School’s back on and NYU students wander through my neighborhood, clutching new books and pencils. Quite often, I see some of them set up in the park, preparing to draw Washington Square arch. It’s a beautiful landmark, and I’ve often tackled it myself.
I like the ones who slop around with paint and charcoal but I can’t relate to those who show up with t-squares and turn out tight engineering schema, that look more like blueprints than any expression of soul. To me, drawing is about observation and sensuality more than perfection. That’s my esthetic.
I draw a lot of architecture because they define the landscape we New Yorkers live in. While I’m no Brunelleschi, I understand the principles of perspective. I know generally how to locate a vanishing point and that knowledge can be useful if I’m really stuck. But I think of it as more like understanding the principle of the internal combustion engine; I get it but it doesn’t enter my mind much when I’m driving down the road.
Here’s how I’d go about drawing* the view down my street. 
It’s a fairly complex scene so I lay down some little marks first. I find the midpoints of my page (in green) using my pen as a rough ruler. I take the same sorts of measurements of the thing I’m drawing. I also uses my thumbs as rough rulers� so and so many thumb widths to this point, so and so many pen cap lengths to this point � that sort of thing. If I didn’t measure things out like this, I’m sure I would have misjudged how wide the library’s facade was in the foreground. The actual part of the scene that is of interest only occupies about 1/8 of the whole space.
I usually start drawing in the upper left hand corner and work my way across. I’ll make little marks if need be to tell me where things intersect. When I just whip out a long diagonal line like the one in the upper left, it probably won’t hit the mark unless I set a target point.
I’ll also look for some sort of large and broken line somewhere to use as a reference point. In this case, the building on the right has a regular pattern of tiles down its length; I can use this like an in situ ruler to guide the other buildings’ proportions. I count down three tiles and say, ‘Okay, the roof of the ornate building in the center hits this height. Go down one more tile and that’s the point at which the angle of the receding part of the roof hits. Down two more and that ‘s the roof of the building behind it…’ and so on. If there’s no guide in the landscape (as there wasn’t horizontally here) I can also use my pen length to bifurcate the space and create a partial grid to set my reference points.
Remember to check your verticals. Unless you have birds’ or worms’ eyes, make sure your verticals are straight 90 degree angles to the ground. It’s so easy to start leaning them over and soon all of your lines will be out of whack.
I measure other sorts of angles by holding up my pen horizontally and then rotating it to meet the angle. That action temporarily imprints the deviation of the angle from the horizon into my brain. When I go down to the paper, I just repeat the rotation and I can usually get it pretty dead on.
I like to do all these little measurements rather than ruling down the artificial lines of perspective and then erasing them because I am trying to record my own observations in my drawings. I find that all these little measurements bring me closer and closer to my subject and that’s the goal of my work. I don’t care if it’s all accurate and perfect but that it reflects what and how I am seeing. The deeper I go the better. Somehow rulers and perspective lines make it all seem more mechanical and artificial and I just don’t like it.
In any case, the results seem okay to me. In fact, I will often be a lot wilder and just draw lines and angles on the fly. I don’t care that much of my buildings are misshapen and irregular, so long as they feel alive. Those T-square folks seem to make drawings that lie on the page like dead, academic fish.
Drawing buildings is just like drawing anything else. Be slow. Keep your eyes on the subject most of the time. Don’t freak out if you make a ‘mistake’. And do it as often as you can.
Drawing isn’t a science. Don’t reduce it to one.
—–
*Atypically, I drew this in Photshop on a tablet so I could use layers to demonstrate my methodology.
Category: Advice & answers
Got a question, an issue, a dilemma, a gripe? Here’s my response.
Step-by-Step comics
Avuncular advice
hey danny just a (not so quick) question for ya
we’re in the middle of this whole looking for colleges and setting up visits thing and it is absolutely overwhelming. i was told by an admissions dean to find someone who is in the field i want to go into(Art/Art Ed/Art therapy[still deciding..heh]) and come up with a list of questions i can ask to these places i visit to find the school with the best program.not just a good art program but good in integrating art and teaching art. the two art teachers i have are at two oppsite ends of the spectrum. one is a photo teacher that doesnt believe in going to school for art education but just going to some artschool for art, doing what you want all through college, bettering yourself and afterwards consider teaching (after youve spend thousands of dollars on an education already). the other teacher is one of the nicest people i know who is so busy with just being a teacher, having a family, and driving an SUV that she doesnt draw anymore or make things. she’s all for practicality and strictly the teaching aspect. i feel like these people aren’t very much help in that they both have their own ideas of what being an art teacher is and these ideas aren’t mine. and after all this jib jab my real question is do you know any art teachers or professors or anything of the sort that can give me an idea of how to feel these schools out for a program that im looking for? how to narrow down the options. i realize that not knowing for sure what i want to do doesnt help this situation but i know i want to make art myself. learn as much as i possibly can and do the best that I can and work with people/the public and make art mean as much to them as it does to me. if any of the above content made sense, your input would be greatly appreciated.
thanks for your time(!)
