Vincent van Gogh was not the only Dutch artist I met in Amsterdam. I also had a lovely time with Koosje Koene, a wonderfully talented illustrator who has been my online pal. Koosje draws amazingly well — I am especially amazed by her work with color pencil — but also has a lovely sense of wit and wisdom. She creates cartoon characters, illustrates food, tell visual stories, and has become the mentor for lots of people in the EDM community.
We met at a teahouse in the Vondelpark, shared stories, tea, and a stack of journals, then drew together. Our styles are different but complementary, doncha think? Then we met up with Pascal, Koosje’s musician husband, and had a sumptuous Indonesian feast.Koosje is also one of the first people to offer really great online classes in drawing and she has been really helpful with advice on my budding efforts. I urge you to check out her work, watch her free weekly drawing tip videos, and sign up for her next class. She’s awesome!
A mural in my ‘hood foreshadows my trip to Amsterdam.
The conference and Amsterdam’s cold, damp (I miss LA!) didn’t leave me a lot of opportunity to roam around the city but I did get to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum.
Vincent van Gogh has alway been a huge inspiration to me. I love his colors, his ferocity, but most of all, the whole journey of discovery he took trying to beat and bend himself into being an artist. In just ten years, he went from painting awful brown crap into changing art for all time. I’ve always even a kindred spirit because of the way he went about teaching himself, how he absorbed so many influences, how he went down one path after another to get clearer and more direct in his work. He spent a few months in art school, studied under a couple of professionals, read loads of instructional books, but most of all he just painted and painted, often filling a canvas a day, day after day.
As you can imagine, I was really excited by the enormous show called “Van Gogh at Work”. It focusses entirely on this process, showing how Vincent learned and evolved through more than 200 drawings, paintings, and sketchbooks. There are exhibits of his easels, his paints, palettes, preparatory drawings, and loads of completed masterpieces, in a sweeping chronological exhibit covering four entire floors.
I learned a huge amount in the hours I spent there.
First, there was the shock of seeing all these amazing paintings as working examples, rather than “Priceless Masterpieces,” giving them an immediacy that made me understand how Van Gogh himself must have seen them.
Have you ever had the experience of seeing an artist with his own work, how he might rub the paint with his thumb, or want to repaint a corner, or throws them onto a stack in the corner? Artists have such a different relationship with their pieces than curators or gallerists who tiptoe around with white gloves and X-ray machines, because artists value the process of their art as much, if not more, than the actual products of that process. Van Gogh would paint on the back of old paintings, or just scrape them down so he could make something new. He would knock out stacks of paintings of the exact same subject, trying new and different things. When you see, for example, both paintings of his room at Arles, two version of an iconic image hanging next to each other, similar but different in a hundred ways, you feel the living artist behind them, how he thought and developed, what he was considering, where he saw mistakes that became lessons. How often he would make copies of his paintings so he could give them to other people or just to brighten up his room. All those priceless sunflowers — he made them just so Gauguin would be happy in a cheerfully decorated room when he came to Arles.
And he was such a thirsty sponge. He was always studying others, absorbing, mimicking, incorporating, and then surpassing a long list of painters who seem at first to be him betters but ultimately look regressive, formulaic, and only of their moment, now past.
You get the sense that people are always telling him, “No, this is how you must make Art,” from the one professional teacher in his hometown who briefly mentored him, to the teachers at the Académie who gave him the worst marks, to the Impressionists who opened his eyes in Paris to Gauguin and on and on. Everyone knows better and he seems to listen, guilelessly. But, unlike them, he is never satisfied, never thinks he has the final answer, and keep pushing on.
You could sense how hard he was working and how he kept pushing himself onward. Even if he liked a painting he’d done, he would try something new. A new approach, a new subject, new materials, different canvas sizes… new, new, new. He never felt like the journey was over, that he had arrived; there was so much more to discover. I love that hunger and enthusiasm.
