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.
Category: Drawing
Kitchen Window
In the morning, as I eat my breakfast and listen to the news, I like to draw the view out the window. I can see the Park and the Judson church and the layers of buildings stretched out to the Hudson River. I zoom in on little rectangles of the landscape and loosely sketch it in an old drawing book. If I don’t have time to finish it one morning, I’ll continue on another, generally with whatever pen is at hand. Some times, on weekends, I may pull out a watercolor set or a bottle of ink and a brush and add another dimension. Here are a few examples:
Comic Class
Yesterday, Jack and I overcame our usual aversion to art classes and joined Patti on 6th Street and Avenue B at a comic drawing class. The teachers were graduates of a comic drawing college in NJ, though one of them has left the biz and become an illustrator. They handed out a thick package of material Xeroxed from some great anatomy and comic drawing books, then gave us a few assignments, one to make up a character and draw a spec sheet of the character from all angles and write a description, of the character and his powers. This seemed dull to me so I decided to tackle a comic right off.
I haven’t really tried to draw a full up comic since I was a kid, and since I generally don’t draw from my imagination, it was a bit of a struggle, I just started drawing panels describing what was going on in the class, and, because I couldn’t be bothered to write real dialogue, I just filled bubbles with chicken scratching.
Patti, who’d initiated the thing, ended up having to leave early so Jack and I drew on.
He invented a bunch of weirdo characters, including a hilarious slug-like bunny.
Then we were asked to draw a 2 page comic about two characters finding a box.
Jack was cursing and crumpling up paper, damning his own drawing abilities, which was pretty unlike him.
I got very into the minutiae of the character’s morning ablutions and only got around to the box in the last few panels. There were several layout and composition problems I couldn’t crack. Fortunately, Jack is a genius and helped me out.
I quite like drawing the comic though it was far from my normal drawing experience, I like pushing myself to draw from my head and should probably do a lot more of it.
Like father, like son.
My father has been drawing self portraits every day for ages. He just sent me a day’s output, drawn looking down into a mirror lying flat on the table.
In the accompanying note, he says:
“Doing things in pen is very nerve wracking as if you get one line wrong the whole thing is ruined. This makes you concentrate so you tend to get a picture that is more accurate than otherwise. I n each case I started with the left eye which is the only one I can see out of (the other has been blind all my life), I did the last two in the afternoon, I had to wear my glasses (as you can see in the pics) because after lunch I am unable to see without them, (except all blurry).”
It is sad that I didn’t know about my father’s blindness until this letter. He sends these sorts of little packages to me every year or so. They are more or less the only contact I have with him any more. My parents were divorced when I was about three so I don’t know a lot about him.
His drawings are so similar. He has really developed his ability to draw himself down to an almost mechanical science.
He is pretty unflinching in his scrutiny too.
I decided to try my hand at the same experiment. It is a very unflattering, through-the-nose-hairs sort of perspective on oneself. The last time I saw my father, about three years ago for a couple of hours in London, we were walking down the street and he said to me, “Is that your stomach?” As a result, I made my head very thin in this first drawing.
More accurate, less paranoid view of self.
Third go: scary, pig-snoutish.
I tried a version with my glasses and could barely see my reflection through them. The resulting drawing looks a lot like Ozzie Osbourne’s loutish son, Jack.
Thursday
Slo-Mo
I think, therefore I am. And yet to truly be, I have to control, even stifle that part of me that thinks and thinks and thinks. It’s important, particularly when life gets overwhelming, to take time to just be in the moment.
I’ve never been able to shut down through a program of meditation; the voices of boredom soon intrude on my tranquility. But when I’m drawing, that yammering voice of worry and criticism starts to disengage from my mind and then float away. Time slows, then stops. After twenty minutes or so, I come back to reality — refreshed, clear, my buttocks still asleep.
But I’ve found other ways to slow down.
