We just came back from a pleasantish week in the Dominican Republic. Every so often, I would stagger out of my deck chair and draw some of the scenery. In lieu of sending you a postcard, I have put together a special little gallery of my favorite journal pages.Check it out here.
Category: Drawing
Pendemonium
An inventory of my current stable of pens. They are all waterproof and under $10. Each drawing was done with the corresponding pen.
Dip pen: I love to write with this pen. It’s a little scratchy and there’s something very organic and wild about dipping it in ink. I never know entirely how the pen will react, whether it will stammer or buck and so it makes me draw in a very particular way. It’s my favorite thing for ‘calligraphy’ and turns any writing into a decorative element. I’ve saved a lot of boring drawings by scrawling with it. I’ve used various cheap nibs; this one is the most expressive. I hate italic nibs and think they should only be used by people who really know what they are doing. Otherwise, you look like some fancy 8th grader.
Staedler Pigment liner 03 – Roz recommended this pen to me and I like it a lot, The line isn’t perfect like a technical pen but it’s reliable and consistent. The flow is smooth but not luscious and the nib responds to pressure so you can vary the line thickness somewhat. 03 is the right gauge for me most of the time.
Staedler Pigment liner 07 – There’s also an 05 but I tend not to use inbetweens. This pen is good when I want to loosen myself up and draw big and chunky. My only complaint about pigment liners, in fact all technical markers of this type, is that if I hold the pen at too extreme an angle to the page, it rubs the metal part of the nib and causes the line to suddenly thin down and skip. That’s of ten a good indication that I’m drawing too fast and should pay more attention to what I’m seeing.
Rotring Rapidoliner: I am really in love with this pen these days and I never would of thunk it. I first tried Rapidographs when I was a teenager but they always clogged and leaked and were a pain to fill. I was forever dismantling the nibs and washing them in the sink and finding ink blots on my shirts. This pen is perfect. My nib is the finest they make and the pen just won’t clog or skip. The guts are disposable, for $4 you get a fresh new nib and supply of Indian ink. I have been drawing with this pen every day for two months and am still on my original cartridge. The pen’s feeling is ultra smooth, a little creamy and a little brittle, like icing on a cupcake. The best $10 I ever spent.
Faber- Castell PITT – The best brush markers, hand down, far more robust, consistent and black than Sakura. I like the whole PITT series, including the pens. Waterproof, Indian Ink, highly lightfast and most of the colors are quite good. They’re just being introduced so you can get them at incredible prices. I bought a set of 24 for a little over $30.
Sakura Pigma Micron: D.Price first turned me on to these pens and I used them exclusively for years. They come in sizes 005 to 08 and are archival. The point is a little hard and the pens aren’t terribly robust. I think I strayed from my exclusive relationship with Sakuras for tiny reasons: the type on the pens wears down over time and it can become hard to tell at a glance what the size of a pen is as they all look alike, I wrap mine in tape to preserves the numbers. I still use them but have diversified.
Penstix: this pen’s nib is plastic and yet it has a fine feel. The ink is a little less opaque and ultra black but it’s nice to draw with, almost crayon like sometimes. I get in the mood for it and tend to use it for a week at a time then it gets lost in my pen box.
Grumbacher Artist pen. This little hypodermic syringe is ultra sharp and precise, the finest point I know. It’s a 25 like the Rapidoliner but it seems frailer and more spidery. This pen makes me draw teeny details and endless crosshatching. The design is awful — the cap won’t go on the weird sticklike barrel and the pen can, after time, leak a bit. They’re hard to find but I hoard them when I can find them. About $6 and last for ages.
Take the F train
I have a piece in the New York Times today, in a special section on the 100th anniversary of the subway. Click on the thumbnail to see it.
The rhythm is gonna get you
I’ve always enjoyed drawing series of things. It’s so interesting to see variations on a theme, to explore connections between things, and to expand specifics into generalities and vice versa. I learn a lot by doing drawings of similar things, going deeper into the familiar and seeking out variation. The subject itself is fairly irrelevant; the patterns and changes are what inform.