And, as the chronology of the show takes him (and you) from milestone to milestone, you can see his work progress and yet retain certain things that make them all Van Gogh. He copies and copies and copies — Impressionists, Dutch masters, Japanese Woodcuts, all of his friends from Lautrec to Seurat, absorbing each influence, going down by ways and dead ends, accumulating new ideas and ways of seeing, and yet each brush stroke can’t help but look like his. He couldn’t help being Van Gogh.
If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. — Vinny vG.
His passion and his passion never abate and the miracle of what he is making himself into through sheer force of will is exciting and inspiring. No matter how familiar the images look, seeing them in the flesh makes them new and exciting.
Oh, and he is always drawing.
There are lines over and under the paint, that give everything definition and clarity. That’s been my desire with my paintings too but it didn’t seem “painterly” and he shows how it can be. His influences in this are those Japanese woodcuts, Lautrec, and Gauguin — lines that are sometimes black or in contrasting colors or just darker shades or hues of the blocked-in shapes. Or lines that graduate in color and tone along their length. Sometimes the lines are picture elements: a branch, a window frame, a doorway, the edge of a petal, but often they are just there to separate planes and outline color fields.
Also: I was surprised to learn that he used store-bought, pre-stretched canvases. And that for a long period, he relied on a wire perspective frame to help him draw more accurately. And that he would used lengths of colored wool to plan out the color compositions of his paintings. They displayed the actual box full of balls of yarn that corresponded to many of his most famous works.
And finally, I saw that his work is a record of his life. He painted the people he knew: lovers, friends, neighbors, postmen, landlords. The places he lived. The cafés he ate in. The landscape all around him. His subjects had meaning to him and it shows in his best work.
When he does academic work, painting from professional models or plaster casts, it feels dull and lifeless. But when he paints sunflowers he picked, irises he wants to decorate a room he will live in, the difference is palpable. I have always loved his painting of almond blossoms against a teal background, a background that he painted last, carefully outlining every branch. Now I know that he painted it so carefully for his newly born nephew, blossoms for a fresh life, and there is love and care in every stroke.
Great art isn’t scary and imposing and “Important”. It’s personal and full of feeling. At some point, van Gogh gave up making paintings to be sold — that seemed like it would never happen. Instead he made so many paintings because he had to, he wanted to, he had problems to unravel and the world around him was beautiful and cried out to him to be embraced.
The last two paintings in the show left me with a lump in my throat, like the ending of a great 1940s movie. The wheat field aswirl with crows, big wet-on-wet strokes that he slapped down in the baking sun, is well-known as a symbol of his tortured state. But the very last painting was one I had never seen before. It’s of the roots of trees, tangled like snakes, and it’s unfinished. It was his last lesson and he never completed it.
What must that last day have been like, him stopping in the middle of a painting and deciding that he’d had enough, that it was hopeless, and putting a revolver to his chest? One can never know. But as I walked down from the fourth floor of the museum, after seeing all of his hard work over the years, all of his experiments and discoveries, his catching up to and then surpassing so many other great artists, it was so sad to think that, in the end, van Gogh felt he had failed.
The monkey got him.
Skateboards and mousepads in the gift shop.
Imagine if Vincent had known how loved he would soon be. How we would all learn from his lessons and discoveries. How his works would become icons and decorate tea towels and boxershorts. And that the voice in his head was utterly wrong, despite how it seemed that one lousy day.
The monkey is almost always wrong. And the only answer is to keep trying and pushing and learning and discovering. The road has no end, just lots of twists and turns, and it keeps moving upwards even if we can’t feel it all the time.
Since I first started drawing again, more than fifteen years ago, I’ve discovered that drawing in a book is a lot more than making nice pictures.
Observing one’s life, recording one’s days, contemplating the details of the everyday, being more present, finding the beauty all around me, these are powerful experiences that have been transformative for me, particularly in difficult times — and I have always hoped that I could discover how to share this discovery to help others. I’ve long wanted to go beyond the world of Art and illustration and talk to people in schools, hospitals, and prisons about how drawing can help them discover the world as it truly is: beautiful and full of meaning.