-niece in distress
Dear Morgan:
I hear you. Choosing the path you are to take in life is a daunting prospect. But, here’s the secret: you aren’t making that choice right now. It’s a long and gradual process with many twists and turns and none of the crossroads is irreversible. Don’t worry about the end result right now. Don’t think that you have to choose the school that will firmly and clearly deliver you to the door of the job you will do until you retire.
Secondly, don’t be impatient. Don’t rush to get a highly professional education right away. Don’t commit yourself to an idea of what you will do in life. When I was seventeen I couldn’t have described the life I lead today. I know you are anxious about being successful in what you do. You and you parents don’t want you to become a starving artist. Believe me, that’s extremely unlikely.
But similarly I wouldn’t want you to make up your mind today that you will be some thing specific. Your experience is simply too limited for you to make the right choice at this point. There are so many sorts of stimulating and lucrative creative jobs you could have, and most of them are careers you have not even heard of yet.
The training for most of them is similar, however. You need to learn as much as you can about as many things as you can. That should be the goal of your college education.
I have met and worked with many young people who went directly into art school and/or an advertising school. They think they know far more than they do. The fact that they have been taught some technical skills does not prepare them for a career in advertising or design. In fact, I would much rather hire a smart, worldly, inquisitive person who traveled the world, read history and sold shoes at Macy’s than a person who focused entirely on getting a career in advertising since they were seventeen. Most of the skills they think they acquired can be learned quickly on the job. But reading good literature, debating politics and philosophy, living among many different sorts of people, those are experiences that will advance you far more in a creative field. The most interesting film directors didn’t limit their educations to film school. The most interesting writers didn’t come out of the Iowa program; the most successful copywriters didn’t limit their educations to the Miami Ad School, etc.
You say you are interested in art therapy and art teaching and you may well end up in those fields. But may I suggest that the reason you are interested in those fields is because you know people who are in them. Frankly, your world is a little limited. There are many, many other options you should look into first.
Here’s a partial list of the jobs of creative people I know, stimulating and lucrative jobs you may not have considered, jobs that may actually be perfect for you: documentary producer, flash animator, magazine illustrator, greeting card designer, software engineer, toy designer, packaging engineer, medical illustrator, court room artist, commercial photographer, automotive designer, production designer, prop maker, line producer, cinematographer, magazine art director, jewelry designer, fashion stylist, typographer, costume designer, film editor, sound designer, architect, urban planner, graphic designer, food stylist, runway photographer, book editor, book jacket designer, museum curator, art historian, retail display designer, fashion director, makeup artist, choreographer, stage manager, commercial composer, industrial film editor, fragrance designer, information architect, strategic planner, potter, art buyer, continuity person, textile designer, set carpenter, industrial chemist, fashion forecaster, copywriter…
You can prepare for most of these jobs the same way.
First of all, do your best in high school. Have diverse interests so you build a good resume: School paper, school play, community stuff, etc. Sports matter far less after high school than they do in high school. Same with TV, Play Station, drugs, liquor and other extracurrics. But don’t be a goody-two shoes either. Live fast but don’t die young.
Apply to the best possible schools. Set your sights high. You are smart and articulate and you can do it. My high school had no formal grades so many of my classmates worried they couldn’t get into a good school. I didn’t know better so I applied to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, University of Chicago and had University of Michigan as my safety. I got into all of them (but Yale) but only visited the one I really wanted to attend: Princeton. I knew very little about it but I like F.Scott Fitzgerald. I also liked the fact that it had no law school, no med school and seemed committed to under graduate education. My parents were not particularly wealthy but family members kicked in some cash so I could go.
