Art – Page 45 – Danny Gregory

Having faith in Brooklyn

December 4, 2005November 8, 2013 dannygregory

Yesterday Jack and I took the never-before taken Q train, deep into Brooklyn. We were off to visit Rick and Brenda and the rest of the Beerhorst clan in the apartment they recently relocated to from Michigan. It was brave and giant leap they took –– a couple of self employed artists, moving with six small children, all of them home schooled, into the belly of the Big City.

Rick works in several media: he is mainly a painter and a wonderful one at that – his realist work is part Alice Neel , part Grant Wood, depicting his children, his household, and his faith. He also makes bold woodcuts and has just recorded a CD of his original songs and he is a devoted sketchbooker. (All of this work is available through their website ). Brenda is a rug maker and her paintings are abstract, colorful patterns that remind me of Paul Klee (sorry for all these references – the Beerhorsts are actually quite unique) and I liked it very much. As Rick says of her work:”It is the way trees speak to us when we wrap our arms around them. It is way the ocean speaks to us when we walk along its shore letting our sneakers get wet.”

Back in Michigan, twice a year, they would cover their walls with the art they’d made — the children’s drawings, Rick’s painting, Brenda’s weaving, and Rose’s sock monsters. Then they would open their home and sell their work to anyone who wandered in. The question this weekend was: could this same thing work in a Brooklyn apartment building? When Jack and I arrived, it seemed like it could — there were all sorts of people from the neighborhood sifting through woodcuts, admiring sketchbooks, picking through a basket of monsters, and then opening their wallets.

Rick and Brenda seem to be living the life that most of us only dream of, and, of course, I wondered how they manage. They make their art, sell it, and educate their kids themselves, all in a city a thousand miles from what’s familiar. And they’ve apparently always lived this way.

Recently, I asked Rick to tell us more about how they live and how they manage and his answers reflected their deep religious faith:

“As to “irons in the fire”, keeping the money coming in, bills paid and a life still fertile for creativity that remains quite a mystery. I think it is up to each person to find the path that is theirs. I think for us at the bottom is a kind of old fashioned belief that God really does exist and has his eye on us. His realm seems to be both the physical and the spiritual at the same time, whereas we tend to be mostly just bound by the material world and its concerns (the neighbor who is mad about our bath tub overflowing and ruining his ceiling for the 4th time). We think God is watching out for us and has actually called us into a life of art-making that has a particular design to it that often may seem like foolishness to much of the general public. “Having so many children, (“don’t you know about birth control?”) is one of those things that seems like it could really get in the way of a “successful career” and yet our children have made our life so much richer and have given it depth which is in the long run great for making art with depth and uniqueness. But we don’t want to get up on a soapbox and preach lots of children as the answer. Which brings me back to the mystery part of living. The question always seems to come back to each person to ask, “what is in my heart?” and then to begin to pursue that. “We have written and received art making grants including the NEA and the Pollock/Kranser Grants and others. We have worked with art galleries around the country; Chicago, Seattle, Nashville, and now NYC. We have also had family art show where we invite friends into our home where Brenda and I as well as the children have put our works on display. These home art shows continued to grow and bring in more people and revenue over the past 10 years up until we moved here this summer. “We are missionaries with a mission organization out side of Nashville called ACT, Artists in Christian Testimony International. They work with artists and see them as an important part of the way the church needs to grow to stay relevant in a world culture that is increasingly image based. We are basically doing what we can to help our artist friends stay healthy and encouraged because we feel that the culture we live in is often toxic and about destroying artistic people rather than nurturing them. I had a friend die of an over dose about 5 years ago and it kind of lit a fire under me to want to do something to put an arm around the artists population that really needs a friend that is just there to take. “We have known poverty and lived with in it but try to keep the “spirit of poverty” out of our hearts. We have received the benefits of the WIC program. We have gone to church food pantries to volunteer as well as to receive free or nearly free groceries. We have often found our selves at the end of our physical resources and sought God’s deliverance in simple prayers and then experienced some incredible breakthroughs. “I will give you one such story: “In the spring of ’04, I was coming back from my gallery in Chicago with my two older daughters and their friend in our old Chevy van filled with paintings that the gallery wanted out of their storage room that hadn’t sold (the old maids I call them). We were about an hour away from home when the engine blew on the highway. We got a tow in to town and got the kids to bed really late. The van was bad news because we had no money to replace it and now real prospects except our little spring family art show coming up. “Brenda was pregnant with Rain, our sixth child, at the time. We decided to go without a car for a while which is a lot tougher in the Midwest where every thing is dependent on everyone having their own vehicle. It was the day of our family art show and Brenda started going into labor when she wasn’t supposed to be due for another two weeks. We were in the dilemma of what to do, call off the art show or just press on with it? “We decided after talking with our midwife to go ahead and let people come and if things got out of hand shut the show down. We ended up selling over a thousand dollars of art the first night and closed the door at 8:00pm. Brenda had the baby upstairs in our bedroom at 8:30pm, a beautiful little girl. The next afternoon we began again at 1:00 pm and in the first two hours, Betty DeVos came over who is a personal friend of President Bush. She and her husband own the AmWay corporation with another family. She is mind bogglingly wealthy. She bought enough paintings to make us $8,000 richer that day. (I had met her son in a filmmakers’ group a few months before). Needless to say we were able to buy a car to get around again. We kind of walked around in a daze for a while wondering how this had all happened. It felt like a miracle to us. “The pattern of our lives seems to be we are frequently hang from that little branch on the edge of a cliff and rescued just before our grip gives out. Living like this is a pain in the ass but it keeps us awake, attentive and appreciative. We feel like the life we live is an impossibility that God makes work as we press into him for his help and favor. In New York, we are living off the money we made when we sold our house back in Michigan. Our savings are dribbling away as I type and we feel again that scary feeling of a free fall. We are taking this day-to-day, just trying to do the best we can with what we got.”I am very grateful that Jack and I had a chance to visit with the Beerhorsts and they taught me some very valuable lessons. Lessons I seem to have to learn over and over:

Choose your path.
Believe in yourself.
Improvise.
Count your blessings.
Trust in the power of love.
What can you learn from their example about your own life?

Pens of the Moment

November 25, 2005 dannygregoryLeave a comment

These days, I have quite a nice little arsenal of pens (here each presents a self-portrait), and they are influencing how and what I draw more and more.
First off is (1) my trusty nib holder. It’s a General’s #204B with a cork finger grip area, now deeply dyed with a couple of years of various inks. Despite my collection of nibs, this one is permanently in my holder: aHunt Ex-Fine Ball Pointed (my sight is beginning to go and Jack had to read the tiny letters off the nib) with a nice big reservoir hole. It’s a squishy nib that can draw very fine lines or big fat ones.
(2) came from Venice with my Friend, Tom. The holder is champagne colored Murano glass with steel hardware and it’s a lot more solid and weighty than everyday pen. I like the weight but am nervous to carry it away from my desk. It came with this nib that looks like a steak knife which lays down sharp lines, a little less flexible that the Hunt. In my current journal I am only drawing in browns, blacks and yellows ï¿½ my main inks are Doc Martins’ radiant concentrated Sepia and Golden Brown and Daler-Rowney’s FW Acrylic Artist Ink. The former is a little more transparent that I always want, the latter is thicker, almost like paint and takes a while to dry.
(3) I’ve mentioned my bamboo pen before. I use it with any ink but most often Sum-i ink in a heavy stone inkwell. It draws all sorts of line depending on how hard I press and feels lovely and organic.
(4) is a Faber Castell PITT pen, brown ink, preferably, S or F, and usually in my pocket. The ink is permanent so I can watercolor over it right away and depending on the age of the pen it can be smooth and creamy or scratchy and textured. I can draw very little broken lines with it or bear down and make dark ones. It’s less alive than dip pens but the best marker I’ve found.
(5) After years of searching, I found a fountain pen I really like. I got it in Italy: a Columbus Maxima and it’s very heavy and silver and cost about 80 Euros. I use disposable cartridges with non-waterproof ink which I can smear with a wet fingertip. At first, I thought the tip was too stiff but I carry it with me everywhere and it had become a good friend.
These pens tell me quite a lot about my drawing at this stage. I like dip pens because they slow me down — I take my time with open bottles of ink and the small load of ink they can sustain. It also makes me feel connected to centuries of artists who worked in just this way. My love of technical pens like the Rapidoliner has ben replaced by a desire for variable lines that give drawings more interest and life.
It’s also interesting to see how my pen choices have changed. Here’s the inventory I did a year and a half ago. The entire original cast has changed.

Going to Van Gogh

November 6, 2005September 24, 2010 dannygregoryLeave a comment

Inspired by van G, I have been drawing with a bamboo pen of late.