I walk to work most days, covering the two and a half miles in thirty five minutes. I generally wind through Greenwich Village, then up through the meat packing district and along the river. I don’t encounter much traffic and the landscape is varied and interesting: 19th century brownstones and warehouses, taxi garages, car washes, art galleries, empty lots, some gentrified conversions. For a year or so, I wore my headphones en route and listened to music, books on tape or NPR podcasts. But recently I began leaving my iPod at home and slowed my pace down a bit. Now I spend my traveling time just listening to the morning. I find the time to think through ideas, to make connections, to be.
When I’m overly busy, my perspective gets so distorted. My loved ones become distractions. My pleasures become chores. I just want to get through things so I can work my way down the list.
Our turtle Mo-hammed is a low-maintenance creature. We feed him in the morning and clean out his tank once a week. Under the wrong circumstances, I ask myself (or worse, Patti and Jack) why do we have this creature in our kitchen in his heavy fetid tank of water, making more work for poor, burdened me. But when I come to my senses*, I take pleasure in feeding him dozens of little tablets of food one at a time or watching him walk around the kitchen counter, exploring. His striped skin is so beautiful. His shell like a horn of thumbprints, symmetrical and yet funky and organic. Pick him up when he wants to keep going on and he’ll emit a little hiss, like a cat or a radiator.
Walking with Joe through the park can be a perspective shift — if I let it. What’s it like to see the world from 12 inches, to note every previous dog’s markings, to yearn for every discarded chicken bone and bagel stub? I observe the politics of the dog run. A new dog enters and the pack’s pecking order needs to be re-calibrated. Every butt must be re-sniffed. Each dog must decide if he’ll submit or try to dominate the rest. The power struggles tend to be bloodless and quick. Dogs thrust their chests out or expose their genitals. Many encounter include a period of assessment, a brief standoff, during which each party stares and vibrates and finally chooses his place. Or, has it chosen for him. Studying and flowing with these basic interactions makes me feel at peace and in harmony. If only office politics were so clear and simple.
Drawing with my boy, cuddling with my wife, weeding my garden, folding laundry, staring out the window, sunbathing with my hound, flossing, drinking tea… the day is full of opportunities to stop and be. I never regret the time spent being thoughtless. I need to think of more ways to do it.
____
*“Come to my senses.” I just instinctively typed in that phrase and yet it seems so exactly right. I spend a lot of time away from my senses, in a revery or an imagined depiction of the what the world is really like. Being in the here and now means brushing away the fabricated veil, dealing only with what actually is (or at least what my senses really seem to be experiencing, Neo).
Too hot not to cool down
Like every twenty-first century critter, I am surrounded by exciting possibilities that latch onto the throat of my life and suck out my plasma. Every second is so jam-crammed with diversions: 500 channels, ten billion websites, a zillion blogs and podcasts and videocasts and magazines and art supply stores and people to chat with and email with and lunch with and … gak!
Life is American Idolized as our culture dangles the carrot of success and adoration at every street corner and browser window. Everyone is getting their 15 megabytes of fame. We keep inventing more and more entertainment and interactivity and yet my watch still only manages to tick off 24 hours each day and my calendar only offers seven days each week.
I am a child who’s lost in the candy-store so long he is exhausted from hyperglycemic sugar fits. My cheeks are stained by tears and smeared with corn syrup. My tongue aches, my taste buds refuse to respond. I am slumped in the corner after a glut of trying to podcast and videopod and become a ‘serious artist’ and promote my books and answer every piece of friendly email and delete all the spam and plan my next blog entry and I am lonely from breaking appointments with friends because I am dull and spent and just want to put my feet up and watchHouse.
But most of all, I am sick of what has happened to my drawing.
Between advertising and books and illustrations and design projects and blogging, I forgot what the hell I am doing.
I have lost touch with the most important thing to me, my life as I live it. Not my life as it is ornamented and sugar crusted but the plain old eat-some-cereal, smell-the-tuberose, watch-the-dog-sunbathe life that I actually lead. The life that isn’t destined for some other purpose or audience or analysis but just is. The authentic life that starts each day with an emptying bladder and wraps it up with a stretch of floss.