Get a very liberal education: This is the last time in life you will get to immerse yourself all day in all sorts of learning among a lot of smart people. Don’t waste it by limiting yourself or your field of interest. I studied French, Latin, History, Geology, Politics, Literature, Economics, Art History, Music, Anthropology, Psychology, and more. Only when you are absolutely forced to, choose a major. Mine was Political Science with a minor in Near Eastern Studies, I wrote my thesis about 1960s radical students. Again, none of it had anything to do with my future career, and yet it was all immensely helpful in separating me from the dull careerists in my peer group. I was and am interesting and interested. I can bring a lot more to the discussion than those who majored in graphic arts or economics. Trust me, if you could learn all the professional skills you need to in four years of college it wouldn’t be worth much in the job market. But the ability to form associations between obscure things is a very valuable skill that you can only hone by reading and experiencing as much as possible throughout your whole life. I go my first job in advertising after a couple of weeks of interviewing. It was easy and I had zero experience.
The future looks bright. There are more and more opportunities for creative people to earn a good and interesting living. In the dawn of the Information Age, technical skills mattered a lot and engineers and economists were Kings. But, frankly, billions of Indians and Chinese are taking over those jobs. What they don’t have and won’t have for the next few decades is a good grasp on culture and a sufficiently free society to encourage individuals with new and fresh ideas. That will give America a competitive advantage for most of my lifetime, if not yours. People who make things will be very valuable for a while to come. The entertainment field will keep America first: fashion, consumer culture, computer gaming, web design, marketing, music, film, etc. Think of how those fields have transformed over your short lifetime. Any hard-core specific learning you get in a second rate college in these fields will be obsolete before you graduate. But if you have a diverse and insatiable hunger for learning and a creative mind, you will always be on the cusp of the new wave.
Education never stops. Apply yourself in school but use your summers to explore other fields. Write to people and ask for internships. Spend half your summer making spending money, the other half working in a gallery, for a commercial production company or a magazine publisher (I worked at the White House, for cryin’ out loud – also newspapers, congressmen, McDonalds, record stores, etc.) Stay with relatives in big cities and immerse yourself in the metropolitan jungle. You can also wait until graduate school to go to an art program; by then you may feel more comfortable about where to specialized. Meantime, keep reading and exploring. My nightstand is piled high with history books, art criticism, books in technique, magazines, etc. I take classes, interview people with diverse careers, and keep hungry and inquisitive. I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up. And you don’t need to be either.
I hope this is a little helpful. But let’s discuss it more. Call me anytime and I’ll help you however I can
Meantime, don’t worry and be happy,
Your uncle,
Danny
Doing a 180
My pal, Jim, is directing our commercials out here in LA. After reading Everyday Matters, he’s become increasingly intrigued with learning to draw. He told me he knew he couldn’t draw, didn’t think he ever could, but still always wanted to know how. I told him about Betty Edwards’ book and the next day, he showed up with his own copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
Each day he reads the book between takes and each night he works on drawing exercises. Just three days in, he drew the drawing above, a copy of Picasso’s Stravinsky.
This is one of the most powerful exercises in Edward’s book. You are told to copy this image which is printed upside down in the book. You draw each line individually, then move on to the next, building up the picture stroke by stroke. Everyone who tries it describes the same reaction. They are beating themselves up as they do it, ‘Oh, you drew that line wrong, this is a mess, you’ll never do this, etc.’ and yet persevere. When they are finished and turn the page around, they are blown away. They cannot believe their eyes. The drawing looks remarkably like Picasso’s original.
For almost everyone, this simple fifteen minute exercise transforms their view of themselves. It flips a switch in your head that says I can draw! and gives you permission to keep going, to polish your skills, to trust that you’ll keep improving, and get on the road to drawing as you only dreamed you could.
If you’d like to try this exercise, use Jim’s drawing (You can download a bigger scan of it here.). Print it out, turn it upside down, then slowly and carefully copy each line with a pen onto a sheet of paper. Then, brace yourself and turn it around.
What do you think? Let me know.
The Art Spirit
“Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.” — Robert Henri
I have always been a fan of Walt Disney. Not just of his animated films but of a certain image I have of the man himself. It’s not the dictatorial egomaniac that some biographers have depicted but the gentle, welcoming character who appeared at the beginning of each episode of the Wonderful World of Disney — small moustache, grey gabardine suit, warm smile, standing in his book-lined office.
