Category: Advice & answers

Got a question, an issue, a dilemma, a gripe? Here’s my response.

Why?

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[<em>Seth Apter of</em> The Altered Page<em> is conducting a </em><a href=”http://thealteredpage.blogspot.com/2010/07/buried-treasure-2010.html&#8221; target=”_blank”><em>Buried Treasure</em></a><em> hunt and encouraged bloggers to resurrect one of their favorite long ago posts. I like this one. Next, back to the normal sturm and drang of the present.</em>]</p>

Danny,
The moment you get up to get your sketchbook to draw, why do you do it? What makes you want to make a sketch your sketchbook? Do you do it for you or does knowing other people will want to see it get you to do it? Is it an obsession? I don’t understand drawing constantly and not hanging it up unless it is a preliminary drawing for a project. If you are accomplished at drawing anything, why do it over and over?
Still in a rut and still depressed and with much gratitude for you,
A________

Gee whiz, Annette, you do sound like you’re in a funk.
Why whistle in the shower?
Why cook a new recipe for your family?
Why tell a joke?
Why put an outfit together?
Why style your hair?
Why arrange some flowers in a vase?
Why read a novel?
Why watch one movie instead of another?
Why not wear a uniform?
Or eat the same Value Meal at McD’s every day?
Why not shave your head?
Why not get a job at the DMV?
Come on outta the rut. It’s Springtime!
Or do you need to know why the bulbs are pushing out daffodils?

Your pal,
Danny Gregory

[Originally published on: Jul 19, 2008 @ 0:01]

Blue Skies

dannygregory2 Comments


From a comment submitted re. my last post.
What is creativity? Creativity is the ability to come up with productive, enterprising ideas and work that, at the very least, should have aesthetic, if not monetary value. It’s all very well to say that creativity should exist for its own sake; for enabling the self to be conscious of the here and now; but how could you possibly remain calm and poised enough to achieve that state, if your so-called creative work merely represents your inability to produce anything more than eyesores?
Your book, ‘Creative License’, aims to rid people like me of this inconvenient truth, but I’m afraid it fails to do so. I attempted at your EDM group’s weekly assignments one challenge a day, everyday for the past week, struggling to keep my inner critic down and concentrating hard and long so that I may to produce something half-way decent, but the best I have come up with so far is a deep lengthwise scratch in frustration down a page of the Moleskine I’d bought after months of guilt at such indulgence.
I doubt you could really help, but it would be interesting to see what you have to say for such problems.
— Blue Skies

Image
“A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.” — Shostakovich
Dear Blue Skies:
I’m sorry you are so frustrated with your efforts. I’d suggest you worry less about aesthetics and persevere. The fact is, your desire to make ‘something half way-decent’ is your Achilles heel right now and your harsh inner critic is taking advantage of it.

Spend another week just drawing the same thing over and over. Draw it, turn the page and draw it again, A bowl of fruit, a shoe, a picture of yourself, whatever. Again and again. Don’t look at your work, don’t judge it, just draw and draw.

If your inner critic is jabbering in your ear, blast music.

I know you don’t trust me but heed just this: if you draw a lot you will improve your drawing. It may take longer than you’d like but it will happen.

Aesthetics do not matter at this point. I know you don’t believe this either but it’s true. You are learning how to drive, not how to win the Indy 500. And there will be rewards. Every so often a line an angle, maybe a whole drawing will strike you as not quite so awful. And that feeling will happen more and more.

Force yourself to do it on a schedule so your inner critic can’t talk you out of it each day. Twenty minutes after breakfast, forty five before bed, whatever.

It may sound like bullshit, but your inner critic is the one that is the one convincing you that the whole enterprise is a waste of time. But it is wrong.

Frustration is natural but irrelevant at this point. You are not and are not going to make anything frame-able or even pleasing at this point. That’s not the point. Work out, build your muscles, feel the rhythm and only then run a race. So your inner critic is right: everything you are doing is crap. That’s no reason to stop.

So go on, right now, get off the computer and just draw some object. Don’t think too hard about what it is, just draw it. Then turn the page and do it again.

Don’t think of why I’m wrong. Just do it.

Thanks.

