Category: Art

Examples, instruction, advice, recommendations, and more.

The Daily Grind

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A short film about my everyday.

For the last few years, I have walked to work every day. It’s about two miles and the trip takes about 35 minutes. I only made an exception if it’s raining hard.  Recently I got a new bicycle, a Bobbin from England, and I now make the trip in about twelve minutes, most of it along the Hudson RIver. My bike is new but old-fashioned. It has five gears but they are all fairly slow. Men in Lycra crouched over titanium frames from Italy streak past me as I toodle along. I am like an old man with a baguette in his basket, whistling under my beret, enjoying the birds and the sunshine and the breezes off the river.

Spring: a new Sketchbook film about, well, me

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I really enjoy making our little series of Sketchbook Films. With each one we become more ambitious and discover new techniques and gear to use. Last weekend, we decided to make a fairly simple one — no dollies, Winnebagos or helicopters.  I got in front of the camera again and left Jack to man the lens for the action sequences then Jenny covered off my drawing process (the fourth Beetle, Tommy Kane, was off doing something productive and couldn’t join us on this one though he approved the final cut as being Sketchbook Films worthy).

I wanted to show a simple pen and ink drawing, done outside on a gorgeous day. The weather didn’t cooperate and instead of gorgeous we got clouds and rain which meant things got more complicated and technical and we actually had to shoot bits and pieces over the course of four days and in three different parks.

It was still fun to make though horrifying as always to see myself on screen. It may surprise you to know that no aging makeup was used on this production — that’s actually how decrepit I now look.

A new Sketchbook film: Hayley Morris in “Under the Sea”

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Hayley Morris is a whimsical, sometimes dark stop-motion animator whose sketchbooks are filled with creative musings and pencil sketches. My girlfriend Jenny met her recently and immediately called me to say she thought she’d be willing to be in a Sketchbook film. I love Hayley’s films and videos and was super-excited to visit her Brooklyn studio and once again collaborate with Tommy Kane on shooting her creative process.

Despite her scratchy line, Hayley puts down each stroke with confidence and vigor. Her drawing seems to pulse and vibrate. She layers her watercolor quickly, wet-on-wet, creating more vibration and vitality. I like the ease and spontaneity of the way she makes art — you’d think a stop-motion animator would be enormously controlled in her work but Hayley leaves room for reaction and response as she makes her art. In an era of CGI and digital processes, her work harkens back to stop-motion puppeteers like the Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay. It’s beautiful and emotional.

Hayley uses her sketchbook to incubate ideas, jotting down notes in the margin to remind her of how she will execute the thoughts in film. We watched her develop creature designs for a new video, animating to the strains of a new collaboration by Hilary Hahn and Hauschka. It’s a dark and powerful piece for violin and piano and Hayley turns it into an undulating underwater dance in a densely populated tidal pool.

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We shot this film more quickly than our last one (we didnt need to stop to replenish huge amounts of alcohol or to wipe up blood) and even we managed to fit in a few crude little  stop-motion animations of our own. I filmed Hayley with a Canon 7D and four lenses (a 15/2.8 Fisheye, a 50/1.4, a16-35/2.8 L II, and a100/2.8 L IS MACRO) and Tommy used his own video camera for the aerial shots.

The music is the classic chanson “La Mer” by Charles Trenet.

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PS The film was just mentioned on motionographer:

Cover story

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While I try to do my best making every book I’ve published, my next book, A Kiss Before You Go, is the most important one I’ve written — to me. It’s a recollection of the lovely years I spent with Patti and a journal of the months after she died, how Jack and I coped, how it changed and sharpened my view of the world. Because the subject is so dear to my heart, I have worked very hard to make every inch of it as perfect as I can, to fill it with the bright colors Patti loved, to be as scrupulously honest as I can be, to craft it to the highest standards I can muster and to drive my editor a little nuts by insisting on all sorts of things to make it perfect, from the exact dimensions of the book to the bleed trim on the inside of the cover.

The book itself has been in production for months and I am so happy with it; I have okayed the proofs of the pages and have now only to be patient until the first bound copy arrives in my hands. The part that is always the toughest on every book I’ve done — the cover – took months of experimentation and discussion. How to encapsulate this book in a single visual statement that would attract a casual browser and still evoke all of the richness within? And how to make the most of the fact that this is my first book with a dust jacket, making it feel even more real and special.  I made almost thirty different designs; I even dragged in Patti’s old friend Mick Haggerty, one of the great album cover designers of all times, to lob in his ideas.

Simultaneously, I worried over who would be the best person to write the cover blurb, the first review. I finally decided to ask our old pal Moby who loved Patti and who is the sort of sensitive artist whose endorsement would mean so much. He got the book and wrote, “I loved Danny’s wife Patti. And I love this honest, beautiful book.” That’s so simple and nice.