When I flew home from LA for the weekend, I decided to re-screen one of my favorite videotapes for an infusion of inspiration. It’s an episode of the Disney show that I Tivo-ed a couple of years ago in which Walt answers letters from art students seeking direction in life. His advice to them is to read a book called “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri. Henri was a painter and art teacher in the early part of the twentieth century, a terrifically inspiring guy who taught the generation of American realists that emerged in the 20s; people like Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis and John Sloan and Rockwell Kent, many of whom I like a lot. He encouraged his students to paint what they saw around them, urban scenes of everyday life — gritty, bold, and true. Henri’s students collected their noted from his lectures and assembled them into The Art Spirit and it has been a valuable guide for artists ever since, full of observations and ideas that are accessible and encouraging.
One of Walt’s correspondents asks him how he can develop style and Disney responds via Henri, with something like, “Don’t worry about your originality. You couldn’t get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.” To demonstrate how individual vision is really at the heart of style, he takes four animators form his studio, men who by day are paid to subvert their individuality in the service of creating a unified look for Disney movies and films them, of a Sunday, painting a tree. Each has his own way of painting, but more importantly his own way of seeing. One describes the tree in terms of architecture, like a solidly engineered structure on the landscape. He paints the tree as if it were made of steel pylons. Another artist is fascinated by the movement of the tree’s bark and studies the surface textures in detail. A third sees the tree’s relationship to the sky behind it and studies the negative space of the branches. A fourth observes the entire tree as unified shape and works on its relationship to the rectangle of his canvas.
Then we see how each artists interprets his vision in different ways through his materials. One paints of a big slab of plywood thrown down on a rock, painting with long brushes in a muscular way. Another draws in charcoal and then fills in with casein. When the paintings are done, they are juxtaposed and we can really see the varieties of worldviews in the four men. Even though they are talented artists, the real lesson comes from their willingness to put their own characters in their work.
It’s all shot in muddy black and white, typical old TV images, and the painters are not fine artists showing in NY galleries, just modestly paid artisans working for the Man. But the little film demystifies the process of art making in a wonderful way. It’s also a reminder of how the world has changed. Hard to imagine these days prime time Sunday night TV being devoted to something as ethereal as this. And the Disney Company, marred by well-publicized corporate battles and an surfeit of marketing and promotion, seems pretty far removed from the gentle art lesson on this show.
If you can, Tivo the Wonderful World of Disney, and see if you stumble on this gem. Or pickup a copy of The Art Spirit and be directly inspired by a great teacher. Try to keep in mind the wisdom of this thought from Robert Henri: “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
— Written in a rental car in a rainy parking lot by the Rose Bowl, a few miles from the Walt Disney studios.
Collaboration isn't just for the French
I am writing this on a flight to Los Angeles where we are going to shoot the first five commercials for the campaign I began last summer. It was July 27th when I stood at a urinal on 22nd street and was suddenly struck with the idea which, through various barrel jumps, backflips and slaloms, has brought me to this seat on American Airlines.
Of course, it’s absurd that it should have taken 200 days for three or four minutes of advertising to go from my urinal to your television. Well, actually the commercials haven’t even been filmed yet. It’ll be closer to 300 days before they actually hit the airwaves. This is certainly a long time for even advertising to be birthed, but not unheard of.
When you sell your creative work, the results are invariably a collaboration between your imagination and the processes of the person or corporation who is funding them. In the case of a new brand advertising campaign, your collaborators include various levels of decision makers in your agency, some ‘creative’, some administrative and some strategic, all of who provide input based on their own experience, ego, time and attention span.
Next, the work runs through the filter of the client company’s marketing executives. Some have long and illustrious careers producing great advertising and can often make your ideas better and sharper. Others have ended up in marketing by virtue of their success or failure in another part of the company. I have worked with clients who were former antifreeze salesman, flight attendants, bank tellers, and tax attorneys. When I created ads for the Postal Service, my client was a former mail carrier. However, their past is not necessarily an indication of their utility as creative collaborators.
As I have done a lot of corporate and brand advertising, I invariably end up presenting to CEOs and CFOs. Most of them have little interest in advertising and consider it a waste of time and money. They tend to be results oriented, I’m from Missouri, kind of left brainers, Some, by virtue of having a lot of money and a lot of power, have odd and interesting ideas about how advertising should work. They often cite their wives’ or children’s opinions. Because they are unused to talking about executional creative matters, their words are often ambiguous and hard to take at face value and much time is spent by others, parsing their phrases and trying to determine the hidden meaning behind all sorts of cabalistic executive signs. I have worked with agencies who note down the colors of executives’ ties and shirts in an effort to come up with logo and advertising palettes that will pass muster.