Your pal,
Danny Gregory

PS For more of this sort of useless advice, read on.

Paint it blue

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A recent email:
Hi Danny,
Do you think being creative and artistic makes a person more depressed or prone to depression? I read a book about this a long time ago. They actually used Jonathan Winters as an example of the creative mind and artist and his bipolar disorder. Something about how being creative taps into the same part of the brain as the emotional area.
 I think that being creative makes one more sensitive which could enhance one’s tendency for depression but that could also translate into increased optimism. I’ve found that focusing on art has shown me the beauty of the world in the face of calamity. I guess everyone’s chemistry is different.
Next question: Do you believe that sketching everyday makes you more conscious and in the moment? (I'm talking more like what the Buddha states about it.) I do seem to remember Dan Price talking about this also.
 As I’ve written in my last two books, I know that drawing is a powerful form of meditation and very definitely enhances one’s awareness of the Now.
I guess I'm just curious if doing art everyday creates a more conscious, but also a more likely to be depressed person?
 I understand the theorem you are testing here: a) Drawing makes you more sensitive so therefore b) more sensitivity leads to more depression. I know the first part is true, but is the second? And the sort of sensibility one develops through drawing is as much about knowing the outside world as it is one’s inner state, in fact more so. I find that when I draw my brain sort of goes on hold, that the things agitating me recede as I dwell in the moment.
I believe that making art and, importantly, sharing art with other people, enhances my view of the everyday and my positive outlook. I know that I can feel down some days and not even want to draw but that if I kick my butt into doing it it usually makes me feel better. Do I think that making art can drive one deeper into depression? From my limited experience, no. There are certainly many depressed, even deeply depressed people in the history of art but I don’t know that they constitute a disproportionate part of the overall community of art-makers vs. the general community.

Being neither a psychologist nor a depressive, I invite ask any readers with a POV to comment on this topic.

The Mouse Race

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In most normal parts of the world, when children graduate from their local middle school (also known as intermediate school or junior high school), they go onto their local high school. Their school choice is pretty much set by their address. New York City, however, given its position as most extraordinary city in the solar system, has to have a far more complex and stressful solution.
Jack, who is now 13, has to submit almost two dozen choices for school next year.
First of all, we had to decide if he should continue to go to private school or return to the public school system. If we had chosen the former, he’d have to take a very long multiple choice math and reading exam, then write essays and be interviewed at however many schools we had visited and thought good candidates. Then, if we he was accepted at one, we would spend over $100,000 to make sure he got a high school diploma.
Because we’ve opted to send him to public school. his choices are multiplied. First we had to go through a directory of NYC High schools that is over 600 pages long, listing choices from the FDNY High School for Fire and Life Safety to the Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports, from the EL Puente Academy for Peace and Justice to the School for the Future.
Patti, Jack and I, collectively and separately, have gone on scores of school tours, grilled acquaintances for inside info, read books, articles and websites, and finally narrowed down on our list to the mandatory top 12 schools. That’s right — everyone who applies to NYC public high school must rank their top dozen choices to get into even one.
Some of the schools are really amazingand we are so lucky to have them as options (we visited one that just got 12 million bucks from Bill and Melinda Gates, another which takes the kids on trips to Europe) while others are scary and ringed with metal detectors and classrooms full of hooligans and pre-cons.
There’s more. New York also has a group of “Specialized” High schools that includes schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science that are among the very best schools in the country. To even be considered for admission to these schools, Jack had to study for several months and then, last weekend, along with 25,000 other students, took a three hour test with a few insanely hard questions (in helping him prepare for this test I have had to take a nightmarish stroll down memory lanes to my dusty repository of algebra and geometry, knowledge I haven’t accessed once since Carter was in the White House). He also took yet another test for entrance to Bard, which covers all of high school and the first two years of college before the students turn eighteen.
If all all of this sounds like I am a neurotic, over achieving yuppie parent, I promise you, we are merely average in this city. As soon as you enter the maelstrom of high school selection, you inevitably are faced with all these choices and feel you must at least do what you can to give your kid the best options. And, because you have to rank those twelve schools without knowing whether your kid will get his first choice or his twelfth, you must get somewhat involved and get the lay of the land. Every one does it, from bus drivers in Staten Island to investment bankers in Brooklyn to short order cooks in the Bronx. If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere. Otherwise, move to New Jersey (shudder).
Alright, I hear you wondering, so what does all this have to do with drawing?
Well, about a dozen of the schools in town are art schools of one kind of another. Most seem to be training people who will end up in making mechanicals or painting signs, anything to divert talented kids who would otherwise be spraying graffiti everywhere. We checked out a couple of these schools and they seemed quite grim, with lousy facilities, unimaginative teachers and slack-jawed students. One school, however, LaGuardia High School of Music and Performing Arts has been top Jack’s list for a while. The guitar player from his band was admitted last year and he raves about it. LaGuardia was the basis for the movie and TV show “Fame” (“I’m gonna live forever…) and it full of amazing singers, dancers, musicians, actors and artists. Each year thousands of the most talented kids in the most talented town audition for entry. Less than 10% get in.
Jack has been working hard on his portfolio for the art program. He has to submit fewer than twenty mounted pieces and then take a test: drawing a figure from life, a still from memory and a pastel painting form his imagination.
Jack loves to draw and had filled many sketchbooks with masterpieces. However, he has never really taken much in the way of academic art and usually resists formal teaching. For his application, however, he has had to sit down and really concentrate on the sort of art neither of us particularly love to make. He has drawn long careful portraits of Patti and me, has drawn a range of still-lifes in various media, had drawn urnban landscapes, done some watercolors and has even attended four hour life drawing studio classes with me, sticking it out for the whole session (no nudes, alas).
I am amazed at his commitment and at the strength of his drawings, I had neither the ability ntr the commitment at his age.
The question of course is, will he get in? And the next question is, if he does, should he spend this much time on art? That’ss an interesting question coming form me — I have always bemoaned my own lack of formal training and would personally love to go to art school. But Jack is also a very good student, getting As and B+s in every other subject and we are concerned with whether the academics at LaGuardia will be enough. The fact is, other schools offer better social studies and writing and math programs, no question. But he loves to draw… Well, we’ll see what’s what this spring when the decisions are made by the Board of Ed and we learn the options
Meanwhile, I am posting the pieces he has made for his portfolio. Would you accept him?

