Check out a new interview I did with SuperheroYou.com. I’m long-winded so they published it in two parts. Here’s part one and here’s part two.
Able to draw tall buildings in a single book….
Tag: creativity
Take three.
What with this, that, and lots of the other, I haven’t gotten around to telling you about a brand new klass I am teaching in the new Kourse at Sketchbook Skool. So I shall. But first, let me show you a little film about the kourse and its fakulty.
I also wanted to tell you what I was thinking in putting it together. This has actually been harder to do than I thought (the telling, not the putting together). In fact, this is the third film I’ve made on the subject this week and I hated the first two. So this time I shall just turn on the camera and see what comes out. If it’s boring, don’t worry. Polishing, I assure you, is not.
I hope to see you in klass. It begins on April 15th and you can learn more about it here.
Why the World Needs Stretching
Sometimes, I worry that I don’t adequately convey my enthusiasm for the things I truly love. People tell me I am too soft-spoken, too grumpy, too English… Well, I’d like to try to remedy that by telling you about a project I worked hard on and which I think is deserving of your time too.
How to Be Creatively Productive.
Here’s a piece I just wrote for Thought Catalog,
True dat.
Donald Trump. Ben Carson. Bernie Sanders. Microbrews. Artisanal pickles. Documentaries. Memoirs. Ukuleles. Normcore. Etsy. Real Housewives. YouTube. What do they have in common?
A claim to authenticity. Their appeal is a rejection of the cynical, corporate polish of the 21st century and a willingness to show it like it is.
Granted that behind a lot of these ‘authentics’ is the same old cold calculation, cynical manipulation, and ancient biases — but our hunger for them is real.
When everything seems to have passed through Photoshop, Autotune, TelePrompTers, 3D printers, Instagram filters, product placement and GMOs, we come to crave authenticity. We tire of bullshit and hidden agendas. We have all seen the DVDs extras and know how special effects can easily manipulate the truth. And so we prefer politicians who don’t seem like they are. We reject Spiderman VI and Billboard charts and McDonalds breakfasts. We hunger for the truth.
So why is authenticity at such a premium? If people want to wind back the clock, why not just let ’em? What’s the big deal?
Well, authentic authenticity is hard. It’s hard because it’s naked and vulnerable and exposing your warts can cost you dearly. Because you can’t delegate authenticity to consultants. Can’t guarantee its outcome through past success. Can’t slash its costs, can’t ship it overnight, can’t outsource it. Authenticity doesn’t fit neatly in a box so it sends shock waves through the system.
It’s easier to keep to the status quo which gleams and glistens and reflects back a shinier, faster, cheaper world.
But you have a choice. How could committing to authenticity effect your art? Your creative goals? How can you replace perfectionism and self judgement with honesty? How can you avoid succumbing to the artificiality that technology makes easy and instead reveal your soul, share the truth, make something interesting and fresh and honestly you?
Inspiration Monday: Moody Eastern European edition
I am writing this on a train traveling from Prague to Vienna. The trip is very comfortable, the day is sunny, and the Czech countryside unfolds all around us. However, the wifi service is kaput and so I will probably upload this bit of Monday inspiration closer to Tuesday morning. I hope you have been able to hang on, uninspired.
Kids: I’ve spent the past week in Prague, working with students from kindergarten to twelfth grade, and their energy and creativity has inspired me deeply. I don’t pretend to be an art teacher when I visit schools. Kids, especially 2nd to 4th graders are so enthusiastic about drawing and they have so many interesting ways of tackling drawing from observation. I show them a bunch of my own sketchbook pages for inspiration, give them some minimal direction, and then stand back.
I drew with several hundred kids over the week and I think we were all surprised at what they made. Kids are perfectly willing to draw from reality, even kindergartners. They are capable of noticing enormous detail and of the discipline to sit quietly with pen in hand for up to an hour. It’s pretty amazing to see a room full of 7 year-olds staring at their shoes with wrapt attention.
Their creative energy and fearlessness inspired their teachers and parents too. I heard lots of stories of little kids insisting their entire families draw together, of unused sketchbooks being taken down and filled up, of ancient fears being addressed and overcome. Having an entire community start to express their creativity together is powerful and infectious.
If you haven’t drawn with a kid recently, give it a go.
Terezin: In 1941, the Nazis set ups a transit concentration about 30 miles from Prague. Terezin was a propaganda project, a “model ghetto,” used to con the Red Cross into believing all was well, that the Jews enjoyed self-government and idyllic conditions. The reality was different — a way-station en route to the death camps that processed 140,000 Jews from all over Europe, many of whom were children.
The Jewish self-government tried to create an alternate reality for the children, shielding them from awareness of their fate, and turned several of the dormitories into recreation centers. The Nazis forbade organized education of Jews, but the inmate were able to offer drawing lessons which they believed were key to knowledge and communication skills.