Last weekend, after I dismounted from my horse, I opened a FedEx package and out fell the first proof of the dust jacket. I wrapped it around a book and, for a minute, pretended I had just come across it in my local independent bookstore. One of my favorite features works perfectly —the dustjacket contains a lovely surprise that will only be experienced by people who buy the book. I do hope you like it.

The book will be out this winter — I’ll be talking about it a lot more in the interim. Meanwhile, here is a peek at some of the designs I considered for the cover.

Cross training

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My drawing muscles are out of shape after a few months of underuse. As I get back to the habit of journaling again, I am taking my tools out one at a time to see how I want to work, how to express myself, how to become fluid and unconscious once again.

My first drawings felt scratchy and inept to me, so I put down the pen and picked up the brush, wanting to work in color and built up layers of perception. I drew my stuffed pheasant with my little winsor newton paint set and a sable brush.

My first attempt felt too stylized in the face and I didn’t capture the iridescence of the neck feathers.

This is more like it. He has a chckeny expression in his eye which is right. My brush also feels good in my hand and I can make all sorts of marks with it in a controlled fashion. Let’s have one more go.

My colors are nice and bright here. My little watercolor set, while filled with high quality paints, can sometime lead me to make murky and muddy paintings as I over mix.

I turn the page and the pheasant and get out some other media.

Roz had been extolling the virtues of gouache lately so I dust of my set of opaque watercolors and give it a whirl. It’s so different to work with colors that aren’t translucent; I’m used to layering and layering until things come into focus. These paints force me to commit much earlier to my tones. I also have to work from dark  to light, I think. Or maybe it’s the other way round. II dunno, I just can’t get the hang of it and cant be bothered to figure it out. Lots of other tricks in my bag to play with.

I have been using my Lamy Safari fountain pen for most of my drawings over the past year. I like the feel of the pen’s flow and the blackness of its line. It’s mildly flexible but I wish it was even springier. Drawing with a pen forces me to pay far more attention than does the brush; I am committed to every mark and I can draw much more specifically. My crosshatching is a little less even than I’d like it to be but I quite like this drawing.
I liked drawing this one more. It’s done with a dip pen and a steel nib (no idea which one — I have a big box of randomly collected one and I know by feel which ones I like best). This pen gives me much more variation in my lines and it’s more interesting to draw with. It’s trickier to control too. My lines are a less regular and perfect and I never know exactly how the nib will behave. The springiness also means it can spring back and attack the wielder, spraying splotches and drips or suddenly scarring the page with a dark irregular line. It’s an adventure.

I pick up my sable brush again and dip it into my India ink. It’s a feeing experience, like drawing with a super liquidy marker and also has a fair degree of unpredictability (Or is that just a function of the fact that I don’t really know what I’m doing?) I make a specific kind of graphic image with this brush, almost comic booky, and unlikely to become my everyday way of capturing the world around me. A fun detour nonetheless.

Colored pencils are just too much work. I don’t like swapping pencil after pencil to find the right color and then being limited to the hues I have ( and I have a huge collection of pencils, none of which are exactly right). I cross hatch and layer them to reproduce the colors I see but I don’t like the process or the results, I don’t like seeing white paper showing between the lines either. I am trying to approximate what I do with water colors and I may well be doing it wrong. Pencils do give one a fair amount of control and the colors are fairly bright but they are also smudgy and fiddly.

My love for Lucinda Rogers‘ work inspired me to combine a sper fat (B) Faber Castell PITT pen  with a super fine one (XS).  I’ve done a few drawings like this but I have  a lot to learn about this technique. I dont fully understand when to use the fat one and the XS doesn’t glide on the rough watercolor paper of my Moleskine.Still, it has a nutty quality that I like.Finally, I unpack my huge collection of Doc Martin’s super electric translucent water colors. I just love these colors, so bright and bold, but they need to be handled with care. Like colored pencils, they come in zillions of hues (I have over a hundred little eyedropper bottlesfull) but they can be mixed. They tend to be much more fluid that pan watercolors so it;s easy to overload the brush and make things gloppy. This isn’t the best example, but generally I love the ways paintings come out when I use this stuff.

This was a liberating experience and gave me lots to think about. I also got to know my pheasant roommate better, always a smart idea.

Two Years

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It’s much sunnier on March 18th than it was two years ago. And the sadness and loss I felt then have become memories. Now, when I think about Patti, I don’t feel overwhelming emptiness, just sweet thoughts and warmth. Despite the enormity of her death, Jack and I have continued to find our way and to find things to like about life. Surviving is no longer a guilty feeling; it’s what Patti would have wanted for us.

