I am currently in Dubai for a ten day shoot. It is beastly hot and I am managing very little drawing, however I have made at least one tall friend.
Category: Exhibits
Collections of things I make and/or like
Death Valley Sketchbook
A decade ago, I did a week-long drawing trip through Nevada and parts of California with my pal, D.Price. The sketchbook I kept (only my 7th to that point) was the first step in my publishing career. When I shared it with an editor at City & Co., who liked it so much she asked me to assemble a book of my journals. Ultimately, though I ended up placing that book with Princeton Architectural Press (Everyday Matters), it was so nice to have someone interested in my work and this concentrated drawing trip was the kick-off point.
I was flipping through the original journal today and thought I’d make a little video tour. It’s also notable as several other firsts — one of my first hand-bound books, one of the first times I made a dedicated journal for one trip, and one of the first times I experimented with watercolors.
The film I made ended up being eleven minutes long, so I cut it into two episodes. You can see them both there.
Oh, and if you like this sort of thing, let me know and I’ll do more if it. (Though I am not trying to make anything technically sophisticated with these little films, I would love to know if there’s any particular information you’d like to know about my sketchbooks). I appreciate your comments and insights.
Childhood memories
(click images to magnify)When I was a boy, I travelled a great deal. My family wasn’t in the Armed or Diplomatic services. I guess they were just adventurers, peripatetic wanderers, refugees, gypsies.
These are pages of random memories, without any real conclusions, just snapshots of stuff. I drew them from old family albums with a dip pen and india ink, painted them with watercolors. If you can bothered, click to enlarge the pages and read the captions.
My maternal grandparents (Gran and Ninny) were German refugees and were married in Rome. Mussolini threw them out in the mid 1930s.
Then they escaped to the part of India that became Pakistan (after World War II and Partition). My grandparents were doctors and they remained in Lahore for thirty-five years. My great-grandparents had also fled Germany and joined them in India, but later moved to Palestine. My mother (Pipsi from Püppchen or ‘little doll’ in German) and my uncle grew up in Pakistan, then went to boarding school and university in England.
I was born in London and first went to Pakistan when I was two. Of all the places I’d lived till I came to America, I always thought of Pakistan as home.
The long voyage to Lahore, via plane or ship, was always an event.
Snake charmers and bear trainers came to our house to perform for me.
Lahore was always bustling.
We moved to Pittsburgh when I was five, then Canberra, Australia when I was six.
At nine, I moved back to Pakistan alone and lived with my granparents for a year and a half.
Then we moved to a kibbutz in Israel.
I went to a public school and became fluent in Hebrew. I also got my first job, at a slaughterhouse. When I was thirteen, a week before the Yom Kipur War, we moved to Broooklyn.
Oregon and Back
Jack and I just spent a week driving 1,000 miles or so (a crazy distance for New Yorkers) across Oregon and back to visit our pal, d.price. It was the first time Jack has seen the huge scale of things in the West and the first time we’ve done and dad-and-boy epic drawing trip.
My journaling skills were a little rusty. I haven’t been doing bona-fied illustrated journaling in awhile; over the past few months, I’ve been drawing various things in various books in various ways. So I decided to take a long two drawing books, one larger for ink and such, the other a smaller one made by Roz Stendahl. It’s 3 and 3/16 inches by 3 and 3/4 with Fabriano Artistico 90 lb. cold press paper, palm-sized and very handy.
We began the trip a little spasmodically as you can read above. We had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. and then double back to get Jack’s passport (which turned out to be completely unnecessary — kids under 18 don’t need ID to fly).
In Portland, we rented an SUV (a very odd vehicle for me, the non-car owner) and headed east. Jack is a very able navigator and we used the Google maps function on my Blackberry. We took our time ( on my last trip to Oregon, I got my first and very expensive speeding ticket; this time, I relied on my cruise control to keep us legal) and stopped at interesting stuff along the way. Looking for lunch, we stumbled into the Bonneville Dam and its sturgeon hatchery. We learned about fish ladders and saw the most enormous fishies ever — critters a dozen feet long placidly floated past the hatchery window like prehistoric aquatic cattle. As its near the end of their trail, replicas of Lewis and Clark’s journals were also on display.
We found lunch at the politically incorrect CharBurger and then continued east.