These creative approvals are funny things. They are so often subjective and frankly irrelevant to the effectiveness of advertising. The best clients are the ones who are extremely clear and smart about what they know best. They tell you what they want to accomplish with their businesses and how advertising can help. They couch their reactions to the work you bring them in terms of their original intent. Often they are surprisingly lucid and insightful, demonstrating in spades how they got to where they are. They respect the people they hire and assume that they will do their work well. They keep their egos in check and use their authority to clear impasses further down the food chain. They can break loggerheads with a phrase or two. As one CEO said to me recently, ‘People assume that because everyone has a voice that this is a democracy. It’s not. I want this done so let’s move on.” Someone who works for someone who works for someone who works for him and who had been our daily contact had said something equally memorable and candid in an earlier meeting:” My boss told me that my job is to tell you what you have done wrong. I can’t see anything wrong in what you’ve done but I still have to figure out how to do my job.”
There’s little question that, unfortunately, much of what we are paid for is to deal with the process. To be able to listen to someone’s incoherent rant and turn it into some thing actionable. To respond to the various thumbs stuck in the wet clay of one’s idea and yet emerge with something that isn’t embarrassing and wasteful.
There are different styles that creative people have to deal with this obstacle course. Some defend their work against every single remark and soon devolve into shrill defensiveness. Others sit quietly, waiting for the moment to insert a devastating retort. Some try to come up with constructive responses as the clients lays out his objections. Some give long rebuttals that communicate little but ego and leave the client wondering if they heard a word she said. Some sit gulping in anxiety, waiting for others to defend their efforts. Some smirk smugly, all but saying ‘ You are such an idiot”.
The most constructive approach is, first, just to listen. Particularly when there are lots of clients of various levels in a room, they tend to circle around each other, ideas canceling each other out, objections overruled, problems solving themselves. Then, if the audience has the patience, summarize what they have said and see if they agree with your summary. Then offer a solution or two for the present and withdraw and try to form a coherent plan of response. When you do respond, show them what they asked for, accompanied with a range of other solutions.
I think most clients like the creative process. They want to be wowed. When they come up with their own ideas and insist upon them, they also have a nagging feeling that they’re doing the wrong thing, buying a dog and barking themselves. In some ways, advertising seems easier than other creative forms. When I do illustration work, no one has ever redrawn my pictures like some clients feel they can rewrite my copy. When I work with composers, I have (almost) never seen a client tell them which specific notes to play. A bad and desperate client will push past agency and director and go up to an actor and tell him specifically how to say his lines but he’ll rarely get in front of the camera himself.
The key again is to listen and observe. That’s the way to get the clearest sense of what’s really going on. Then by re-presenting the client’s POV to him or her, you show that you get it, you want to help, you care. Don’t insist on logic — often the process spits up a lot of nonsensical mandates that come about through intricate games of Telephone that make no real sense. People, intimidated by their inarticulate bosses, can resort to just taking dictation and passing the buck on to you. But try to see through that and get to the truth underneath.
Then, try to take all of the comments as a new creative challenge. Be willing to sacrifice your children in order to end up with an even stronger result. I’ve often had good ideas become great ones as they were annealed on the forge of the approval process. Despairing of being able to fix your crippled creation, you toss it aside and fabricate a far more elegant solution.
Am I making it all sound horrible? Do I seem like an arrogant know-it-all who thinks all clients are boobs? Maybe so, but I don’t really feel that, not most of the time. It’s a thin line to tread between making something that fits the needs of the people who hired you to do it and something that you are proud of, that is fresh and exciting to you. I often write commercials based on events or perceptions that have occurred to me and it is heart breaking to see them mangled beyond recognition. It feels very personal. But in the end, it really isn’t. That’s what Art is for, to express the personal. The creative work we are paid to do, while growing from our integrity and values and personal aesthetic, is always a collaboration and must be respected as such. When created honestly and openly and generously, it is is the best sort of collaboration, Rogers and Hammerstein, Dolce & Gabbana. At other times it’s more Rogers & Frankenstein, Dolce & Gambino. So you pick your fights. You say to you yourself, if they want to drive this Lamborghini over the clff, it’s their dollar. I won’t allow myself to be twisted in the wreckage. Recognizing that jobs and millions of dollars are at stake, that these matters are impacting people’s better judgment, doesn’t make you a hack. Just a professional.
