Category: Journaling

Books, experiments, lessons learned, others’ practices

New Book

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Ah, the fresh, crisp promise of an untrammeled moleskine! And thus I open Vol. 49 of my ongoing adventures.


Our pal, Moby, invited us to a concert at a tiny venue on the Lower East Side. We were smack dab in front and it was as if he was playing right for us. As always, I can’t draw very well when music is playing but I did try to do a quick surreptitious sketch in the press of the crowd.


Jack is becoming an expert on blacksmiths and is always popping up with various bits of trivia about colonial life. Yet again, my son is starting to show that he is now smarter and better informed than I am. He must be stopped, the little weisenheimer.
We have also been plagues by the endless shooting of ‘I am Legend‘ with Will Smith in our park, klieg lights blast the ‘hood all night long. We are all becoming vampires, just like the critters in the story (coincidentally, I just read the Richard Matheson book it’s based on; a reasonably good horror story).

Jersey City

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On the way to work, walking up the West Side drive, one of the loveliest additions to my lovely city. The view of Jersey is is a little dull with all its new glass box construction but it’s nice to watch the boats whizz by and pretend I live in some coastal resort like Miami or Brighton or Dhaka.

I am fiddling with an ultra cheapoid set of gouache paints Patti gave me. It came in a set of stacking disks that look lovely in the box but are chalky and a little garish on the page. Perfect for painting JC and a garbage truck.
This, the final page of my moleskine, is painted not on watercolor paper but the oak-tag end-paper of the book. I have squeezed every morsel of pleasure out of this book and it’s time to crack open the next volume.

2006 in retrospect

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The palest ink is better than the best memory”
– Chinese proverb

One of the many pleasures and benefits of journaling is the ability to get a clearer picture of one’s own changes over time. I just sat down and flipped through the last year of drawings I’ve done and it’s quite amazing how much experimentation I’ve done in 2006. I have always been a dabbler and though most aspects of my life don’t change an awful lot (same home, same career, same wife, same inexorable slide toward baldness), I like to try on various guises, learning enough to be dangerous but rarely sticking with anything long enough to be particular expert.
This year, however, I have been searching mightily. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll take you through the convulsions of my year and try to draw some conclusions about what the heck’s been going on with me.

Image
In January, I had prepared the pages of a Canson watercolor book by staining the pages with Doc Martins liquid colors, mainly yellows, oranges and brown. Then I drew on them with brown PITT pens. When we were in Mexico, this was a particularly interesting technique but after a month or so of doing it, I moved on.
I published my thoughts on the difference between my experience of drawing from photos and reality and attracted a vocal minority who strongly disagreed with my conclusions. As an addendum, I would point out that a) I do believe that photography is an art form, b) that I often draw from photos myself and will continue to do so and c) that I still maintain it is an inferior experience and far less challenging than drawing from life.
I then began Vol. 44 which was a vertical drawing book with oaktag pages. I continued drawing mainly with brown PITT pens and a white pencil. In retrospect, I really quite like this book and the casualness and anarchy of its pages. I’m glad to have an idea of how to do this sort of drawing as I’ve always admired when other people draw on color paper.
I had an idea to harness the energy of our Sketchcrawls to some larger goal and so we had a get together at the Rubin Museum and raised a bunch of money for victims of the Pakistan earthquake. As usual my drawings at these events sucked but it was nice to see so many people who share my interest in drawing, many of whom did lovely work there.
We also held a contest to give away a book on illustrated letters and I received so many phenomenal responses. It is great to revisit the gallery of that work.
In February, I conducted a series of interviews with other people who had either fled or rethought their careers in advertising. I know so many creative people who are ambiguous about our industry and it was nice to share POVs.
I had long had fantasy that I should take some really good paper to a bookbinder and have the ultimate journal constructed for myself. I finally did so with Volume 45, a mixture of heavy watercolor paper and colored drawing papers. I took the book with me to LA.

At first I loved it. The pages were big, the paper was great. Most of all, I liked having perfect bound pages. I’d been dealing with spiral bound journals for a while and forgotten how different it is to design across spreads and how different the whole psychology of working in a real book can be.
Eventually though, I got tired of it. The book was too damned big and heavy so I neglected to carry it with me and eventually I stopped working in it all together, about 1/3 of the way through. In the meantime my drawings got worse and worse, more constipated, hesitant, crabbed … yuk.
I did do a few things I thought quite lovely. I also had a great sketchcrawl with a bunch of Southern Californians. It proved to be the last sketchcrawl I did in 2006.

…In my quest for new media I grew a beard.