Since leaving my job in advertising, I have been thinking about and working on how to do this. I’m not there yet, but this week I took another step forward.
I’ve just come back from five days in Amsterdam, where I gave the keynote address at an educational conference, addressing 1800 teachers from 213 schools in 37 countries.
After my presentation and workshops, I had loads of interesting conversations — about the true meaning of drawing, how to encourage teens to reignite their childhood creativity, how to get children to express their inner lives in their own journals, how drawing can go beyond the art classroom to be a part of all subjects, and much more.
These conversations opened new doors. I got invitations to come talk with students, teachers and parents in Germany, Czech Republic, England, Tanzania, Malaysia, Switzerland and the Netherlands. I don’t know what will come of all this but it’s very exciting.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well. — Aristotle
Many of you were enormously helpful over the past few months as I prepared for the conference. Dozens of teachers generously shared their experiences with illustrated journaling in the classroom and sent me the wonderful work their students had created.
Their stories and images helped build a bridge between the work I have done and the needs of the teachers at the conference. It was invaluable and I want to thank you again for collaborating with me.
Since the early 1995, Frank has cut what I laughingly call my hair. Every 18 days or so, once over with a 1.5 clipper. It takes fifteen minutes tops, we chat about the weather, listen to Italian radio. He applies warm shaving cream to my neck and sideburns, wields the straight razor, slaps on some stingy stuff. No muss, no fuss. He was trained in Sicily, authentically, pre-hipster, old school.
Now Frank is three thousand miles away. I have scoured West L.A. looking for his distant cousin and have had three haircuts from three different “barbers”. The ambience, the chit-chat, the music, the results, have all been very disappointing.
On Friday, in preparation for my trip to New York (sadly, Frank is closed the days I’ll be there) and then Amsterdam, I tried yet another place. A very nice lady tried a) to talk me out of my usual haircut, b) put a paper rather than cloth towel around my neck, and c) badly sliced the edge of my ear with the clippers. She tried to blame the shape (somewhat pointy) of my ear, then handed me a series of towels to absorb the geysering blood. I held a towel to the side of my head while she cut around it.
By the time I woke up in the morning, with bloodstains on my pillow (isn’t that the name of a song?), the wound seems to have closed. I grumbled a bit more about it and then suddenly had an epiphany. Of course! I am headed to the Netherlands, home of Vincent V. Clearly, this is a great omen that the trip will be a wonderful artistic experience.
Late weekend morning and Jenny and I were on bench outside a local motorcycle shop/café, eating breakfast and perusing the Sunday Times (N.Y. — Like a proper NYSnob, I haven’t been here long enough to forgo proper journalism for the local paper).
We had a croissant and a fresh and elaborately made latte apiece. I am not normally a latte person but when in Rome… (where, incidentally, I never saw anyone drink latte which is normally reserved for infants or the feeble). While reading the Book Review, I absent-mindedly chugged down the contents of my cup. It was warm, creamy, slightly sweet and, soon, disappointingly gone.
I immediately hopped up and went to order another. A young woman with multiple face-rings rang me up and a man with a waxed mustache and neck tats handed me another steaming cup full of ambrosia.
I plunked back down and resumed chomping on the NYTBR. Suddenly I started to feel, well, unwell — pulsing waves of liquid anxiety coursed up my arms, my bowels felt like quicksand, my heart thundered like Secretariat, beads of sweat dribbled down my pate. It wasn’t a stroke; it was the effects of far more caffeine than a normal, unsedated person should consume. And I had yet to touch my second cup of well-milked amphetamine.
My point is not to warn you again the evils of the world’s most widely consumed psychoactive drug. Life would be duller without it. Instead, this episode made me pause to think about my gluttony and impatience. My need to rush into things that seem vaguely interesting and to find immediate solutions to potential problems that have yet to crest the horizon.