It’s not just me. It’s easy for anyone to get caught up with the enthusiasm for this drawing stuff to get overly involved in drawing prompts, in posting to a blog, to shopping for art supplies, taking classes, and planning sketchcrawls, and to forget the most important thing, the true purpose of it all. To draw what you live so you will live it more deeply.
Life without drawing is bad.
And drawing without life is bad too.
I am going to go out and have that tattooed on me somewhere prominent. But first, let me do some research into tattooing, pick a type face, plan out a color palette, comparison-shop pain killers…
A religion
oah: HI!
Tess: Hey Danny!
Noah and I are reading your book Creative Lisence in class and it has been one of the most inspiring book we have evr read, and we are on the 20th page! It is like a religion all it’s own. It has all the elements and honestly has done more for me than any religion has even begun to.
Are you religious? This is the only of your books iv’e read so I don’t know if you had alluded to it, but Noah was just wondering. He wants to know if you would want to start a religion with him. o.O
If you have the time, please write as back as we wuld love to be in contact with such an inspirational person ^_^
Thank You,
Tess and Noah
——
Dear Tess and Noah:
Indeed it is a religion.
Here are the ten commandments:
I. Thou shall not be afraid of making things.
II. Thou shall not erase. Well, not too often.
III. Thou ought to keep a journal of your life and draw the stuff that strikes you as cool and make little notes next to it and stuff.
IV. Thou shall not not play around.
V. Thou shall not covet they neighbor’s art work as thine own.
VI. Thou shall remind other people that they can draw even if they think they can’t.
VII. Thou shall not judge too harshly.
VIII. I 8 a dead horse.
IX. Thou shall draw on the Sabbath, but not only on the Sabbath.
X. Thou shall not make lists with more than IX things in them.
Your pal,
Danny
Creeping down the Promenade
Near my hotel in Santa Monica, there’s an outdoor shopping mall called the Third Street promenade. It’s one of the rare places in Los Angeles where pedestrians are free to wander and, as a New Yorker, I have always been attracted there. The first time I visited Third Street, 10 or 15 years ago, it consisted primarily of old stores that seemed to have been there for decades. Five and dimes, second-hand clothing stores, bejeweled movie palaces, a couple of great old bookstores, that sort of thing.
It’s completely unrecognizable now. Or should I say it’s completely familiar. That’s because all those old, local businesses have been replaced by the march of globalization.
Barnes and Nobles, J.Crews, AMC theatres, McDs, Jamba Juices and, of course, Starbucks line Third Street as they do streets around the planet. I have seen the same line up in New York, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Cleveland, and all points in between. The inexorable creep of multinational corporations rob us of one of the main pleasures of travel. When every street looks the same, you feel as if you might as well have saved the airfare.
While, it’s true that, on one level, human beings crave the safety of consistency and like to know that we can dull the anxiety of being in a very foreign environment with a Big Mac and fries, this dull homogeneity feels threatening to all of us. As animals who are the product of evolution, we know deep down that trying to erase all variety from our environment is a very dangerous game. Katrina showed us what happens when we delude ourselves into thinking that we can control our world, can set up camp in Louisiana as if we were in Kansas, can treat an ocean shoreline like any other line on the map. We are just fragile critters, despite our hubris. Third Street may look like the Champs Elysees but it won’t if the San Andrea fault rebels.
Globalization is not the only story these days, of course. There’s also the backlash, seen most prominently in the Middle East, where the mullahs would take the people back five hundred years, long before the invention of the internal combustion engine, the thong, and the double decaf latte. Here in America, right between the Olive Trees and the Banana Republics, folks are growing fed up and reactionary. They’re also using religion as a levy, trying to hold back the rising tide by opposing Brokeback Mountain and Bolivian busboys. But right-wing politics, which is after all, complicit in enabling the corporations that now dominate the world, is in no position to fight back against it now.