When I got back from my shoot in LA, I grew enamored of the idea of podcasting and after a lot of technical wrangling, I did a half dozen or so episodes of my podcast. I never really found my POV – somtimes I was too casual, at other time too grim – so I eventually gave that up too. I think my main motivation was to solve the technical issues and see if I could do it. Well, I could and now I’m done. For now.
In April, HOW Magazine asked me to design their cover as well as to write an article about drawing. It was new sort of creative challenge and I loved it. (Incidentally, I’ll be speaking at the HOW conference this Spring in Atlanta. Details to follow).
I continued to flounder about. I started to get interested in cartooning and made a few attempts to chronicle my life in photo-comics, like they have in Mexico. I also drew a few, including one on the history of my hair.

Maybe it’s because I walk past all the Chelsea galleries on my way to work, but I went through a brief neurotic period when I decided I had to make some fine art. My subject matter: work. I found a picture of a horrible business meeting and then laboriously reconstructed it in watercolors. It was one of the most unpleasant art experiences I’ve had, sort of like being in the meeting itself. The best thing to come of the experience was it led me to shave off my beard.
Disgusted with my journal book, I started drawing on loose pieces of paper, Acquarello hot press paper that is lovely and smooth. I also launched a new experiment. I reset my alarm and every day I would wake up and hour early. From 6 to 7 a.m., I would do something I’d never really done before, then draw and write about the experience. I listened to multiple takes of a Miles Davis performance, followed my dog around the park, communed with my turtle, reperformed a play I’d done in high school, and a bunch of other silly stuff, It was a great month which I never really blogged about.
In June, I fell in love with Kate Williamson’s book on Japan and we had a great contest to give away copies. Great travel postcards showed up from all over.
Jack and I also got into stop motion animation and he made a few great little films, like Sunday Road Rage.
In July, I saw several photoblogs that made me think I’d like to take simple pictures of my daily life. I bought a teeny camera that also allowed me to film stuff so I started making short video journals.
I also had this massive fantasy of creating some sort of comprehensive creative resource onlone. That ended up becoming the EDM group wiki and Michael Nobbs’ EDM Superblog, both nice things.
Not journaling properly was taking a toll on me. I started to freak out at the end of July and, in August, I bailed out and announced a sabbatical from this blog. It all seemed a bit random to readers I’m sure but I was having a bit of a creative crisis. I was getting increasingly wrapped up in others’ expectations of me and feeling like I was far from meeting them. While my new book, The Creative License, has done phenomenally well for a book of its type, outselling my others by a factor of four or five, my huge publisher, Hyperion (part of Disney) wanted it to sell millions of copies and when it didn’t, they said they couldn’t do another color illustrated book with me. My original editor had quit to move to Colorado and I felt very unloved. I also realized, after dropping out of teaching an art workshop and declining requests for more Sketchcrawls that I am not an art teacher really and that what I am really looking for is a deeper more honest way to express myself and my experience of the world. Not having another book proposal on the stove was also making me antsy and shitty about myself but my imagination felt bone dry and I wasn’t coming up with anything new I wanted to write about.
In late August, we went to Amsterdam and I started journaling again. I went back to my favorite old format — a little pocket-sized moleskine, this time horizontal and filled with watercolor paper. Within a few days, I felt like I had picked up the thread again.
I continued experimenting: after reading several books by David Hockney, I bought a camera lucida and experimented with drawing portraits and landscapes with it. Cumbersome but illuminating. I also started drawing and redrawing the view out of my kitchen window, usually at breakfast, quick sketches with a fountain pen and a little watercolor set.
Then in mid September, I bought a lush new set of Winsor Newton watercolors that added new zest to my paintings. I also begain drawing portraits in a larger Moleskine, page after page of men’s head and shoulders, responding to various sorts of photgraphs, many quite old. I didn’t care who they were but I was looking for an intuitive response to their faces. Like the drawings of the kitchen view, I was interested in repeating the same subject over again, going deeper and deeper.
When I was stressing out at the end of the summer, my pal, Tom Kane, who had begun blogging this year, made a liberating suggestion. Rather than feeling I have to post my work as I do it, I should pace myself and share drawings and journal pages when I am ready to do so. This has been very freeing and, though I don’t make a big deal about it, the pages I have been posting have become increasingly out of synch with real time, giving me and more perspective on what I am doing.
For instance, in late October, I began drawing exclusively in shades of grey, painting with sumi ink. I also began doing a lot of cartooning, describing my experiences and thoughts in semi-surreal comic book from. I will post those in time.
I also found new fuel for my writing career. There are several significant new irons in the fire and I will share news about them soon (fingers crossed). I am more excited about this than anything I’ve done so far. Also, the release of Everyday Matters in paperback is going to initate a new PR effort from Hyperion that will bring in some new readers to the fold. I look forward to meeting them.
Well, that about wraps up a year of flailing around, a year that was far from pleasant in many ways but ultimately helped me grow. Much pain, some gain. I realize that these pregrinations and unpredictablity has lost me more than a few readers. I apologize to those who remain and hope to do better in the future. Past performance is of course no guarantee of future moodiness.