They are interesting to look at too. The eyes like rhythm. And repetition and pattern are made more interesting by variation. This is the basis of music, the bass line and the drum keep your feet moving, syncing up with the natural rhythm of the heart while the melody adds the variation that keeps you from zoning out.
It’s also interesting to revisit themes from your own work or that of other artists. Monet had his water lilies, haystacks, cathedrals and poplars. Mozart’s wrote variations on Haydn’s string quartets which in turn inspired Ludwig Van. Picasso’s painted dozens of variations on Velazquez’s Las Meninas, Warhol did soup cans, Dine bathrobes, Wayne Thiebaud cakes, Hirst pills, Ford westerns, and the Magnetic Fields wrote 69 Love Songs. It’s more than a shtick. It’s how you go deeper.
Life itself is a variation on a theme. The seasons repeat like movements. Each fresh day provides a canvas whose dimensions always stretch from dawn to dawn, while the clock ticks out the same number of bars each day. Despite this consistency, we have enormous freedom to play each day as we will. We can seem to trace the day before exactly, from bed to the office to lunch to the train home to the TV set to bed again. But our hand always hitches some where along the path, throwing in some minor variation. The art is in noticing these chord changes, attending to life closely enough to recognize its shifts. That’s the art of journal keeping.
I find enormous positive reinforcement in these little adjustments. They show me that what has been may not necessarily continue to be—the skies will clear, the mercury will rise. And yet I see the consistency too, so I am not as panicked by chaos. There is reassurance in the sameness and hope in the changes.
Anatomy of anatomy
I have been doing life drawing at a studio down on Spring Street. Generally the sessions are open and you can do what you like. Some people paint or draw. One guy draws entirely on his PowerBook (and fabulously, creating something that looked breathtakingly like a chalk & pastel drawing). Yesterday I went to a three hour anatomy lesson; we studied the innards of the bottom of the foot. Fascinating and baffling.
Drawing the human body is hard. Tackling a nude is the hardest of all. Foreshorten the body with its unfamiliar shapes and angles, all symbols distorted beyond recognition makes the degree of difficulty quite numbingly high.
It’s not just that a body has so many angles and curves. It’s how loaded it is with expectations and meaning. Humans know the human body intuitively and yet not consciously. We are able to spot our species from afar, to judge a fellow man from another among thousands. Have you ever scanned a huge crowd, at a football game or in a train station, and been able to find a familiar face though all you have to go on are tiny differences, the cant of a nose, the miniscule difference in eye size or the relationship between ear and cheekbones? Cut a person’s hair, give them a beard, makeup, a hat, or glasses and, often, we will still manage to pick them out from across a crowded stadium. It’s a life saving skill, finding your mother in a herd, and yet it’s a lobster trap of sorts. We can spot Mom and yet we probably can’t describe her accurately to a police officer with an Indentikit. We can’t recall or reproduce those features which we can so accurately judge.
When drawing the human body, unclothed — a sight we actually behold quite rarely in the flesh (and yet think about several times an hour) — we have to ditch all our baggage and try to see clearly without judgment, breaking it down into components, lines, shadows, angles and curves. And yet the inaccuracies we might get away with when drawing an apple or a car or a building are completely unacceptable when drawing a person. The tiniest miscalculation in the angle of a nose turns Mary into Sue or possibly Bob. On the other hand, if we slow down too much, become too accurate, too calculated, we will never capture Mary’s balance and weight, she will be a two dimensional cut-out instead of a body with mass and volume, with no sense of the bone, muscle, and fat that lie beneath the skin. And most challenging of all, we will fail to capture her humanity, her personality and character, her spark of life. She will be just a body, a slab of flesh, an animal, a cadaver, and not Mary.
Seeing humans is extraordinarily hard because it requires the usual cool, calm, objective sight that lets us draw still lifes and landscapes and yet a much healthier dollop of subjectivity. We can read Bridgman and learn all the tricks that make joints turn and proportions accurate, but we will end up with comic books heroes or mannequins. To be Degas or Rodin, we must work and work to internalize these principles so they become unconscious, second nature, so that we can suffuse them with feeling and response to the actual person before us, not a faceless hulk but a living breathing person whom we can lust for or pity, love or disdain. Investing that human feeling is at the core of all successful art, even when it’s not depicting human anatomy. To draw a peach or a beach or a leach, and make the viewer feel something real about it, we must transcend technique and approach the truth about how we feel about peaches and leaches, about the world, about ourselves, a truth that is simultaneously intensely personal and completely universal.