So the simple answer is: throw yourself 90% into what you do for money. Reserve that small part for self-protection. Be willing to stand back, to be objective and dispassionate. And channel the feelings you have, the reaction to disappointment and limitations, and put it into the work that really matters: your Art. Now be uncompromising. Insist on the highest quality from yourself. Be clear, be strong, be energetic and bold. Experiment, reach, push. Stay up later than you would on a client project. See yourself in this work, the real you. Keep working, keep fighting, be heedless of others. And keep telling yourself that you work to earn a living and that you must never forget to to do the living that you have earned.
They pull me back in
It’s a year and a half since I left my last job, left meetings, left acount executives, left downsizing, left that tight feeling between my shoulderblades. For the next year, I managed to do a lot of drawing and travelling. I created this blog, worked on the staff of the Morning News and the New York Times, and finally achieved my dream of being paid to be an illustrator. I finished one book and then conceived and wrote another, the book I have always wanted to read. I spent a lot more time with the people I had abandoned during my four years of senior management: I picked Jack up from school, I sat in the kitchen and talked to Patti every morning, unencumbered by bosses and office gossip. I met hundreds of great creative people around the world. A happy time.
Somewhere in the back of my head, probably on a nerve that connects right to that tightness in my shoulders, a little voice continued to murmur. “You’ll never make enough money. You’ll never be able to afford the standard of living you had during all those years in advertising. You are still a rank amateur. What will you do when you’re sixty? Seventy? What if you live as long as your grandfather? You can’t survive to 95 on scraps. Wipe that smile off your face.”
On and off, I freelanced in ad agencies. I had steady clients who brought me back in time and again. In one day of advertising freelancing, I could make what took me a couple of weeks of illustration and so I did both.
And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it like I hadn’t in years. I was being hired just to sit around and come up with ideas, to make things. Not to hold clients’ hands or draw up lists of people to fire or listen to my boss quote from his most recently read book on management techniques. All they wanted was ideas and I have become a fire hose of those. At the end of each assignment, I would throw on my suit and present the work to the client and most everything was well received.
Then last summer, just before I went on my cross-country trip, I came up with a campaign that won a small agency an account worth about a quarter of a billion dollars. When I finished my trip, visiting Andrea in San Francisco, I got a call on my cellphone while walking down Market Street. They wanted me to come back and run the account.
It was exciting to have been part of this sort of victory. We had beaten the biggest, most famous agencies in the country, based on a line I’d thought of at the urinal one afternoon. The agency has done a lot of good work and it is on a phenomenal wave of success. Right after the big win, we reeled in one of the leading sneaker companies, then an international beer, and now we are on the verge of three other huge new accounts.Our success is like nothing in the recent history of advertising and there are just a meager overworked handful of us doing it.
Like the tsunami that hit Asia, this agency’s momentum has threatened to devestate all of the changes I made to my life over the past couple of years. It is easy to succumb and work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I can give up this blog, see my family only in their pyjamas, stop drawing altogether.
I can also succumb to the tension and fever pitch and not even enjoy the incredible creative opportunities on my plate. I just got the go-ahead to shoot a dozen commercials, each with a budget over a million dollars. I’ll be traveling around the country to do it and yet I can still make myself feel miserable about it. Miserable because I worry about what I am losing, breaking my commitment to myself. Miserable because I can worry about not living up to expectations. Miserable because I’m an ad guy again.
It has been a struggle not to succumb. I know that sounds dreadful and there are so many people who would do anything to be in my place. What I am wrestling with, truely, is the danger that I could slide back under the waves, go back to how I felt a half dozen years ago, when I didn’t draw, didn’t share my feelings, couldn’t conceive of myself as an artist.
But guess what. I can and am and will continue to win that battle. I am not the person I was. And even though I am in the world I left, I am a new man. My year off was transformative. My imagination works better than it ever did. My confidence and self-knowledge are magnified.
If you are considering chucking a job or career or a direction that stifles you, I hope my experience is helpful. You can decide to walk away and then to walk back without feeling like your experiment was a failure. You will return, if you do, changed and smarter and knowing where the exits are in case you feel like you need fresh air ever again in the future. Or perhaps you will stay on the new path and never look back. All that really matters is that you take each day as it comes, look for the beauty in it, abandon preconceptions and focus on what you want to be. A healthy, creative, complete person.
I wish it for you. And for me.