Slumberpups

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Sometimes I use my journal to do more involved, careful drawings. At other times, I use it to just fill in a few minutes, or to record a little factoid about my day. This spread is a good example.

Tim is such a nervous little creature that if I draw him while he’s awake, he gets very nervous that I appear to be staring him down. He can be really tough at times, joining Joe in barking at random dogs in the street, or fighting over a rawhide on the living room rug, but most of the time he lives up to his name: Timid Tim. If you met for the first time, you’d assume he’d been horribly abused as a pup, but he inherited his nerves from his mother, who is a total basket case.

I quite like this painting of Jack for the colors and the layering of paint but my unfortunate use of shading dots makes him look like he needs a good shave. Live and learn.

Backstage with the Peeps

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Jack’s band, the Peeps, continues to flourish. They are currently big fans of Tenacious D and discussing playing some of their songs at their next concert.

The lineup coninues to vary a little bit and some members are switching instruments. However, despite changing schools, Jack’s pal Max continues to be a Peep, a loyalty that bodes well.

I made up this composition as I went, beginning with Jack’s drumkit and then adding the rest of the band in a reflection in a mirror in the corner. The whole practice room is jammes with gear, wires, light and mirrrors — a challenge and a treat to draw.

Here and now

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One of the pleasures of carrying round a little journal is being less precious about my drawing. Insteads of sitting down in a studio with all of the materials at hand, I can just whip out my book and fill the moment with whatever’s happening right then.

There’s no such thing as wasted time when you can draw. Instead of waiting for the waiter to take our order, I can draw the salt and pepper shakers while I chat with Patti and Jack. I was trying to explain the complexity of my extended family to my boy and so, rather than just draw it on the place-mat and leave it behind, I have a permanent record of our little chat.

This pen is quite obscene, of course. I saw it in a catalog. I will hold off buying it until I can find an appropriate sketchbook; something with vellum pages hand bound in some sort of horribly endangered species’ skin.
I drew the bank on a drawing jaunt with my pal, Tom Kane. We walked too far to find something interesting to draw and I felt a little cramped and off-kilter when I drew it. More and more I am liking spontaneous, solitary drawing, rather than anything formal or planned.

Amsterdam Journal

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Here are some pages from the tiny journal I kept recently in Amsterdam. (Click on any thumbnail to open the gallery)

I do it 'cause it's trendy.

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Recently, I was asked why I thought journaling, and Internet journaling in particular, has become such a phenomenon. I rattled off a bunch of bullet points but I’ve continued to think about my answer and thought I’d share my thoughts with you to see if you want to refute or amplify my hypotheses.
First, there’re the tools at hand. The Internet and blogging let us share our personal work with like-minded people more easily. In the past, one might keep a diary that some descendant could unearth in the attic after we’ve passed, but the practice was basically solipsistic. In the new millennium, while our stories and drawings may not find an audience in our homes or communities, the Web lets us find interested readers from Belgium to Brisbane. The fact that someone else is interested helps to keep us going.
But technology also helps to create the need. I think that all this technology and titanium has made handmade things much more appealing. Even if it ends up as a jpeg, putting ink, graphite, and good old watercolors down on paper is a warm and pleasant break from email and cel phoning.
The next factor is our zeitgeist. We live in the age of memoir and confession. Anything goes and everyone’s an audience. Reality TV, James Frey, Augusten Burroughs, Oprah, Bill Clinton, everyone is sharing their story whether anyone asked or not. You don’t need to be a celebrity or a world leader to be worth listening to any more; now, if you get a publishing contract your personal life is, well, an open book. It follows that we all have a heightened need for self-analysis and -exposure.
Our culture has also become increasingly about individual achievement: the star athlete, the maverick CEO, the non-aligned President, etc. Despite a brief window of collective focus after 9/11, ‘s not about community any more; instead ‘s about self-absorption.
Most if us have the leisure time for journaling. Oh sure there’re a zillion diversions and distractions but if we want to make the time, we can have it. Turn off the tube, the Crackberry, the RSS feed, and do a bit of self-analysis.
And more and more of us have that need because of a growing sense of our own mortality. Baby boomers are the largest group in the population and we are in mid-life. Beginning to sum up, to think about what we’ve learned from life, and interested in sharing what we find.
Another aspect of modern life is reflected in the last essay I wrote here, about the effects of globalization on our environment. The more homogeneity there is, the more we seek quirk and particularity in others and ourselves. If everyone’s wearing clothes from the same stores and eating food from the same restaurants, we have all the more need to make our own mark, to stand out from the crowd.
While the world imposes consistency on us through megabranding, it is also providing us with a lot of tumult and anxiety. We are looking for answers and perspective and sitting down with a blank piece of paper and a pen is a great way to start looking.
It also seems that organized religion hasn’t managed to give us a strong enough sense of meaning in the modern world. I don’t feel that the Pope or the mullahs or the Christian Right are providing any answers I can relate to; instead it seems ‘s up to me to get to the bottom of things and chart a path for passing through these troubled waters. Again, slowing down and meditating on the moment with a pen in my hand brings me peace and balance.
Why have you started journaling? And what role does drawing play in it?