Jack Tea’s Portfolio gallery

How to avoid having your Creative License revoked.

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In the EDM group, a member recently posted the following:

” … I recently read, I forgot where, that gimmicky [drawing] methods, e.g. left hand work, blind contours, upside down, etc, is a not legitimate way to produce a finished, repeat finished, work. Meaning, I can understand
It is a great practice skill sharpener. And yet I would probably be willing to agree that unusual limiting techniques are a bit gimmicky for finished art. But yet, some of the great pieces of history appear exactly as though one were altering his or her usual perceptions and ability. So how do you do produce unusual art? Without gimmicks?”
–Michael, Boston, MA

To which I responded:

Dear Michael:

I believe that you are referring to the Artists and Illustrators Code that was recently revised in the MCLXII International Convocation of the Art and Creativity Authority (CACA) held in The Hague last November.
In Section 73B, article 14, it clearly states:
“…gimmicky methods, e.g. left hand work, blind contours, upside down, etc, is a not legitimate way to produce a finished, repeat finished, work…”
It goes on to stipulate:
“All drawings must be made in spiral bound books clearly labeled on the cover as “Drawing paper”. They may be made only with a lead pencil, not to exceed 3H, and erasures must be neatly and completely done.”
“Any person or persons working with art materials must work only with in the domains of their licensed class:
To wit:
Doodlers: may only draw with ballpoint pen on lined paper intended for class or meeting notes.
Incompetents: may not draw anything ever.
Sunday painter: may only work within the confines of authorized painting and drawing classes in a local junior college, community center or otherwise sanctioned facility and overseen by a bad-tempered and inattentive disillusioned Class 3 watercolorist.
Art School Graduate: Must have completed certificate and must then have spent a minimum of five years working in an art-unrelated field: video store, coffee shop, falafel stand, ad agency. Many not produce any art of any consequence ever again.
Genius: Must be represented by a major gallery, have been on the cover of Art Forum at least twice, and been interviewed by Morley Safer at least once. Must acknowledge and yet in some cute and non-threatening way challenge the current Art establishment. All works must sell for a minimum of five figures.