Practice makes perfect. By mastering technique, anatomy, light, color, materials, we push them into the background and let our selves take the helm — honest, open, caring, judgmental, flawed, true. Drawing humans is incredibly hard because to do it really well, we must let ourselves be a little naked too.
The Old Bamboo
My passion for my Rotring rapidoliner deepens. Unlike any other technical pen I’ve used, it is always on the ready, never clogs or sticks or leaks and I’ve never even had to shake it one time to force ink to the nib. The ink itself is deep black, fairly quickly drying and water proof. The drawings I do with this pen are detailed and full of crosshatching. Occasionally, I catch glimmers of the sort of line that r.crumb coaxes out of his Rapidographs and those are very exciting occasions to me.
Still the pen tends to make me draw and see in a particular way — I find myself looking for immensely detailed things to draw, elaborate building facades, the interiors of overflowing closets, or else to do lots of postage stamp pictures crammed on the same page. To shake things up, I switch hit with the crudest, most blunt drawing instrument of all, a bamboo pen.
This pen is just a stick carved into a point on either end. I dip it in Higgins waterproof ink. The line is surprisingly smooth and responsive to my pressure, delivering lines of different thickness.It makes me draw far more gesturally and to switch my vision to a different focal length, taking off the microscope of the Rapidograph and seeing in sweeping outlines, forsaking the miniscule details I could never render with the bamboo.
I am drawing from one of my favorite sources, the 1955 yearbook of Spalding Institute of Peoria, Illinois, full of hundreds of well groomed Catholic faces. I have a shelf full of yearbooks, picked up a for a dollar or two at flea markets, and they give me a great range of faces to study, all similarly composed, sharp and clear, covering the 1930s through the 1970s.
Electron Fast
I have not posted or visited this site for a week. I have been on an “electron fast”, forsaking all activity on the computer and television (except for those things absolutely essential to my business). The rest has been liberating. I have enjoyed several additional hours in each day, time which I have spent reading, drawing my city, listening to music, writing, thinking, playing board games, strolling, and whatever else took my fancy.
Reviewing my emails, I see that only a couple of people wrote to me to ask why I had stopped my daily postings, to inquire after my situation, so I guess it was okay to be gone from the virtual world for longer than usual. Clearly, I had been taking the burden of regular, committed writings more seriously than anyone else. The discussion group seems to be firing on all cylinders and traffic to this site has ground down even further than it did when the group began. My suspicion that people needed other creative folks to talk with has been confirmed and my own role can easily be assumed by many others.
To add to my humility, I have also decided it’s time to start learning from other teachers besides experience, intuition, and books. A good and generous friend has begun to instruct me in color theory and I am staggered to see the depths of my ignorance when it comes to watercolors and how they truly work. It’s a lot more than just whipping together colors on my palette and slapping them on the paper as I have been for years. There’s an enormous amount to learn about chemistry, physics, manufacturing, aesthetic theory, and the wisdom of the ages.
I have also begun attending life drawing session at a nearby atelier, and am humbled once again by how much I need to learn about anatomy. The data passing through my eyeballs is insufficient to draw people accurately; I need to ‘see’ beneath the skin, to comprehend the body as a whole, to practice from scratch again.
Every time I feel I can relax on my laurels, feel competent and proficient, I see how much of a beginner I am. My grandfather is still alive and fifty years older than I, so hopefully I still have much time left in which to study.
Hubris is a terrible vice for a creative person. The arrogance of accomplishment is as bad as the fear of beginning; they both prevent one from taking risks and jumping ahead.