On Friday, Jack and I headed up to the Met to check out the van Gogh drawing show. It’s the first time that all the known drawings have been assembled in one place — they’re fragile and very sensitive to light — and, after Jack’s school conferences in the morning, I decided that visiting them was a better way to spend my afternoon than revising Chase checking ads. Hooky is good for the soul.
There are four or five rooms full of drawings and a half dozen paintings and they are arranged chronologically so you can get a sense of his progress. Right off, I was struck but how much better he was at the beginning than I’d thought. I have always disliked the Potato Eater period and thought that his early drawings would be hamfisted and ugly. In fact, they are quite accomplished; however, he had the beginner’s anxious tendency to overwork. Most of the drawings are thick with heavy-handed lines. It also seemed that he was so anxious to develop himself into a commercially-viable genre painter that he was unoriginal and struggling. He even spent a very brief period in art school; his academic nude is embarrassingly mawkish — he is clearly not working from instinct but trying hard to fit in. It was only after he’d left Paris and found himself in Arles that his drawings really took off.
I discovered that he was always a bit of an art supply freak — particularly in his first few years, he did drawings that used graphite, ink, watercolors, thinned-down oil, pastel, all in the same pictures. His most lovely works were done in just sepia ink and the variety came from his lines rather than his media. He had so many ways of making lines, swirls, hashes, dashes, circles, dots, capturing the rich textures of the countryside, the soft waving wheat, the dried, gnarled trees, the prickly cypress leaves, the delicate wildflowers… WIth just reed pen and ink, he could capture layers of mists sfumattoing off to the horizon. Most evocative was the way he rendered the harsh, ever-noon light of Southern France; the high contrast and deep shadows makes the heat wave off the page.
I was struck by things he does that I probably should do but don’t. He’d redraw good drawings and perfect them. Back at the studio he’d paint from drawings done in the field. He’d do drawings of paintings he’d done and send them off in letters to friends, relatives, potential patrons; I was interested in how in different drawings of the same painting he would emphasize different aspects of the composition — making it more abstract, more colorful, more accessible, depending on what would appeal to the particular audience. I just never work my stuff through that way. I like to think of VvG as being very spontaneous and visceral but he was obviously a lot more thoughtful and deliberate than I am.
He gave a couple of the paintings a painted edge which the catalog explained as an attempt to make them special and more ready for sale. One even had a crude marbleized paper matte. SItting on one of the rare benches at the show, I wrote in my journal, “How could people at the time not have bought these? I want to take them all home.”

Art Class Memories

October 22, 2005 dannygregoryLeave a comment

Me-And-Pencil-Box

The earliest art class I can remember was at ten, in Lahore, Pakistan. The class was held under a line of tall trees along a dusty road. Willow trees or cypress (?) swayed overhead. It’s vague and improbable. Why along side a road? The only clear thing about it is a painting I made, a multicolored sunset over twisting black rocks. I painted it for my mother who I hadn’t seen in just over a year while I lived with my grandparents. I remember it clearly because I saw it a month ago; it hangs in the stairway down to her basement in Mattituck.
My next memory was two years later, in the Brenner School in Kfar Saba, Israel. Matatiahu, my art instructor also taught Wood-shop class. I was an enthusiastic but inept carpenter; I could never measure things attentively and my joints were always out of whack, my projects a mess of protruding nail heads and smeared glue. I was better at Art (or so I thought) — I had always liked to draw and paint — but Matatiahu didn’t like me. Maybe it’s because I was a foreigner, only recently fluent in Hebrew. Or maybe I’d established an unshakeable reputation with Matatiahu at the workbench. Or maybe I was just an obnoxious twerp.
One day, Matatiahu assigned us a project to do at home: a painting of birds. Determined to

redeem myself in his eyes, I worked long into the night. I collected reference pictures of dozens of species of birds and arranged them in a sprawling painting of an oasis at sunset. Flamingoes and storks posed along the water’s edge, sparrows and owls were arranged on tree branches, and hawks soared through the pink and purple clouds overhead. I felt like a young Audubon when I handed it in and, the following week, when Matatiahu handed back our work, I eagerly flipped it over to see his comments. In blue ballpoint, he had written, “F. The assignment was ‘birds’ not ‘landscape‘.

My mother and my stepfather, proud ’60’s anti-authoritarians, were majorly pissed. ”Who grades a child’s art work, for Chrissakes?“ my mother fumed. She stormed down to the school, lodged a protest, and my grade was changed. The following week, Matatiahu told us about a nationwide student competition for traffic safety posters. I painted a grisly scene of a corpse sprawled across the bloody hood of a smashed car. No doubt gritting his teeth through his congratulatory smile, Matatiahu picked my work to represent the school. I didn’t win the competition but fortunately my parents didn’ t fight this latest injustice.

As a teenager in Brooklyn, I attended a very progressive school. My art teacher, Paul, was an ardent Marxist and always encouraged us to be loose and experimental, not to worry about figurative bullshit — concept was king. I loved him but he taught me much more about class oppression, tofu, and joint rolling than how to draw.