When I came to LA, I had an urgent need to furnish my home and my studio as soon as possible. Within days, I had built truckloads full of furniture and knocked out dozens of drawings and watercolors to fill the walls. I had a shelf-full of guidebooks and had visited all of the decent museums. I had contact everyone I even vaguely knew in-town and planned get-togethers.
Something inside me felt imperiled if I didn’t get a move-on. If I hadn’t built a bulwark against the dimmest view of my future, I couldn’t feel safe.
This is an impulse I have wrestled with my whole life, a need to rush to results. Hurry up and wait. I handed in my thesis three months early — my advisor scowled at me and said he wouldn’t be even looking at it till Spring. I envy procrastinators. This isn’t false modesty. It’s the same impulse that had me ruining model airplanes when I was a gluey-fingered kid, that had me making wonky, ill-fitting covers in bookbinding class, that caused my journal to burst into flames in the microwave as I tried to hurry the drying of a watercolor. If I took my time, I might come up with more thoughtful, deeper, better crafted stuff. Instead, I splatter ink, drop glasses, and dash for second helpings.
My commitment to drawing has been an attempt to slow the hell down, despite my twitchy nature. I really do want to do things well and carefully, to stick to it, to focus on the process instead of obsessing the purpose and value of whatever I undertake. When I wrote A Kiss Before You Go, I forced myself to go slowly, to carefully check each draft, to take my time with the watercolors, to make the best book I could. It was hard and I still managed to get the book out fairly quickly, more quickly that I sometimes think was altogether decent.
Maybe advertising was the right career path for me. Thirty seconds. And all that money at stake meant I was surrounded by people who made sure I slowed down and polish every detail. I was known for making really well crafted commercials, again, despite my nature.
I left my job three months ago and I have been in LA for seven weeks now and already I am impatient. I had committed to myself that I would take six months to a year to figure out where I was going next. To explore, to reconnect with myself, to have an adventure. But the anxious monkey in my head wants another latte, wants results, clarity and purpose. It’s not enough that I am painting and drawing and blogging and writing my next book. He wants the path all worked out, wants an answer, any answer, now.
Screw the monkey. I have to be careful. That’s why I haven’t blundered into going workshops or contacting galleries or shooting all of my online classes videos or writing the five other book proposals I’ve been kicking around. I worry that I am just sitting in this garage and that cobwebs will grow over me but I must sit still.
I am trying to grow a new me. And that takes something the old me has in short supply. Patience. Calm. A long view.
So it turns out that there are some shortcomings to owning a twelve-year-old truck. Nothing major, just a reluctance to start the first time I turn the key. I spent the afternoon at my local mechanic’s garage, inhaling the heady perfume of grease and metal shavings, while he replaced some worn bits and poured in some fresh magic potions. Meanwhile, rather than watching the History Channel in the waiting room, I drew the brake lathe. My mechanic, who also likes to draw, made a color Xerox of my journal pages and hung it next to the centerfold in the office. A pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Can’t wait to go to the dentist next and draw my root canal.
Recently I posted the huge drawing I did of my street here in LA. It was the culmination of a new drawing experiment I began a few weeks ago with the drawing above of the chaos on my worktable.
Over the years, I have played around with bamboo pens, the favored drawing tool of my old pal Vinny Van Gogh. The marks this pen makes are instantly recognizable — they have a certain roundedness to them and can be made in many thickness and degrees of blackness. My own attempts with bamboo have heretofore been disappointing; one has to redip thepen so often that it can be quite frustrating to fill a page. But recently, a chance perusal of an art manual revealed the error of my ways. Soak the pen in water for half an hour or so, it suggested, and bamboo becomes thirsty as a diabetic camel, absorbing a huge reserve of ink that can fuel half a drawing or more.
Once I had that sorted, I drew a bold outline, complete with minor variations in thickness, and was quite please with the result. Then, I decided to eschew all shading and fill in my shapes with solid gouache shapes to make a painting that was as bold as my drawing. Here and there I added a little detail and texture, but not too heavy handed. It was the sort of direct and confident drawing I have been wanting to make for ages but never quite knew what I was looking for.