All works not adhering to these regulations may not be sold, framed or enjoyed in any way under penalty of law.”

I assume that all members of this group are aware of and operating within these international authorized rules. Failure to do so will mean immediate and humiliating expulsion from the community and confiscation of all art supplies.

Thanks for your continuing cooperation. These rules are made for the enjoyment of all.

Your favorite art authority,
Danny

Bill's conundrum

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From a recent email exchange with Bill, a reader:

Hey Danny:

I have a real conundrum.
After a few years pursuing other dreams (but still keeping my artistic feet wet). I ramped back up my freelance illustration pursuits. With my website up and loaded with samples I began sending out my promotional material. It has been a year now and I have received only a few nibbles. That being said my portrait business has really picked up.

Here is my dilemma. To me. portraits have always felt like an artistic parlor trick. Sure I can render a portrait to look like your photo but why the heck do you want me to you already own the picture. I just feel like if I let the portrait business take over I will lose my illustration goals.

My problem is I owe it to my wife and son to make more money. I know it sounds odd but my illustrations make me feel like an artist and my portraits make me feel like a whore. What should I do?

Bill

Dear Bill:

I think your issue is less about practicality and more about how you define yourself. The reality is that there are illustrators who feel like whores because they are working for big corporations and making art that will be trashed at the end of the month and wish they could do work for people who would cherish and frame their art.

Not to be harsh, but I urge you to get over your self and focus instead on being as productive as you can. It doesn’t mater if you’re an artist or an illustrator or a hack or a genius. Just take it day-by-day, make art for those who want it and keep moving. While your drawing someone’s portrait, see if you can leverage the connection and make more business for yourself. Then think of who else you can send promotional stuff to.

And think about the promotion stuff you send out. Is it really special? Is it something an art director will just toss in a drawer? Are you giving them something that’s of value and memorable? And are you …

getting back to them to remind them who you are? Is your illustration outstanding in some way? Are you targeting the right people? You seem to work mainly in pen and ink. Have you targeted newspapers? Can you get a regular gig in a local paper? Does your website showcase your work as well as possible? Did you just put it up and figure it would have to do? Do your refresh it? It seems to me that it’s a little passive and asks the visitor to do the work with tiny thumbnails. It also keeps reminding me that your work is for sale. Woo me a little first before waving the’ for sale’ sign.

You are a creative guy. Apply that creativity to leveraging every possible aspect of what you do. Forget about your own label (artists, illustrator, diaper changer, whatever) and do all you can to make other people yearn to work with you. Maybe you should do cartoons, Christmas cards, a children’s book, and give them out free to prospects.

You have a lot going for you. Don’t limit it in any way. Embrace opportunities and keep making stuff.

Hope I haven’t kicked your ass too hard but I know you can do it. I look forward to hearing how it works out.

Your pal,
Danny
Danny:

Thanks for your thoughts. I appreciate the kick in the ass…. As for my portraits, I guess I treat myself harshly in this area. My first paid illustration was a portrait and they come kinda easy to me. They just never seemed valid from a personal artistic standpoint. My portraits are oil painted or pencil and my illustrations are pen and ink. For some reason I have always felt more valid doing the pen and ink work. It’s a strange battle that I have been dealing with since high school (I am 38 now). I guess I get hung up on the fact that most people have preconceived notions of what a portrait should be. If people were willing to accept a more creative portrait like the ones you have been doing I would feel more fulfilled. I have been watching how after you went through your creative rough patch this summer you came back with both guns blazing. If I could somehow marry my two styles to a point where both of my needs were met I would feel better. …

Bill

Dear Bill:

Portraits are endlessly fascinating. These days I am looking at lots of them and drawing inspiration from : David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon. Vincent van Gogh…

I think they refute your idea that portraits are not artistically valid or that there’s any preconceived idea of what a portrait should be. If you shake your own preconception, you will grow as an artist and as a success.

And forget trying to marry styles. Try something a lot less conscious and experiment with new media and approaches. It will put fresh excitement into your work that potential customers will respond to. Or else fuck ’em.