Early morning habits
Too long ago, I went to the gym every day. At seven a.m., the doors opened and a small group of us would shamble in and begin lifting weights. I had a little notebook in which I charted my regimen and recorded my progress; accumulating the little pencil scrawls kept me committed for close to a year. I was pretty intense about it, seven days a week, rain or shine, always at 7 a.m. If I overloaded the stack of iron and strained a rhomboid, I would switch to a leg routine for the next few days until I healed. But I had to keep going
I took a fair amount of pleasure in how my body developed. I wasn’t a steroid freak or anything though some of the other 7 a.m. crew were a little scary, particularly a couple of the women with lats like pterodactyl wings and neck as thick as my thighs. For me, weight lifting felt like a creative act; I liked how my arms felt like they belonged to someone else, like touching a horse or a large dog’s back. I had made my body into something, something essentially useless as I rarely had to lift toppled trees off cars or open jars of pickles, but something hand-crafted nonetheless. I don’t even know how healthy the whole thing was: I almost always hurt somewhere and woke up each 6:30 wincing and groaning.
When it was still cold and dark outside, Patti would urge me to stay in bed but I would refuse. There was simply no room for discussion. If I missed a day, I would lose momentum, my streak would end. I was convinced that I had to be 100% committed to my routine. The pathological drill sergeant in my head gave my will zero room for excuses.
Then my sister said she wanted to join me. For a week or so, she met me every 7 a.m. and it was fun to have someone to work out with. Till one morning she called me at 6:45 and croaked that she didn’t feel like going today, that I should take the day of too. So I did. And the day after that and so on. I never went back to the gym again.
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Habit is enormously powerful. The bad ones are easy to pick up and a drag to shake. Each bad habit starts by stifling a voice in your head, the one that knows better, and says ‘go ahead, just try it’ and leads you to drag that first cigarette though you know it’ll lead to the grave, to accompany every burger with fries, to flop on the couch in front of the tube, to drink too much, talk too much, do too little…. The angel on your shoulder doesn’t stand a chance.
For me, developing good habits requires the same sort of censorship. However, this time I have to stifle the voice that leads me astray, to be absolutely rigid in my refusal to capitulate. It works best when I have an inflexible routine, like my 7 a.m. appointment at the gym.
These days, NPR wakes me up at 6:57 a.m., and I go mechanically through a series of maneuvers that have me walking up the street and arriving at my desk at 8:30 while the office is still cold and empty. I am at my most productive in that first hour. I’d love to add another hour to my morning, to rise before six and really get something done with my first cup of joe. I haven’t muscled myself into that harness yet.
What does this sort of rigidity mean when it comes to creativity? Can you be so iron-clad and expect your imagination to function just because you have put it on a regimen? Will the ink lie cold in the pen? Will the mind stay half-asleep?
Not if you insist. The muse can be put on a tight schedule. I have had to come up with ideas, on deadline for decades and, if anything, things flow more easily when you bear down on the brain. It’s not guaranteed but showing up is half the job. If I am focussed, resolved, and present, ideas will come.
I’d like to be more disciplined about my drawing. When I have an illustration assignment or a commitment to another like sketchcrawling, I can deliver. I just did it in Paris, crawling out in to the cold rainy dawn to draw. But it’s not as much fun as when I am suddenly inspired to pick up the pen. It feels like work. But maybe that’s because I am irregular in my early morning sessions. I mean, I could stagger over to the gym tomorrow at 7 am and bench press something but it would not be fun.
My pal, Tom Kane, has a great habit. When he walks into his office each morning, he snaps on his computer, loads the NY Times homepage and draws something from one of the lead stories in a Moleskine reserved for the purpose. Each day, at least one drawing of a newsmaker. Only then does his work day begin. His book is full now, brimming with great caricatures and portraits, built one drawing at a time. His drawings muscles ripple. Of course, he does not stop there; he draws New York City most days, detailed pen and ink drawings that fill the page from corner to corner. Tom’s compulsive too. He cannot stop until every square inch of paper is covered and crosshatched. He tells me he doesn’t do it because he enjoys it; he does it because he has to. He’s got the habit.
A Writer's Paris
Dr. Eric Maisel is a psychotherapist who works exclusively with artists and has written many terrific books like The Creativity Book, Staying Sane in the Arts, Fearless Creating, Deep Writing, A Life in the Arts and other inspiring guides on the creative mind and process. Recently, Eric invited me to illustrate his new book, A Writer’s Paris, which will be published in a year or so.