Rather than be drilled with formal drafting skills, the children were encouraged to express themselves, their memories, fantasies, and fears. They explored morality, the battle between good and evil, folk tales and biblical stories that could serve as moral examples. They documented their personal histories, their experiences in the camp, their visions of the future. Drawing was their only therapeutic outlet, the only way to cope with the unimaginable situation they and their families were in.
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a Viennese painter and inmate of the camp, became the primary driver behind this art program. She later volunteered to go to Auschwitz to join her husband, first hiding 4500 drawings made by the children of Terezin. She and most of the children did not survive the war, however their art lives on in the Jewish Museum in Prague. It’s a fairly awful museum, poorly presented and documented, but the children’s art outshines this dismal presentation.
For me, seeing this work, after a week spent with healthy, happy, free children, was a transformative experience. This was the most powerful example I’ve seen of the power of art to shine light on the darkest corners, to provide meaning, education, and hope, despite calamity.
Art is not a luxury, a ‘nice to have’ — it’s central to what it means to be human. If your children or grandchildren are not getting enough encouragement to make art in school, find a way to keep their imaginations alive, not just on the screen of an iPad but with a pen, a box of crayons and a sketchbook of their own.
Praha: Prague was the only major city in Europe not to be bombed during WWII. So, thankfully, a thousand years of wonderful architecture has been preserved there for me (and you) to draw. I didn’t have nearly enough time to draw all I would have liked but I did get a chance to record some of the amazing cathedrals, the castle, and the rooftops sprung fresh from Tim Burton’s imagination.
If you are any sort of urban sketcher, I urge you and your pen to hop on a flight to Prague, especially when the weather is nice (as it was, unseasonably so, much of the time I was there). The views are great and the beer is cheap.
Flaesh: Most of the museums of Prague were frankly a disappointment. They featured huge slabs of dry explanatory text in microscopic fonts, undistinguished objects mixed in with very occasional treasures, and staff that were trained in the Moscow DMV sometimes in the early 1970s.
However in the Galerie Rudolfinum, we saw a wonderful show of a half dozen contemporary women artists, including favorites like Marlene Dumas, Kiki Smith and Lousie Bourgeois.
Two artists that are fairly new to me were Tracey Emin and Berlinde De Bruyckere. Emin’s work is strongly autobiographical, confessional and sexual. She’s an extraordinary craftsman — there are pieces made of neon, several of the drawings were stitched into the canvas, others that seemed to be watercolors were actually woven tapestries.
De Bruyckere makes work that is monumental and grotesque. My favorite is what seemed to be a collapsed, flayed horse stuffed into a large wooden cabinet with an old Dutch label, evoking the recurring butchery of war, colonialism, suffering, loneliness and death. The work is unapologetic and blunt. Seeing it in this spacious, baroque museum, so unexplained and stark, moved me almost as much as that of the children of Terezin.
My inspiration this week is admittedly dark. Maybe it’s being in this Medieval city, surrounded by magnificent but unattended churches, the specters of WWII and the Iron Curtain still so present. Maybe it’s the autumn skies, the collapsing Jewish cemetery, an excess of Pilsner Urquell, the profusion of consonants in the Czech language. I am having a wonderful and inspired time — but my palette is indigo and umber.
Cool.
I’m spending this week in school. Surrounded by teenagers, I am transported back to my own school days, back to a time when cool was the rule. I came into high school decidedly uncool, with my charcoal smear mustache, fresh off the boat from three years in a small Israel town. I knew nothing about pop culture, sports, music, how to dress or swear. My mother still cut my hair.
By the time I graduated, I was cool—ish. By day I was a good student. I starred in the school play, I edited the paper, I illustrated the yearbook. At night, my friends and I were automatically waved past the velvet rope at Studio 54. We were regulars at CB’s, Mudd Club, Area, Heat, Danceteria, and the Roxy. We hung out with junkies in Alphabet City and smoked dope in the theatre balconies of Time Square. We went to outlaw parties on the High Line, thirty years before it became a tourist attraction, climbing the rusty pylons to drink from brown bags on the crumbled tracks. New York in the ’70’s, it turned out, was cool as hell and some of it rubbed off on me.
When I graduated from college and came back to New York to enter the work world, I was the new kid all over again. I soon discovered there was hierarchy of cool among ad agencies. Ally, Scalli, Della Femina, Lord Geller and Ammirati ruled the early ’80’s only to be eclipsed by newcomers like Riney, Hill Holiday, Kirshenbaum, Deutsch, and the coolest of the cool, Chiat Day and Weiden & Kennedy.