The weather had been overcast and intermittently rainy since we’d left Portland but midday things started to heat up.We were pretty knackered from the long day and decided to make camp midway, pulling into Pendleton to find a motel. We decided to look for one where we could swim and ended up at the Travelers’ Inn which boasted a pool with the dimensions and sanitary status of a New York urinal. After paying for the night, we discovered our room was similarly fragrant; clearly the former resident had developed some sort of kidney disorder and was forced to use the thick shag rug as a bedpan.
Eschewing a dip and a nap but still anxious to escape the rain, Jack and I headed to the town cinema. A triplex, it proved to be sparsely attended. In fact, we were the only audience for the 4:40 show of ‘Tropic Thunder’, the sole patrons of all three screens. We returned to the Inn and found our next door neighbors were burning hot dogs on a propane grill outside our door.
Early the next morning, we had a hearty breakfast ( we miss Patti!) and finished the last leg of the journey. We pulled into Joseph and met up with D.Price. Dan gave Jack a tour of his meadow, pointing out the various tiny buildings he has built by hand.
There’s the studio where he writes and prints his magazines.
The sweat lodge where we would spend evenings having mystical conversations then plunging into the river.
The Kiva, Dan’s hobbit house. Inside it’s about seven feet wide in diameter, wooden walls, carpeted, low ceiling with a sky light, snug as a bug.
Here’s my impression of what it looks like inside.
Dan has a little shower room, with a gravity shower. River water is loaded into the cistern by the bucketload and then heated electrically.
Later, we were joined by Ryan White from Portland. He is a soil engineer who also likes to draw and camp. Jack and I spent the first night in tents and then we and Dan sopped places each night so we all had different sleeping experiences.
We drive around Joseph, stopping to draw. Here are pack horses that climb up the mountain trails that surround the town.
The lake is lovely and huge, filled with boats but few swimmers. Last week it was over 100 degrees but the rain has arrived and cooled everything dramatically.
Dan’s a master of improvisation and craft. He turns old bikes into fence rails, and recycles driftwood, paving stones, and old wooden signs.
Jack checks out the gallery walls of the outhouse.
Dan had some court business with his ex-wife and then we went back to drawing.
Jack’s drawing has been transformed in the past six months, since he fell in love with drawing from life. His summer arts camp helped him develop the most amazing ability to concentrate. While Dan would dash off a drawing in minutes, Jack could sit in full meditation for an hour, until he was forced to abandon his drawing midway and come with the annoying grownups. Here’s a bunch of the drawings he made on our trip.
I’m admittedly biased, but I think he’s scary good.
Dan spent years living in a teepee like this, back when dinosaurs roamed Joseph.
One of the wonderful thing about hanging out with a bunch of fellow artists, is the opportunity to compare visions. Here for example are the ways we all approached a bunch of old tractors we found in Enterprise, OR.
Personally, if I had to spend more than a couple of days in a small town like Joseph, I would blow my brains our from boredom. However, there are endless lovely things to draw there, as there are in every corner of the world.
A tornado whacked this barn a while back. Rather than fix it, the owners are waiting for Ron Paul.
One of our projects in Oregon was to help d.price to set up an online version of his ‘zine, Moonlight Chronicles. The first few pages are up and I urge you to visit his new site regularly for updates. He will continue to publish on paper but is scaling back to minimize the environmental impact of tree killing. If you like his work as much as I do, consider buying some back issues (or even the first 50 in a lovely hand-painted box).
Our drawings of an old train were constantly interrupted by the fact that the crew moved it up and down the rails.
So instead, I put some coins on the rail and the train squished them flat:
At week’s end, we drove back across Oregon. It was a super trip — one we plan to make a regular summer tradition.
I guess normal men do this sort of thing regularly, except they go fishing or hunting or play golf. We weirdoes prefer to just sit around, pen in hand, seizing the moment.
P.S. For this and probably future posts, I shall be putting my images on flicker where you can see them larger (just click on the blog image you like and it will take you to the flickr page). I have also posted a couple of hundred other pictures up there from our trip.
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An Illustrated Life Podcast 006: Rama Hughes
This week’s podcast is an interview with LA illustrator and teacher Rama Hughes.
Rama’s work is clear and confident and his ability to capture likeness is unnerving. A long time sketchbooks keeper, he has a lot of interesting things to say about incorporating art into your every day life — he and his wife Christine seem to be endlessly creative and just sit around with their friends making things while the rest of us are at McDonald’s or watching the American Idol semifinals. I urge you to listen to this interview carefully and be inspired.
I also urge you to join Rama’s Portrait Party. My family has been drawing each other for the party (I’ll post some pictures soon).