Change of scene

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When I was drawing with my pal Roz Stendahl, I was amazed to see that certain pages of her journals were randomly pretreated before she turned to them. She might have a fat, wet brush stroke across a spread or have some lovely textured paper glued onto a page. When she turned to that page, she just worked on it like any other blank sheet.
I found this very disconcerting at first. “What if the colors you’ve slopped onto the page don’t fit in with what you’re drawing,” I asked. She explained that this what made it fun. Each new spread became a double challenge: to capture the drawing and also resolve it with the obstacle she had set up for herself (Roz has just set up a gallery of some of these pages pre- and post-drawing here).
I spent a year with this in the back of my head and then, last month, I decided to try it. As readers of this site will have noticed, most of the drawings I did in December were on orangish blotchy backgrounds. This happened to have worked really well when I was in Mexico, an orangish blotchy sort of place, but that was just serendipitous.

I chose this palette at the beginning of my journal #43 because I had been looking at a lot of 18th and 19th century drawings in sepia ink (best of all the wonderful Van Gogh exhibit at the Met) and wanted to focus on warm colors rather than the black ink and bright watercolors I have been using for the past year. I unspiraled my book and took a handful of pages into the kitchen and one by one doused them in water. Then I took various bottles of orange and brown and yellow Dr. Martin’s and dripped and sloshed them around . Then I popped the pages into the toaster oven and, when they had dried, added some more layers. Patti described the results as ‘very Cheetos’. She also pointed out the drips of Doc Martin’s on the counter that only came out with bleach and elbow grease.
I drew most of the time with Faber-Castell PITT brown S nib pens and did my writing with a dip pen for maximal splashiness. But one of my favorite things about this technique has been the opportunity to use white pencils to bring out highlights. I just love the look of this.

Last weekend, I inaugurated Vol. 44, which has heavy Kraft paper and so I have stopped the Doc Martin’s pre-treatment. I am still using the same media to draw with but am doing a more traditional illustrated diary sort of thing with each right hand page being a drawing and each left hand page a straightforward record of my day. It’s another way of getting a drawing and some writing into each day and also having a sort of ancient looking document to work in. I have fantasies about burning certain pages and sloshing wine around.
Drawing on colored backgrounds is giving me a chance to think more clearly in terms of values. Because I have at least three tones in my palette right off (brown lines, tan paper, white pencil) and then the infinite variations in between (varying degrees of solid ink and cross hatching, different line weights, different degrees of pressure on the pencil from light dusting to solid opaque), I really pay attention to what is the darkest and brightest points in my subject and then try to capture the correct variations in between.

Idol worship

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crumbI was about fifteen and my idol was Eric Drooker. He was in the eleventh grade, the first boy in school to have an earring, to wear black Danskins and clogs and eyeliner and modeled himself on David Bowie. We would hang out at his place in the East Village and talk about comic books and girls and listen to Frank Zappa records. Over his bed, Eric had a bookcase full of underground comics in individual plastic sleeves. Before long, I shared his obsession with Robert Crumb.
Crumb was bold, scandalous, loved old records and voluptuous women’s bodies, hated the hypocrisy and materialism of American culture, and drew like an angel. We studied his crosshatching and adopted his spelling and his politics. It’s an obsession I’ve continued to feed for thirty years, though my Crumbiana is all dog-eared and well thumbed rather than in pristine collector’s condition.
Eric went on to publish his own graphic novels and draw covers for the New Yorker and I’m sure people keep his work in plastic bags of their own now. You can check some of it out here. My own path was more humble.
However ….when we talked to Crumb tonight (he and his wife Aline are visiting NY from their home in the South of France), Patti asked him, “What was the best butt you ever saw?” which threw him into a paroxysm of revery and he waxed eloquent about Serena Williams. To me, he said “I love Everyday Matters. Thanks so much.” and my fifteen-year-old self died and went to heaven.
Now, I wonder, is his signed copy of my book in a plastic sleeve?