I have learned so much from her since she left. As the clouds parted, I saw how wise she had been about so many things and somehow, with her gone, I am able to better heed her advice and perspective. I have let many things go that I used to cling to, worries, fears, woeful imaginings. Why? I guess because I have to rely on myself, to be strong, to take on all aspects of myself and my life. I no longer have my love to lean on, to make up for my shortcomings, to protect me from the things I fear.

And being a single parent is much more than double being one of two. Without another person to balance my mistakes, I have to be more careful and also bolder when I help steer Jack to the next stage of his life. Would I have been as supportive of his decision to go to RISD if Patti were alive? Would I have been okay with so many of the choices he makes? Would I be as close to him as I am now? Would I have become calmer, more supportive, less judgmental? Probably not, honestly.

My life will change radically again in six months. Jack will be off to Providence and I’ll have my apartment, evenings, weekends and grocery lists to myself. I look forward to it with a mixture of excitement and dread. For the first time, except for a six month period when I first graduated from college, I will be living alone. I have no idea how I’ll take to it. Will I be lonely? Will I be free? Will I try to end my isolation by living with someone else as soon as possible? WIll I thrive? We’ll see.

I think of Patti at least once every day. I have pictures of her throughout our house and office but they have blended into the background. Instead, the way I come to think of her is because I keep encountering the parts of my life that she was  a part of — how I put the laundry away, the sheets she bought, the desk she sat at, the places she walked the dogs.  So many parts of everything. Some of those routines change, new sheets, new shopping lists, new situations with Jack she never dealt with. But she remains at the core of who I am in so many ways. After all, we grew up together and were molded by the same events, huge and minor and she was my best friend for  a quarter of  a century.

I worry sometimes that Patti’s memory will fade bit by bit until no one but her closest friends and relatives remember what she was like. That no one will know any more what a nut she was, how sweet she was, what a good friend and an inspiration. But I don’t think that’ll really ever be true. Her light burned too bright.

I wrote a book about her life and its aftermath and it’s at the publisher now. I worked on it harder and more carefully than anything I have ever done because I want the world to know about her, to fall in love with Patti Lynn like I did. In less than a year, it’ll be out there, making ripples, and creating new fans for her. I hope she would have liked it.

I miss you, Pat. I always will. I know you wouldn’t want any of us to be sad today or any day. I will always remember you and think of how you would have wanted things to be. Thanks you for being my friend and my love.

Book learning

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Yesterday, I ducked out of my office for a couple of hours to visit the midtown Sheraton, site of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) conference. I was the guest of Bob Fisher, a contributor to my upcoming book, An Illustrated Journey. Bob was participating in a seminar with his former teacher, Greg Stanforth, who has taught art at Cincinnati’s Archbishop Moeller High School for thirty years. Their topic, “Creating a Culture of Sketchbooks in a High School Art Program,” was close to my heart.

Greg’s school has about 1,000 students and they have three 90-minute art classes each week. He requires them to fill a page in their sketchbooks seven days  a week, and to cover it completely with color, collage and line. The boys fill at least one complete mid-sized Moleskine every semester and by the time they graduate have a tall stack of a dozen or so volumes. Greg brought a lot of these books with him and passed them around the room and then discussed how he gets these teenagers to produce so much beautiful and personal work.

FIrst of all, he insists that they consistently make pages: they work on them at home and in school and their grades are based on their consistent commitment not on any evaluation of the work itself. Nonetheless, the quality was really high and it was clear that they had spent a lot of time and thought day after day.

He also has them share their work with each other, something the students actually insisted upon. They pass their work around and boys pick out pages they like from others’ sketchbooks and discuss what they like about them. Many of the pages were surprisingly personal, discussing their reactions to parental divorce and other major issues in their lives. Greg reported that one boy even came out to his classmates, (and this is a Catholic school!)

He also brings them all sorts of inspiration, showing them established artists’ work and bringing in guests like Bob, an alumnus who went on to be a succesful illustrator and designer. But he also insists that the boys don’t copy from others but rather channel that influence through their own work, drawing always from observation, using each others as models and sketching and painting the scenes and objects around them.

Apparently Bob’s students have earned over $1 million in art scholarships, a fact that helps the program vital and cherished among the school’s administration.

Greg runs an amazing program and I’m glad to say that the room was packed with teachers sitting on the ground and eagerly asking questions after the talk. It certainly suggest that there may be many new converts to the world of sketchbooking and illustrated journaling.

At the end of the presentation, Bob distributed a list of sketchbooking resources which you can access here.