I just assumed I wasn’t cool enough for any of these top shops and worked for the intellectual agency instead, Ogilvy & Mather. Still, I always looked with dorkish yearning at the cool guys. It seems that to work on Apple or Nike required some chromosome I was missing. I didn’t call people ‘bruh’, didn’t have any tattoos or a soul patch or a pony tail, hadn’t backpacked through Morocco or Burma, didn’t own a black lab with a bandana or a Harley. Some magic was working these super-cool places, magic I wasn’t privy too.
Recently I met a bunch of people who worked at Weiden in that period, thanks to my girlfriend, Jenny — who’s one of them. Nice guys, smart enough, but not another species. They may have felt little more empowered to take risks, more likely to see off-center ideas, more free in some ways, but they put their black Levi’s on one leg at a time, same as me.
I’ve had the same experience with artists I admire. People who I thought had drunk some magic elixir, or carved their own pens out of logs of Brazilian Zebra wood which they’d felled themselves, people who seemed to be gods but were just marginally cooler and freer and looser and are confident than I was. With a little effort, a little willpower, I could see that I could be as cool as Robert Crumb or James Jean or Lapin or Tommy Kane.
I look at the high schools kids I worked with this morning. The coolest ones aren’t the ones with silly haircuts or eyeliner or extreme clothing or the outline of cigarette packs in their pockets. They’re the one who are open, confident, curious … themselves. Assuming you are style handicapped, ungifted, uncoordinated, hopeless, backward, well, that’s just your monkey being uncool.
Grace and aplomb can be yours. Just take a deep breath and walk into the room like everyone’s your pal. Draw that same way. With clear eyes and an open mind. With confident strokes, no matter how wonky. With a willingness to fail and an eagerness to learn. Laugh at yourself, take a chance, keep coming back, and, lo and behold, you’ll be super-cool.
The Sin of WRATH
For the first half of my career in advertising, I would often have irrational feelings of anger during a creative briefing. I would resent being given the assignment. Then I would be pissed off that I had to sit in a conference room with loads of other creative people while the strategists took us through the brief.
I simmered with impatience. I would ask critical, acerbic questions. I would strain against the deadline.
The monkey would tell me that the people briefing us were idiots, that their insights were lame or wrong, that I already knew more than they did about the subject, that it was wrong that we creatives had to compete for the assignment, the playing field wasn’t level, that the whole project was a waste of my time, blah blah and blah.
It was pretty crazy — and incomprehensible.
With time, I became sufficiently self-aware to identify this pattern and dampen it. But I can still feel the impulse when it comes time to get creative feedback or in the final days before a big presentation — a frothing resentment with no legitimate cause.
This reaction maybe in the minority but it’s not unique to me, alas. I often hired great creative people who would have explosions of rage at the most inappropriate times.
What is the fear that drives it? Vulnerability at having to show one’s ideas where they might be rejected? Of being misunderstood? Of losing control somehow?
Recently, I read of a study in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that examined the effects of anger on creativity — and found that it could actually be helpful to the creative process.
Anger provides two benefits: an energy boost in the form of an adrenaline rush which focuses the mind on the problem at hand. Secondly, anger makes your thinking irrational — which can jolt you out of creative ways of thinking. In a paroxysm of rage, you may spit out some crazy truth that makes a wild and fruitful association.
Another study found that many creative people begin their days with negativity and then shift to positive feelings. By channeling the negative energy into their work, they find sharper focus and productivity. If you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, try channeling your bad mood into energy to solve a creative problem.
But proceed with caution for anger is still a sin. Its benefits dissipate fairly quickly. And once the red mists blow away, you may find you’ve alienated potential partners, wasted time and resources, derailed the process, and damaged your reputation. And if people dislike and fear you, they are a lot less likely to be objective about the merit of your ideas.
Being a genius doesn’t excuse being an asshole.
The last in a series on the seven deadly creative sins.
The Sin of SLOTH
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a whole but, (sigh) I’ve been tired, I’m sooo busy, I feel kinda run down, the World Series was on, I had Halloween candy to eat…
The monkey loves a good excuse for not doing what you really oughta (and wanna) get done. Maybe your small reserve of creative energy is being tapped only to make those excuses.
There’s no real shortcut to drawing, bestselling, Sgt. Peppering, or making a perfect soufflé.
It’s easy to tell yourself that you just don’t have talent. But the people you admire didn’t get to where they are just through some God-given gift or amazing luck. They worked their asses off. They sweated over their sketchbooks, threw away draft after draft, built their networks, filled their wells of inspiration, and tried, failed, tried, failed, tried, failed until their humps were busted — and only then did they became overnight successes.
When the Beatles played in Hamburg, they did six 90-minute sets a night. Lennon said: “Every song lasted twenty minutes and had twenty solos in it. That’s what improved the playing.”