DOG

Fear is not very useful.

dannygregoryLeave a comment

Hey Danny,
I have loved your stuff since finding your site. I need some counsel from a fellow habitual doodler. Ever since I was a kid I wanted to do stuff with art. I even got my bachelors in fine art education, thinking I would teach. But, fearing financial failure with a new family, I went into another field, and find myself making a good living, but longing to eliminate the “what if” from my lists of regrets. Some days I wish I could just be forced to go deep into the creative side again, but I fear failure.
Any counsel and suggestions?
Thanks,
Witness

Dear Witness:
Fear is not very useful. Instead, I urge you to just start doing whatever it is you are interested in being involved with. Don’t concentrate on the $$$ aspect of things. Start making, then start sharing.
Get involved with the arts community in your area if you want to show in galleries. Contact magazines and papers if you want to illustrate. Just take the leap and avoid wrapping the whole thing up with your identity and sense of self worth.
Be as positive and outgoing and productive as possible. And consider the expansion of your creativity to be a creative effort in and of itself. Be creative in how you make art, in who you show it to, in how you support yourself emotionally as you head in this new direction.
If you approach it this way, it is impossible to fail, for even if you don’t accomplish what you initially thought you’d achieve, you will have a fine adventure, learn new things and, worse case scenario, get that creative urge out of your system once and for all.
Have fun, be brave, get going,
Your pal,
Danny

Street Folks

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People walking down the street are one of the more challenging subjects for me draw. They are always changing shape and size or just disappearing before I can study them long enough to get down on paper. As I’d rather not end up with every single one of my cityscapes looking like someone just dropped a neutron bomb and depopulated the place, I try to practice a technique for capturing people in motion. It has to be atechnique rather than an actual observation, of course, and so I have to work out shorthand and special practices to get the job done.

When I draw a person, say, waiting for the light to change and standing still for a moment, I can usually capture about half of their pose. Then I watch another person in a similar position and finish up a composite of both of them in one figure. I figured this approach out at the zoo in Milwaukee ( sorry, the the Como and Minnesota Zoos in Minneapolis!) a couple of years ago, when drawing animals with my pal Roz. Many animals would assume three or four different positions but then go back and forth between them so I just did several drawings simultaneously on the page, moving back and forth between the poses.
I did these particular drawings one evening while waiting for Patti to meet me on the street corner. It was fairly hectic and there was a lot of coming and going so I found it quite hard to really lock into to the exercise. I imagine that if I had the patience to take more life drawing classes and concentrated on short poses, I’d be well served.
I learned quite a lot drawing stuffed animal specimens at home and at various natural history museums. Maybe I should visit Madam Tusaud’s. It’s just so hard to find decent human taxidermy.