One of the wonderful things about my time in the garage so far has been that I can really experiment and learn new things. I am reading more of the many art books that gathered dust on my shelves in New York. I am trying to understand the media I have been using blindly for years, improving my color mixing, understanding the limitations I often bump in to and using them to my advantage. And I am studying the work of the artists I admire most, not just for inspiration and new direction, but to see if I can figure out what they were doing and why.
I’m also taking more pleasure in my mistakes. I can afford to take a risk and then watch it go down in flames. A few days ago, I realize that the epic 15 foot drawing of the Venice canal I ‘d been working on for days was in fact a disaster. At first, I got quite depressed by it but then started to analyze what had gone wrong. By dissecting the composition, the line quality, the color range, I eventually figured out the errors I had made and how to avoid them in the future. I’m leaving the big panel up as a reminder.
God, drawing is so endlessly interesting and complex. Just when I think I have it figured out, I turn a corner into a whole new set of lessons. My garage is a lab, a school, a graveyard, a gallery, and a great place to eat a sandwich.
In New York, I had become quite used to the Citibike program, to having a fresh bicycle waiting in a rack outside my front door to drive wherever I chose. I had always assumed that in LA, I would be forced to drive everywhere — I remember from past visits that if you walk on foot down the sidewalk (where there is a sidewalk) , people look at you like you were covered with blood and dragging an axe. And the thought of toodling along on a bike where people are driving Ferraris at top speed while simultaneously talking to their agents on their bluetooth, sniffing cocaine off the dashboard and eating a double-double In’n’Out burger, well, that seemed pure fantasy.
As it turns out, Venice is something of a fantasy land. You see these bulbous beach cruiser bikes all over the place, and their riders are quite brazen. I’ve often had to yank my truck to the curb to avoid some blithe hipster, high on prescription marijuana, talking on his iphone while driving the wrong way up the middle of the road. People never wear helmets or pay attention to stop signs and generally make New Yorker cyclists look like uptight, law-abiding novices.
A friend lent us a cruiser of our own. So far, I have ridden it once and drawn it twice. It’s just not my thing. It would seem too ironic to get run over here in L.A. on a big girl’s bike. To hell with that, I’d much rather go out in a spectacular car crash like James Dean or Jackson Pollock.
A canary sits in its cage, gazing through the bars. Year after year, it watches the world beyond and dreams. One morning, it notices that the cage door is open. The canary catches its breath and waits to see when it will close.
Eventually, the canary hops onto the edge of the door and pops out of its cage. It flies around the room, sits on the back of the couch, perches on the bookshelf. An hour later, it returns to the cage and goes back to gazing through the bars, dreaming. The door is still open. So is the window beyond.
Freedom is not easy. Security, comfort and familiarity are.
……..
Many birthdays ago, long before I had the habit of drawing, my mother and my sister chipped in and rent me a studio for a month. It was the most terrifying gift I had ever received. I went down to Desbrosses Street in Tribeca, and walked into the studio. “Mine, all mine,” I muttered under my breath. The room was about fifteen feet square and empty. I took out a pad and a piece of charcoal and wrote about how I felt having studio all of my own. I filled several pages with writing in charcoal, taped them to the wall, and left.
I came back a week later and made a small collage from cut-up pieces of magazine. I taped that to the wall and left. A week after that, I drew colored lines on the collages with a highlighter marker. The final week in the studio, I brought in a photo of my grandfather and a large canvas. I painted a very bad copy of the portrait onto the canvas. At the end of the day, I left the canvas, the collage, and the charcoal writing on the studio, locked the door, and never went back.
……..
When I arrived in Los Angeles, I had planned to work in the second bedroom of our house, to sit at a small desk in the corner and write my new book. Then I saw our two-car garage, 300 or so feet of emptiness. Like the garage, I stood with my mouth wide open. I spent the first week, filling it with tables and shelves and cubbyholes. I spent the second week sitting at my desk, writing my new book and rearranging bottles of ink. Occasionally I would draw in my journal, using a fountain pen and a white pencil.