Before Picasso sent Les Demoiselles D’Avignon to the framer, he made over 700 sketches and studies in preparation.
Gone With the Wind was rejected by 38 publishers. The 39th sold 20 million copies.
And Isaac Asimov wrote five hundred books. And had cool sideburns.
Sowwy. There’s no real shortcut to drawing, bestselling, Sgt. Peppering, or making a perfect soufflé. You gotta break eggs and you gotta scramble.
You have talent. Or maybe you don’t. Whatevs. But don’t let excuses and torpor and depression and sorrow and keep you from where you want to go. The world needs what you will dream up. Your contribution is anticipated and will be valued.
It could seem easier to stay on the couch with a beer in one hand and a remote in the other — until you go to the john and catch sight of yourself in the mirror.
Failure may scare you into not trying. Sloth should scare you more.
Just do it.
Sixth in a series on seven deadly creative sins.
Inspiration Monday: Filling the well.
Several experiences topped up my well of inspiration. Maybe they’ll feed you too.
I’ve been reading Brian Grazer’s book, A Curious Mind. Grazer is a mega-successful movie producer (Splash, Apollo 13, A Beautiful 
Mind, etc) and he identifies curiosity as the key to his success, his creativity and a happy and engaged life. By having an open and enquiring mind, he has been comfortable with risk taking and exploration. Curiosity is the spark that kindles new creative explorations.
If you can look at learning a new skill, like, say, drawing, as a thing to learn about and explore, rather than an grim evaluation of yourself and your skills, you will make eager progress. If you are genuinely curious to learn about people, you will search out new connections and ask questions without preconceptions. If you are curious, you will not let the past hold you back. If you live a curious life, you will fill your head with a rich soup of influences, ideas and inspiration. You will make new connections which will lead to new ideas and creations.
As Glazer puts it, “Life isn’t about finding the answers. It’s about asking the questions.”
Last week, Jenny and I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see Refuse the Hour, William Kentridge’s multimedia chamber opera. We went with zero knowledge about what the piece was about (Jenny impulsively bought the tickets on craigslist at the last minute). I vaguely knew of Kentridge as an artist but was surprised to think he had made a stage work. Turns out he has a rich resumé in many forms and has even staged operas at La Scala, the mecca of grand opera.
Refuse the Hour is about his lifelong fascination with time, its plasticity and relativity, and the piece brimmed with fresh insights. It combines a poetic script, incredible vocal performances enhanced with audio processing, mechanical musical sculptures, dance, an orchestra playing modified instruments and film projections that layer drawings over performances
What I took away from the evening was the incredible act of creative collaboration between a score of enormously talented people. The program fairly bulged with accomplishment. Each person — the dramaturg, the choreographer, each musician, the singers — had paragraph after paragraph of accomplishments. Honestly, any one of them could have been the headliner, but they all worked together in a joyous harmony. There were so many unusual intersections between the forms, it couldn’t possibly have come from a single creative mind.
One singer took a refrain from the script Kentridge read, and turned it into a aria running up and down the scales. Another singer then sang the same aria backwards into a megaphone, perfectly mimicking all of the reversed breaths and shifts. Then an artist played an array of airpumps venting through brass horns. Next a tuba and a modified trombone took over. Meanwhile, a flickering projection of Kentridge’s hand turning the pages of a sketchbook was layered on top of a couple fighting in a stark painted kitchen set in gorgeously coordinated graphic costumes. I could go on and I would never approximate the tapestry of ideas and skills on display.
Above all, the experience urged me to think of new ways I can collaborate with others in such an open and generous way. The power of Ours over Mine is immense and exciting.
I am also reading Elizabeth Gilberts’ latest book: Big Magic. The author of Eat Pray Love has become somewhat of a self-help guru and is now focussed on thinking about the creative process and how to overcome fear.
I really like the book. Liz has a wonderful, chatty writing style, confessional and inspiring. I was particularly caught up with one notion: that ideas are a life form that inhabit the world just like dogs and walruses and have a single purpose — to be made manifest. They appear to us creators and it is up to us to shun them or to adopt them.
If we do take them on, we now have a responsibility to show up and do the work to make them come to life. If we fail in holding up our end, the ideas will wither and then slip away. Ultimately it will then appear to someone else. Drag your feet if you must, but don’t be surprised if ‘your’ idea eventually blossoms attached to another artist’s name.
I love this idea. It takes away the pressure of judgment, of self-evaluation, and replaces it with a spark which it is up to us to kindle. We don’t own the idea. We are simply its collaborator. Liz’s perspective turns the wasteful drama of self flagellation into a joyous, if sweaty, dance.
What have you read, seen, experienced, or thought of recently that could inspire me and others? Please share your discoveries and help fill my well with inspiration.
Danny Gregory 