpinning, a bit of theory or argument to support his recipes for creative success. Kleon’s Show Your Work came out in 2014. In this text he insists we are not lone geniuses working in a dusty attic but members of a creative scene or network. “...creativity is always...a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.”
My own virulent strain of impostor syndrome dictates finding unique solutions to collaboration. Daily walks with a fellow artist living in my neighborhood and frequent contact with online sympaticos seem to do the trick.
I first read The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron almost 30 years ago. I religiously followed her prescribed methods and I’m grateful. The Artist's Way is a three-part palliative for better creative living: daily writing and reading together with frequent artist dates (almost anything that might stir “your creative consciousness”)
I take my own artist dates seriously (you’re not invited and neither is anyone else); On a recent date I spent two hours listening to recorded spiritual music inside an 18th century Spanish mission. Perfect.
I’d like to say I’ve diligently followed the Ms. Cameron coursework for three decades and was recently selected for the 2026 Venice Biennale. Not true on either count.
Creative Fires Burning Still On Mulholland Drive
As I came upon David Lynch’s picture in the back of his book, Catching the Big Fish I witnessed myself making the sign of the cross (I’m a long-lapsed Catholic.) Saint David of Lynch, patron saint of the creatively insane, or something like that.
I’ve watched his film The Art Life at least three or four times and I continue to read and reread his book, Catching the Big Fish. Most of all I meditate every day thanks to his inspiration. And oh what a difference.
He writes, “Life is filled with abstractions and the only way to make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution...intuition can be sharpened or expanded through meditation, diving into the Self.”
I started meditating five years ago, every morning, in my studio, without fail. Just the breath, nothing else as best as I can focus. I have two series of work, both very dark. Those twin veins have yielded countless ideas and 50 plus pieces. I chalk that output up to meditation however incongruous “dark” and “diving into Self” might seem Or, not.
I regularly genuflected before Audrey Flack’s Marilyn (Vanitas) on the landing to the second floor in the University of Arizona Museum of Art. I was a nondegree student at U of A from 1982 to 1983. Admission to the museum was free then.
Only years later did I discover Flack the author. Her, Art and Soul, Notes on Creating fits nicely into a subgenre of creativity texts that excels at a bounty of headings and subheadings, categories and catchphrases. Some are etched now and forever in the art advice canon:
“If you can’t make it good, make it big.
If you can’t make it big, make it red.”
In a sad twist of irony, her final chapter is a day-by-day diary of her experience jurying the National Endowment awards. She describes five days of grueling discernment and hard choices. She rewards herself with a show of ancient Indian sculpture at the National Gallery. The creativity and effort of the artists she witnesses finally releases the tension she’s built up over five days of viewing and judging 35,000 slides of someone else's creativity.
Was the read worth it? Did you learn something? Find something you can use. A suggestion: buy or steal one of the books on my list. DON'T read it. Just skim to annotate it (completely safe and legal.) The act of annotating is utterly creatively, completely individual and by definition, visual.
The assignment is to creatively annotate with pens, pencils, highlighters and stickies a book about creativity without ever actually reading it. How meta is that? And, who knows what might slip into your subconscious?
My list (in no particular order)
Show your Work, Austin Kleon, 2014
Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon, 2012
The Art Spirit, Robert Henri, 1923
The Blank Canvas, Inviting the Muse, Anna Held Audette, 1993
Art and Soul, Notes on Creating, Audrey Flack, 1986
How to Be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, 2020
Catching the Big Fish, David Lynch, 2006
Art and Fear, Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of ARTMAKING, David Bayles and Ted Orland, 1993
The War of Art, Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, Steven Pressfield, 2002
Art is a Way of Knowing, Pat B. Allen, 1995