I spent the third week thinking. I realized had managed to reproduce my office in New York. I had a lamp, a rug, a laptop, a phone, a box of thumbtacks. I ate lunch at my desk and surfed the web. I was even filling my calendar with a record of my daily doings in case I had to fill in timesheets at the end of the month. All that was missing was a couple of account executives and a client.
So I went to the art supply store and bought whatever I wanted (if you remember my old essay, “Art Supply Porn“, you’ll know my fantasies are legion). At first, however, that just amounted to a few tiny palettes for gouache and a bottle of ink. Oh, and a block of 14 x 17” mixed media paper.
Back in my empty garage, I opened the block and did a tentative self-portrait in ink. This simple act I was breaking one of my cardinal agreements with myself. I was making drawing, with no writing , that was not in a book. No wonder the self-portrait looked like I had just eaten something bad. Then I did a gouache painting on the block and pinned it up next to the self-portrait. Then in a fit of pique, I got a house paint brush, dipped it in inks and drew a huge painting of Tim on the back of an empty Ikea box.
I felt slightly winded and rather nauseated. I took out my journal and told it what I had done, revealing my betrayal and the dim feelings I had about it.
The next day, I bought a 64-box of Crayolas and some tempera and did a wax resist portrait. Then I did some more gouache paintings, then a painting of the back of the house in poster paints on cardboard. Soon the garage wall was full.
The following week, I sat on the corner of my street holding the fattest Sharpie I could find. On a big sheet of cardboard, I drew the house across the intersection. When I had filled the whole board, I went back to the garage and got another piece of cardboard and continued the drawing, a big, grubby, dog-eared diptych.
The next day, I continued the drawing, working my way down the street. When I was done, it was eleven and a half feet wide. Then I added gouache, creating a cheerful portrait of another glorious day in my new neighborhood. Just as my hero David Hockney was transformed by the California sunshine, I felt a call to use candy colors and bold lines and to work as big as all outdoors.
Click to see it bigger.
Now I am working on a drawing that is as big as my garage wall, fourteen feet in all, a broad panorama of all the crazy houses arrayed along the Venice canal. I even added a gondolier.
My sketchbook now looks a bit small and grey but, despite my sudden expansiveness, I love it still.
If you are getting little set in your ways, check out the door of your cage. The world is wide and a little terrifying, but it’s wonderful out here. You don’t need to chuck your job, your home and all the rest, but try flying around the living room a bit and enjoy the view. There may be a cat out there, but if you fly high and far, you’ll be safer than you are trapped in a cage with an open door.
Once a week, usually on Friday, I check out one of LA’s museums.
Two weeks ago, I went to the James Turrell at the LACMA which really dazzled me. I’ve seen his piece in Phoenix but missed the show at the Guggenheim. The Skyspace at ASU’s Tempe Campus is a rectangular room with an open donut ceiling. You sit on a bench against a wall and if you are patient, the relationship of that hole in the ceiling to the room you’re in changes. It soon starts to seem continuous with the walls and you begin to notice the shifting colors of the light. Soon the walls and the sky are on the same plane and it is startling and hallucinogenic when a cloud drifts by or a planes slices the sky.
As Hector, one of the museum guards said to me in LA, “His work rewards your patience.”.
Several of the piece in LA were really mind-altering, making me feel like Wile E. Coyote with spinning kaleidoscopes for eyeballs. You stand in a room like something out of Kubrick’s 2001 and gaze into pure color which slowly shifts; when you look away everything is now bathed in the complimentary color as your rods and cones go nuts.
If you have never heard of Turrell or seen his work, I urge you to soon. There have never been as many opportunities to experience his work as there are this year.
Koosje is also one of the first people to offer really great online classes in drawing and she has been really helpful with advice on my budding efforts. I urge you to check out her work, watch her free weekly drawing tip videos, and sign up for her next class. She’s awesome!
Danny Gregory 