Over the months that I have been keeping this log, I have assumed a role to which I have no real right. I am not an artist and yet I have been judgmental and critical about so many artistic matters and have pretended to provide advice to people who were probably far further down the road than I. I have placed myself along practicing, professional artists, have bemoaned the plight of those who are starving, maligned and ignored. And yet, who am I, but an ad guy with pretensions, a well-fed, Sunday painter, a guy who’s gotten more breaks than he no doubt deserves.
I have written cheerleading, rallying cries, encouraging others to draw around the clock, and yet when I look at my own output for the last month, too much of it was created for those who will, or may, pay me for what I produce, rather than for the sheer love of it.
And as for my electronic asceticism, maybe it was just an attempt to shirk my responsibilities, or worse, to see if an echo would rebound through the silence.
I believe in Art. It is my religion. I study it, I practice it, I seek comfort and guidance in it. And yet I am flawed and hypocritical and human. Art deserves better.
Obviously, I’ve spent some time soul searching. And I’ve spent time feeding my soul too. It has been a sweet feast and only the appetizers have been served; there’s still a lot I intend to do to discipline myself more, to elevate myself more, to deepen myself more. Ultimately, I would like to come a little closer to that thing I have merely pretended to be. An artist.
Early inspiration
I woke up at 5:15 this morning for no good reason and yet felt quite rested. Poking around for something quiet to start my day off on the right footing, I sat down with the last few postings on Wild Yorkshire.
Richard’s view from the Cafe Casbah with all those layered earth tones made me look around for my watercolors (they were by the couch, under Jack’s new Calvin and Hobbes book). His drawing of a Swede, a sort of rutabaga thing, so loose and yet so accurate, and the way he gives depth with those extra dark lines around the edges of the shape, sent me padding back in the bedroom, where I had to turn on a light and wake Patti up as I searched for my new Rotring Rapidoliner in the drawer in my bedside table where I’d emptied my pockets. But it was his drawing of lower Petergate, so intricate and evocative, that really got me going. I love his observation: “drawing a subject like this is a bit like doing a jigsaw.” I know that feeling so well, filling in each section of the page, tonguing and grooving until the picture is complete. That’s how I wanted to open my day.
It was still dark. The view out the window was just starting to pick up the first fingers of dawn reaching down deserted East 3rd Street. I filled the kettle, put it on the hob. As I did, I saw my subject. None of the picturesque charm of York perhaps, but here was a lot to explore in the reflections on chrome, the nubbly brittleness of the sponges, the translucent soap bottle.
"But I don't have time to draw"
Draw lunch as you eat it : 1 drawing
Draw the news as you watch it: 4 drawings
Skip 1 sitcom: 3 drawings
Skip 1 basketball game: 11 drawings
Overtime: 2 drawings
Draw in the locker room at the gym: 2 drawings
Draw the coffeemaker while you wait for the coffee to perk: 1 drawing
Draw in line at the supermarket: 1 drawing
Stay up an extra 10 minutes: 1 drawing
Get up 10 minutes early: 1 drawing
Draw during commercials: 6 drawings per hour
Draw every time you smoke a cigarette: 1 drawing
Draw every time you smoke crack: 4 drawings
Draw till the waiter brings dessert: 1 drawing
Draw in the tub: 1-2 (waterproof) drawings
Draw on the phone: 2 drawings
Draw during a pedicure: 2 drawings
Draw in the doctor’s/ dentist’s/ therapist’s waiting room: 1 drawing
Draw at the red light: 1 drawing
Get to work early, stay in the car: 1 drawing
Take the bus: 2 drawings
Draw while waiting for spouse to get ready: 2 drawings
Draw what you’re cooking while it cooks: 1 drawing
Draw on the john: 1 drawing
Draw instead of reading this blog: ? drawings
“It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.” — Camille Pissarro.
A martini memory
This is a photocopy of a watercolor I just made for our friend, Cynthia. It commemorates the night I introduced her to Patti, four years ago. We went to the Pierre, had too many martinis and, upon leaving, Patti shot out of the bar and spilled (out of her chair) and onto Fifth Avenue! Cynthia was so cool about this debacle that we knew she would be our friend.
I am fairly happy with the uptown, 1950s feeling of the drawing and I hope it’ll look good in her pad.
Danny Gregory 