On Wednesday afternoon, Patti and I will be skipping turkey and heading across the Atlantic; over the next four days, I’ll make as much progress as possible on the 30 full-page illustrations I’ve promised Eric for his book. I’ll be working in black, using a pen and ink wash.
The sketch crawl will be good preparation. I’m going from the 10K of the Met to the marathon of the sketchcrawl to the Iron Man triathlon of Paris. I’ll be dealing with possible snow flurries, temperatures in the 40s and jet lag but it will be a great adventure.
We had a terrific visit to Paris over Thanksgiving. We arrived (via Frankfurt) on Thursday morning and spent the day in a bit of a jet-lagged fog (I can’t sleep on planes) but did quite a lot of drawing. We had Thanksgiving dinner of escargots, foie gras, biftek, and lashings of bordeaux at a bistro in the Latin Quarter.
We started Friday at the Musée D’Orsay. I’ve only been there briefly before but this time we made a bee-line for the Van Goghs and Gaugins and then I spent an hour drawing the beautiful old clock in the main room. A wonderful museum.
I had a check list of more than thirty things to draw and, by Sunday morning, Patti had checked off about 80% of them. I had taken reference photos of the remaining subjects and will finish the project at home.
We were very lucky with the weather. One day of blue skies, two overcast, and the first raindrops fell on our cab’s windscreen as we got in to travel to the airport. The mercury hovered in the mid 40s most of the time so it was quite comfortable sitting outside most of the time. We would duck into cafés or shops for periodic refreshment.
This sort of three-day drawing trip has a lot to recommend it. We were on the go all day, saw every corner of the City, really studied the sights, and came home with a wonderful souvenir without spending much money. Though the dollar is weak, you can do a trip like this for just over a thousand bucks per person and you will remember it forever.
I drew on heavy bond either with a Rapidoliner (.25 and .50) or an Art (fountain) Pen . I then pulled out a Niji waterbrush loaded with black Dr. Martin’s transparent water colors . I colored in the darkest bits and then, while the color was still wet, I used a Niji filled with clean water to slosh things around, mixing various shades of grey right on the page or on the knee of my jeans or on the nearest surface (park bench, Rodin sculpture, whatever) using the clean brush to dilute it and then my Welsh pub towel to clean things up.
When I got home, I made photocopies of the drawings and FedExed the originals. The images I’ve posted are scans of the copies.
My aim, and I think I fell far short of it, was to emulate Ronald Searle’s 1950 Paris Sketchbook.
This book is now available on Amazon
To tell the truth
Dear Colleen:
Thanks for the thanks.
I wanted to respond publicly to your comment that:
One of the main reasons I do not have a blog of my own is that I secretly wonder if I would censor myself into only sharing the “nice” parts of me.
I have considered and reconsidered the voice I want my blog to have on Everyday Matters. Not that I spend hours pining and wondering about such things, but more that I tend to speak with a specific voice but periodicaly reconsider and veer off and talk in another. This has mixed results. I often find that when I change the POV , the comments fall silent. Early on, I raged about the war in Iraq and people stood back as if I was having a fit. When I drew dildoes, some freaked. When I drew Jerusalem and expressed my dislike for Israeli policies, I got some hate mail. When I referred to myself as “a pussy”, I kicked off a week-long semantic debate.
(In fact, I wrote one particularly cryptic entry in which I expressed the fact that I do not feel I can be contained in the single voice I have created here.)
I have tended to stay away from writing about the election just because a) politics can alienate people from my true objective, namely to chronicle and consider creative issues and b) I think there are a lot of better informed bloggers expressing my perspective far better than I can and c) I don’t want to be diverted by responding to a lot of inflamed and irrelevant discussion on this topic.
By virtue of its anonymity, the Internet tends to favor two sorts of voices. The “ultra-nice, please be my friend, I am me at my best, calm, serene and full of love” and “the fuck you, you’re a moron, I piss on your site and feel no fear of accountability” sort of voice. There’s not an awful lot of in between because people feel that a healthy dose of complexity will create an unclear brand or a position of neutrality will strike people as uninteresting. Love or hate. That’s’ what it seems to boil down too. Black or white. Pro or con. Blue or red. Just like politics.
Blogging is media. It’s broadcasting. It’s public. It’s not journal keeping. People have short attention spans and they want to know when they log on, that they will get a certain type of experience. Deviations are disturbing.
Deviants are not.
Your pal,
Danny
Danny Gregory 