The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – What Artists Do by Leonard Koren

Leonard Koren’s What Artists Do reads less like a conventional handbook and more like a pocket philosopher’s lecture delivered in fragments. The book is compact, aphoristic, and intentionally spare — a series of short meditations on the activities, habits, anxieties, and tiny triumphs that make up an artist’s working life. Koren does not attempt a manifesto; instead he offers a plurality of observations, each one meant to be chewed on, returned to, or ignored according to temperament. The result is a book whose value is not in the breadth of its argument but in the velocity of its insights.

Summary and surface structure

Structurally the volume favours the fragment over the treatise. Paragraph-length reflections, brisk declarative sentences, and occasional anecdotal asides replace systematic exposition. This form mirrors the subject: art-making itself is episodic, often accidental, and rarely governed by grand theory. Koren’s entries function like studio notes or marginalia — small tools for thinking-in-practice rather than comprehensive prescriptions.

Major themes

Several recurring motifs animate the text:

• Practice as ritual: Koren repeatedly returns to the discipline of showing up. The emphasis is not on genius but on repetition, attention to routine, and the slow accrual of competence.
• Economies of attention: He insists that making is a redistribution of attention — what artists do is decide where to place scarce cognitive and perceptual resources.
• Humility and smallness: Echoing the aesthetics he’s long associated with (notably wabi-sabi), Koren privileges modesty, the imperfect, and the quietly finished over spectacle.
• Ambivalence toward success and commerce: Rather than moralize, Koren describes the compromises, negotiations, and strategies artists use to survive materially while attempting to preserve integrity.
• The quotidian as material: He repeatedly argues that the ordinary — a habit, a refusal, a single mark — is the raw material of an artistic life.

These themes are not developed into a singular theory but recur like leitmotifs, each reinforcement giving the book the tone of a practised bedside conversation with a seasoned maker.

Style and rhetorical method

Koren’s style is economical and epigrammatic. Short, pointed sentences carry weight; paradox and counterintuitive claims are his chief rhetorical tools. The aphoristic mode is well suited to a book about practice because it mimics the studio’s episodic pedagogy: a single remark, observed at the right time, can alter practice. The downside of this compression is inevitable — some statements read like provocations that demand expansion. But Koren seems to court that provocation: the text’s omissions are often productive, inviting readers to test or contradict the claim in the workroom itself.

Formally, the book trades sustained argument for associative logic. References to design, Japanese aesthetics, and a broad, undogmatic knowledge of craft appear throughout, giving the prose an intercultural and intermedia sensibility. If there is a scholarly charge here, it is lateral rather than linear: Koren collects resonances and lets them do the persuasive work.

Strengths

The book’s greatest strength is its utility. Read in the studio, in a lull between projects, or at the start of a new season, these reflections function as corrective prompts — reminders to slow down, to choose, and to accept failure as material. Koren writes with authority born of practice rather than theory: he speaks like someone who has inhabited the condition he describes. The pieces that linger longest are the quiet ones — short admonitions about patience, the humility of revision, the discipline of attention.

Limitations and critique

Because of its fragmentary mode, the book occasionally feels uneven. Some entries sparkle with specificity and psychological insight; others can seem abstractly aphoristic, as if the thought hasn’t been fully worked through. Readers seeking a manual for technique or sustained cultural criticism may find the book wanting. There is also a risk — inherent in the aphoristic — of mistaking portability for depth: a line that reads well on the page may be harder to enact in practice than Koren implies.

Significance and who should read it

What Artists Do is less a definitive statement about art than a companion for the practicing artist and the teacher who wants pithy prompts for studio conversation. It rewards slow reading and iterative consultation: its claims are small, testable, and best judged by whether they change what you do at the workbench. Scholars interested in contemporary studio cultures, pedagogy, or the vernacular philosophy of making will find Koren’s voice a useful corrective to more programmatic takes on creativity.

Leonard Koren’s volume is modest in scale but generous in use. It is most successful where it stays closest to the tactile — to habit, attention, and the quiet economies by which an artist sustains a life of making. As a collection of short meditations it performs a service often overlooked by larger theoretical tomes: it returns art to the studio and asks, insistently but gently, what you are doing right now. Read it as an intermittent mentor rather than a formal theorist, and it will repay you by changing the way you begin your next session at the easel, the page, or the bench.