While I completely understand the impotence one feels when facing the faceless, godless corporate landscape, I find comfort not among the supreme mullahs or the Supreme Court but in my drawing book. By slowing down and taking my pen in hand, I can always see particularity in the world. I am able to look at the Third Street promenade and see more than corporate logos. I see people, I see trees, I see the edges of buildings against the bright blue California sky. And I see beyond. I pack up my drawing gear and look for the rest of the city, the real city. I look for moldering buildings, tangled telephone lines, the homeless, the taco stands. If I was content to be a garden-variety, guidebook-toting tourist, I wouldn’t spend half an hour in an alley looking at broken windows. I wouldn’t sit on the curbside watching pigeons eat fast food wrappers. (Now that’s a vacation!)
One of the many great things about drawing is how it helps you find the beauty in anything, anywhere. Really seeing something helps you appreciate and understand it, and to know it from all others. I can draw a pebble or an apple core and see the universe within its pits and dents. With a pen and paper in hand, I am sure I will never feel utterly dehumanized. My drawings show me the world as only I can see it.
Sure, it’s dull drawing the engineered lines and committee-selected colors of a Burger King, but even gleaming plastic and fake brass give up interesting reflections and shadows that can confound its designers attempt at uniformity. The golden arches glow differently under the Pacific sun than they do in the North East, and so I can find beauty there. I have drawn them on Broadway, in Paris, in Florence and Hollywood. It’s my small gesture against the corporate creeps. They can try to force the world through their gleaming cookie cutters but artists will always see the truth.
Home again, home again, clippety clop
God, has it really been three weeks since I last wrote anything here? So much for everyday mattering. Sorry for the absence. I have just come back from Los Angeles to find that the weather in New York is far more springular. It was pleasant to shed my layers of sweaters and prance about the daffodils in our garden (well, one daffodil so far).
I had a nice enough time in Los Angeles but a certain mechanical loneliness sets in after so many nights away from my family and my bed. Patti and Jack came and spent the last few days with me in Santa Monica and we drove about, visiting friends and being touristy.
I was shooting a new round of five commercials for Chase and your TV will probably be inundated with them in a few weeks. I am quite pleased with the new batch and it was nice to reunite with the same people I have shot and edited with several times before. It’s a pleasant, comfortable routine one falls into with people whom one spends every waking hour with for a month and then never see again for six. Jim, my director, just released a movie (Glory Road, a basketball flick) and the drawing habit I seeded in him last spring is still with him. He now feels comfortable drawing ideas for shots and for the sets he wants, something he’d never felt okay with, despite twenty years behind the camera. Our video assist guy, Ed, became completely hooked on drawing when I first gave him a first lesson almost a year ago and this month he pulled out some incredibly detailed drawings done painstakingly in pencil and most quite amazingly accurate. I’m so pleased he’s discovered the pleasures of drawing.
I find myself in a dubious place, mentally and spiritually, these days. On the one hand, I am in the midst of producing commercials which I have always enjoyed (I have three more shoots scheduled for the upcoming month); there’s nothing quite like spending millions of dollars to turn your flimsy, in-the-shower idea into something that runs over and over in people’s living rooms (or gets zapped by their Tivos). But whenever advertising work takes up too much of my life, replacing my family, my self, my journal, my leisure, even my blog, I start too feel melancholy and adrift. I start to question all of my priorities and the roads not taken. Even the free time I have becomes contaminated. I stop reading ( I have been on a long sequential jag of lovely Dicken’s novels, forsaken for trashy novels and magazines), I stop dreaming big thoughts about what I might do next, I stop talking to friends not involved in my current project, I become overly touchy about other people’s judgments, and I feel trapped, like a wild animal hunkered over his prey and now anxious some scavenger will pull it away. It’s not pretty.
In spite of all this melancholia, I have actually done (or should I say, forced myself to do) a fair amount of drawing in my new red book and I’ve had a couple of other drawing adventures I’ll share here in the next few days. I also have a couple of observations about the world and drawings place in it I’ll post soon.
So, please excuse my absence, and be patient with me as I get back on the horse.
Danny Gregory 