On Sundays, I studied drawing at the Brooklyn Museum. The second week of the term, a large and loud girl took a liking to me and began to rip pages out of her sketchbook and pass lewd notes to me. I was a very skittish and self conscious kid and filled with horror when she made other students pass these notes to me. I took to sitting at the back near the door and escaped down into the Eastern Parkway subway station the minute the class broke. Occasionally, she caught me on the platform, complaining that she had to buy a special notebook for notes to me as she had emptied her large sketchbook. The fact that I never responded with anything but grimaces and shrugs didn’t seem to dissuade her ardor. Midterm, I dropped out and far too embarrassed to tell my parents what was going on, I spent my Sunday afternoons at the library instead.

The summer after junior year, I followed the example of my idol, Eric Drooker, who the year before had gone to the RISD summer program. It was fantastic; we lived in campus dorms like grownups, studied painting and drawing and printmaking, but more importantly stayed up late, drank loads of beer, and made out with girls.

This was the mid 1970s and I was an overly intellectual, arrogant, and insecure teenager. Most of the art I made was highly conceptual. If I could figure out a way to outthink the teacher, all the better. When our design teacher asked us to use up a whole pencil in a single drawing, I had a brainstorm. I ground up a pencil and its eraser into a fine dust in a sharpener. Then I painted a nude woman in rubber cement, and used an atomizer to blow the shavings all over the painting. When the teacher saw my soft, gradated image hanging among the grimy black works of my classmates, he chastised me for not doing the assignment. But when I explained my ‘ingenious’ technique, he apologized publicly and my triumph was complete. Summer school proved to be another opportunity to refine my mastery of the fine art of pissing off authority.

It was also the end of my art education. Being surrounded by the most talented kids in schools across the country at RISD has lowered me a notch or two. I think I gave up on art at that point and frankly no one else seemed that concerned.

At Princeton, I took some art history classes but loudly resented having to memorize what other people said said about famous art. I don’t remember being asked for my opinion of the masters and instead resisted the ideas of the art establishment that had, in my mind, calcified the history of art into just another academic discipline to keep professors tenured. Mine wasn’t a very coherent critique but I loved clinging to my opinion, which seemed to be the underlying point of much of my education.

It took me another twenty years to accept my ignorance, in fact, to embrace it. These days, I am hungry to learn about art and to saturate myself in as many different ways as I can find to explore it. I wonder what my life would be like if I had been able to find teachers who could have kept me enthusiastic and open-minded, for all these years.

Releaf

September 26, 2005 dannygregoryLeave a comment

On Sunday, I took the first drawing class I’ve had since I was eleven. It was at the Open Center, a sort of granola-y place in Soho which offers many new Age classes on creativity, meditation, and other sorts of grooviness.
My particular class was called “Drawing as a way of being” but I’d not been lured so much by the title as by the teacher’s teacher, Dr. Frederick Franck. I learned a lot about drawing from Franck’s books, The Zen of Seeing; The Awakened Eye; A Passion for Seeing, etc and, now that he is ninety six, blind, and deaf, he has passed his workshop duties onto Joanne Finkel, a fiftyish woman with bright eyes, pigtails and well-furred calves.
Most of the other students identified themelves as undrawers, anxious about their inability, and armed with Venti Starbucks and Pearl Paint bagfuls of art supplies. My supplies were new too; I decided to abide by the class materials list and had a mechanical pencil loaded with .5 HB lead and a kneadable eraser. Under my arm, I clutched a huge virginal drawing pad.
We did a pleasant meditation exercise and then the teacher handed out leaves. I clicked my pencil a few times and got going on the blind contour exercise. It ws a little dicey at first as I just never draw with a pencil, but by the second pass, I was in the groove.
When we were given permission to look at the leaf as we drew, I got heavily into the details, mainlining the veins that branched off the stem, sinking deeper and deeper into the plant’s very cells. The teacher came by to say, “Wow, you’re really into those veins, huh?” As that was what the leaf seemed to be to all about, I was a tad puzzled. On her next pass, she suggested that I squint and only draw the major landmarks of the leaf. This seemed regressive but in the spirit of being a good student, I complied and felt like a half-walked dog. On the next circuit, she suggested I vary the intensity of my grip on the lead, making lines that exressed where the leaf seemed very clear and where it was ‘less crispy’. It all looked pretty clear to me but dutifullyI rode my pencil up and down with fluctuating line weights, something I rarely do with my ink pen. Before long I recognized Frederick Franck’s style expressed on my page. My drawings looked just like his, not much like mine.