A new Sketchbook Film: Pencil & Ink

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(Sorry for the delayed launch of this post; had some last minute tweaks to do)

Tommy Kane, Jack, and I have just completed production on another in our series of drawing films — this one about NY artist, Justin Klein. It was a long and grueling shoot day, a good 14 hours, and by the end of the shoot, our set was full of bloodied paper, broken furniture, and empty beer cans and whiskey bottles. We all left the set changed for ever.

As I say to myself with each subsequent film, this is the best one yet. It is a bit of a departure from what we have done in the past but I think you’ll agree that it is an interesting extension of our core idea.
I’ll try to post again with some behind-the-scenes details about the production and answer any questions you post here.

Happy New Year!

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Filmed with a Canon 7D, edited in Final Cut Pro X.
Music: “Lux Aeterna – Cum Sanctis Tuis” from the Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Color Correction by Lenny Mastrandrea at Nice Shoes.

Legacy

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My friend Michael loves jazz. He infected his son with the same passion for music. By the time Nick enrolled in Jack’s school, he was already an accomplished guitarist and now in his junior year, he regularly plays with several jazz bands and combos. Our friend Jeff, also a jazz lover, recently said to Michael, “Congratulations. You’ve created a jazz musician.… Now what?”

When Jack was little, Patti and I, like most parents, collected and saved his artwork. We continue to encourage his creativity over the hump of the tween years, up to the present day. Along the way there were times I shared Jeff’s ambivalence, thinking to myself, “Are you just preparing him for life in a garret or working at a Starbucks full-time?”  I would hear the voice in my head chastising me for not preparing him for law school or medical school or Wall Street: “He’s a smart kid, he could be making a lot of money”. So when Jack decided that he wanted to focus on going to art college, I could feel the conflict rumbling in my tummy. I mean, there’s no question that I’ve always regretted the 10 or 15 years in which I didn’t create art. I wonder what my life would’ve been like had I gone to art school rather than studying political science.

But I knew deep in my heart that I could give Jack no better preparation in life than to let them know how important it is to follow your passion. I told him “most people are not passionate or talented in any particular way. You are a gifted artist and you love to make art. You are doubly lucky. It would be criminal to ignore those things to lead a life of mediocrity.” So I helped him to put his portfolio together and think about his application essays. We went to visit various art schools in the spring and I shared his anxiety over the weeks in which we were waiting for a decision.

He decided that RISD was his first choice. It was mine too, had been since I was 16 and I had attended the RISD summer program where I had the most extraordinary time of my young life, making art all day, living hundreds of miles away from my family, being surrounded by talented and creative friends, smelling of turpentine, and loving life.

I guess it’s a cliché: the father, frustrated in his youth, sending his son along the same path, like a mediocre football former high school player goading his son until he becomes a star quarterback. My own father was frustrated in the fact that he didn’t become a full-time artist, and, when I was in my 20s, he sort of encouraged me to take a different path, to study bookbinding or some such. Like most things my father said to me, I didn’t take it very seriously and so continued to go to the office every day.

I have learned so many things from art over the years, and I’ve learned it does not derail your destiny or condemn you to penury. Art is a constant in my life, even if I haven’t drawn a sausage for a month, informing how I see the world, how I think, how I feel. I can think of no greater legacy to leave my own son than to share in that wisdom and experience.

So I had no ambivalence last week, when Jack texted me excitedly at school to say that he’d been accepted into the class of 2016 at the Rhode Island School of Design. Instead, I felt enormously proud. And I felt, from some other plane, that Patti was sharing in my pride, because she too wanted Jack to follow his muse, to lead a creative life, but most of all to be happy. I think that in Providence he’ll be able to do all those things.

If a half-century of living on this sphere has taught me anything, it’s that regret is a waste of time, that one should seize every opportunity that comes one’s way, and that the fear of the unknown is just a one-way ticket into darkness. Fortunately, my son is braver than I am, less damaged, brighter, more confident in his abilities to change the world. He is my greatest work of art (though, of course I can’t claim all the credit).

Update on our film

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Just got this mail from the Red Hook Film Festival:

Hi Danny – Just a quick update – we are planning to open the Red Hook Film Festival with your film! (Red Hook-A portrait of Tommy Kane). It will screen on Saturday October 15th at 1pm in our opening block.

The schedule is up at our myspace page right now, and will be on the website tomorrow.

Our MySpace page:

This year’s festival will take place on October 15th and 16th, 2011 at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition (BWAC) screening room, which is located at 499 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, 11231. That’s at the very end of Van Brunt Street, across from the Fairway Supermarket.

Jack and I invite everyone who can make it to Brooklyn to the Festival. It should be a blast!