I am very happy that Rama will be represented in my upcoming book, An Illustrated Life: drawing inspiration from the private sketchbooks of artists, illustrators and designers due out in October from HOW books ( though you can pre-order it today).
The whole episode is 47 minutes long; it’s perfect to listen to as you draw in your own journal.
Please stay tuned and consider subscribing via RSS or iTunes* to this weekly feature until the book comes out this Fall.
See all previous episodes on my podcast home page.
Having a problem playing the podcasts? Make sure you have installed Quicktime! You can get if free by clicking this link.
Oh, and here are some pictures from the Gregory family Portrait party: (I drew Patti who drew Jack who drew me….etc.) and Roz just joined the party too. Check it out!
Meeting art
http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swfI have just arrived at the last page of my office sketchbook, the one I carry to meetings and use to write down my ‘ideas’. Flipping through this most recent volume, I came across lots of little drawings. They are generally utilitarian things, designed to record a thought or to communicate it to someone else. It’s funny, looking back through the scrawled pages, how mysterious these drawings seem now, out of context and stripped of their original purpose. Roll over the “notes” to see my annotaions of each important piece of artwork. Or should it be “Work Art”?
Update
http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swf
I have not been posting. But I have been drawing. I began a new larger (8.5″ x 11.5″) book and committed to only drawing in black and white. Because of the size of the book, I keep it at home and work on drawings from pictures I have found or taken.
School for Evil – exploratory
Toward the end of Fall semester of my sophomore year, I found a small reading room deep within the bowels of my college library. It was called “The Somebody or Other Memorial Hunting and Fishing Library” and was almost always unoccupied. Its walls were lined with glass cases of leather bound editions of Izak Walton on angling and assorted dusty memoirs of African safaris and was furnished with a few oak table and soft-bottomed leather wing chairs It was a hidden treasure, my very own study, and the perfect place to while away the winter evenings. Like much of the school, the Hunting and Fishing library was criminally overheated and, after a day of lectures and an evening of French irregular verbs, I would often nod out against the comfortable soap-oiled embrace of the armchair.
One afternoon I awoke from a sweaty dream to discover that my sanctum sanctorum had been invaded; several other students had crept in while I was dozing. Embarrassed at being discovered in oblivion with my head thrown back and my mouth open and drooling, I pretended to have been lost in thought not the arms of Morpheus, grabbed my notebook and began to write the first thing that came to my pen.
This proved to be a story called “Under the Awning,” a funnyish and appropriately surreal tale of a man and a girl sheltering from the rain. Ten or so pages tumbled out of me in a flash and was published, unedited in the school literary magazine. Rereading it now, I am surprised by the unfamiliar voice of my deep unconscious and the carefree turns of phrase and plot it took.
Early this June, while walking up Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, an idea whacked my brain with the same sort of thunder bolt immediacy. It was a title of a novel, The School for Evil” and the essential elements of its plot. The whole thing struck me as from the clear blue — I haven’t written much fiction since I was in my twenties and the the idea was so developed already that I decided to pursue it. Over the next nine weeks or so, I wrote a couple of drafts of this 200 page novel, polishing it off by Labor Day.
Part of the idea was to write short chapters — fifty of them in all — and to illustrate each one with an ink painting. I drew the first ten or so and showed them to some friends. At the time, I thought the book was for children, probably ones a little younger than Jack, and wanted it to be a little shocking, a little brutal (think Edward Gorey, Lemony Snickety, Roald Dahl), and as funny and absurd as I could make it. I showed the drawings around to friends and the first ones were judged to be a bit scary — some people thought that was a fine thing, others felt they were too edgy for pre-teens. I took a second pass at the drawings and this time made them cartoony and a bit silly. I went on to make a couple dozen in this style.
While I rather doubt the book will ever be published, the process was very interesting and informative. Working from my imagination rather than just my experience was a refreshing change; writing fiction and then drawing made-up scenes was so far from the documentary journaling and non-fiction work I usually do and it opened new hidden doors in my head.
Portraits
I’ve been working on this series for a while, all in one book. They are in watercolor, pen, brush and sumi-ink. They are all drawn upside down.
I made a couple of little time-lapse films of how I drew and painted some of these portraits.
Click To Play
Here’s another. Click here to play it.
Amsterdam Journal
Here are some pages from the tiny journal I kept recently in Amsterdam. (Click on any thumbnail to open the gallery)
Danny Gregory 