How to draw

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To learn just about any task, we start by breaking it into its smallest component parts. That’s how a computer works, breaking every operation into millions of unambiguous instructions which are then executed sequentially at the speed of light. Cooking a complex French dish becomes possible, even easy, if you have a clear recipe which breaks the preparation down into a long series of clear parts. Even playing a Beethoven symphony is technically a matter of reading the notes from overture to finale.
Drawing works the same way.
Most anything you’d want to draw is made up of straight lines and curves. You can almost certainly draw a short, reasonably straight line. And with a little care you can probably draw an arc or a fairly round circle. Improving your ability to do either of these things is primarily a function of how slowly you you do them. And practice will make you better.
But you’re probably no more interested in drawing lines and arcs than you are in learning to boil water or to play a single note on the piano. It’s assembling the individual components that makes the idea of drawing satisfying and challenging. But that’s all it is, a challenge, not an impossibility, no matter who you are.
Drawing is about observation, about dismantling whatever you are looking at into the lines and curves that make it up. So let’s start with somethings simple, say a pencil or a coffee mug. Examine it for a minute or two. Let your eye follow the outer edges of the object and really think about what you are seeing. Ask yourself questions. How long is a particular stretch of edge? What happens when it encounters another edge? What sort of angle do lines make when they meet? Are the lines on one side parallel to those on the other? Keep scrutinizing and studying, like a detective grilling the subject so you can get at the truth. The truth is right in front of you and yet it is elusive. Why? You are not used to seeing clearly because you are bogged down with preconceptions. You want to overcome those preconceptions about what a pencil looks like by forgetting that it is a pencil. Instead you want to see it just as as line and curves and angles.
If you are having trouble, stop looking at the object from two perspectives at once, with your right eye and your left. Close one eye and now you will be committed to a single perspective. Just as your pen does on paper, you will now be dealing only with a 2-D world. Drawing that pencil is just a matter or recording your observations on paper, copying the length of one line, then adding on the curve, noting down an angle. Try it. Run your eye down the edge, then run your pen down the paper. Slowly, slowly. Then connect the next edge, checking your angle. The slower you go, the more you’ll know. Work your way around the whole object, checking parallel lines, seeing where things meet up. It’s just like measuring a window for drapes or flour for cookies. Slowly, slowly. Measure twice, cut once, as the carpenters say.
If you screwed up somewhere, just correct yourself. Don’t erase or freak out, just redraw the lines, training your brain, your eye, your hand.
Take a break, pat yourself on the back.
Soon, do it again. And again. Then when you’re ready, add another object and draw them together, thinking about the relationship between the two. Lay your pencil near your mug. Look at the shapes that are defined by their edges. Think about the negative space they form (that’s the chunk of table that lies between them). Get into the habit of looking for negative space. Look at a tree’s branches. The sky you see between the branches is negative space. So is the carpet or wall you see between chair legs. Observe it. Draw it.
Devote half an hour a day to this sort of observation and recording and, within a week, you will begin to amaze yourself.
The next step is just to add more complexity. Find more complicated objects or scenes to draw. Set up a still life of common objects. get intricate. Draw the seeds on top of a bagel or the hairs on your dog’s face. Sure there are a lot of them but tackle them one by one. Draw a detail then move over to the next one and record it. Keep going and then step back and see the forest after drawing the trees (A word of caution: challenge yourself but don’t raise the bar so high that you start to feel like a failure).
Once you are rolling, make drawing an everyday thing. Record the world around you. Draw your breakfast, your cat, your spouse’s shoes, your child’s toys. Join our Yahoo! group and try out some of Karen Winter’s challenges.
Your inner critic may well balk at all this. First off, how could it be that easy? Well, it is. Now that you know the elements (careful observation, recording lines, angles and curves) and are willing to practice them for a little while, you will soon be able to draw anything on earth. Sure, it will take more time to make and record accurate observations quickly but it’s not beyond reach. I’m not a bird describing to you how to fly; you have all the necessary equipment and abilities already. You simply need to focus, slow down, and persevere. The biggest step is shedding the preconception that you can’t do it.
Second objection: is it art? I have no idea. At first, it will be hard to put a lot of style or expression in your drawing but, trust me, every line you draw, right from the get go, is pureyou. Soon you will have enough control to lead your work in any direction you choose. Think of this as a golf lesson. I am teaching you to hit the ball. It’s up to you to keep working and lower your score. You probably won’t wind up being Tiger Woods … but so what? You’ll still have loads of fun.
Want to know more? Read a good book.

Nice email

dannygregory1 Comment

Danny,
I am a 43 year-old Special Ed. teacher in IN. I have always been an art fanatic and took many lessons way back in my teen years. Since then I have just “dabbled”. I had to take a “leave” from my job in Feb. and have researching altered books/artists sketchbooks/drawing and came upon your book. It is

incredible. I am reading and rereading it every day! I love everything about it! I have borrowed it from the library and will buy at least one copy as soon as I can afford it. I HAVE to have it! I have always wanted to be an artist and during the past few months have done more art than I ever imagined I could. It is wonderfully theraputic and cathartic! You have truely inspired me beyond words. Your book is my “bible”. Since you started in your 30’s I am hoping that it is not too late for me since I am in my 40’s. I want to draw, write and make stuff 24 hours a day (I sleep very little). I just wanted you to know what a wonderful thing you have done in sharing your journey with all of us “aspiring artists”. Please keep it coming, I just can’t get enough and now I’ve found your website and love to see the work from so many talented people. Thanks for all that you have done for me, my life has been changed forever.
With warmest regards,
Holly