It’s interesting that what our teacher saw as a pure response to the subject, I perceived as an exercise in style. I was seeing the way she and Franck saw, but not really as I do. I tend to bore deep into things, and to treat every line and detail with similar emphasis. There is something more sensual but tentative (dare I say ‘feminine”) about the varying lines of this new style.
As we broke at lunch for an hour, the teacher dangled the opportunity to draw fruis and vegetables after we returned. I decided to forgo the salad and played hooky. Instead, I went out and bought myself a 1980 Honda motorcycle. In Dr Franck’s honor, I spent the rest of the afternoon drawing the road with my tires, shifting from first to second to third gear, depending on how crispy the potholes looked.

My perspective on perspective

September 16, 2005 dannygregoryLeave a comment

School’s back on and NYU students wander through my neighborhood, clutching new books and pencils. Quite often, I see some of them set up in the park, preparing to draw Washington Square arch. It’s a beautiful landmark, and I’ve often tackled it myself.
I like the ones who slop around with paint and charcoal but I can’t relate to those who show up with t-squares and turn out tight engineering schema, that look more like blueprints than any expression of soul. To me, drawing is about observation and sensuality more than perfection. That’s my esthetic.
I draw a lot of architecture because they define the landscape we New Yorkers live in. While I’m no Brunelleschi, I understand the principles of perspective. I know generally how to locate a vanishing point and that knowledge can be useful if I’m really stuck. But I think of it as more like understanding the principle of the internal combustion engine; I get it but it doesn’t enter my mind much when I’m driving down the road.
Here’s how I’d go about drawing* the view down my street.
It’s a fairly complex scene so I lay down some little marks first. I find the midpoints of my page (in green) using my pen as a rough ruler. I take the same sorts of measurements of the thing I’m drawing. I also uses my thumbs as rough rulersï¿½ so and so many thumb widths to this point, so and so many pen cap lengths to this point ï¿½ that sort of thing. If I didn’t measure things out like this, I’m sure I would have misjudged how wide the library’s facade was in the foreground. The actual part of the scene that is of interest only occupies about 1/8 of the whole space.
I usually start drawing in the upper left hand corner and work my way across. I’ll make little marks if need be to tell me where things intersect. When I just whip out a long diagonal line like the one in the upper left, it probably won’t hit the mark unless I set a target point.
I’ll also look for some sort of large and broken line somewhere to use as a reference point. In this case, the building on the right has a regular pattern of tiles down its length; I can use this like an in situ ruler to guide the other buildings’ proportions. I count down three tiles and say, ‘Okay, the roof of the ornate building in the center hits this height. Go down one more tile and that’s the point at which the angle of the receding part of the roof hits. Down two more and that ‘s the roof of the building behind it…’ and so on. If there’s no guide in the landscape (as there wasn’t horizontally here) I can also use my pen length to bifurcate the space and create a partial grid to set my reference points.
Remember to check your verticals. Unless you have birds’ or worms’ eyes, make sure your verticals are straight 90 degree angles to the ground. It’s so easy to start leaning them over and soon all of your lines will be out of whack.
I measure other sorts of angles by holding up my pen horizontally and then rotating it to meet the angle. That action temporarily imprints the deviation of the angle from the horizon into my brain. When I go down to the paper, I just repeat the rotation and I can usually get it pretty dead on.
I like to do all these little measurements rather than ruling down the artificial lines of perspective and then erasing them because I am trying to record my own observations in my drawings. I find that all these little measurements bring me closer and closer to my subject and that’s the goal of my work. I don’t care if it’s all accurate and perfect but that it reflects what and how I am seeing. The deeper I go the better. Somehow rulers and perspective lines make it all seem more mechanical and artificial and I just don’t like it.
In any case, the results seem okay to me. In fact, I will often be a lot wilder and just draw lines and angles on the fly. I don’t care that much of my buildings are misshapen and irregular, so long as they feel alive. Those T-square folks seem to make drawings that lie on the page like dead, academic fish.
Drawing buildings is just like drawing anything else. Be slow. Keep your eyes on the subject most of the time. Don’t freak out if you make a ‘mistake’. And do it as often as you can.
Drawing isn’t a science. Don’t reduce it to one.
—–
*Atypically, I drew this in Photshop on a tablet so I could use layers to demonstrate my methodology.

On crosshatching

September 7, 2005 dannygregory1 Comment

As you spend more and more time drawing, there usually comes a point when contour drawing isn’t enough. You can set down lines that perfectly describe the shapes in front of you but you become interested in giving your work dimension and exploring the effects of light and shade. Several people have reached that point recently and written asking me to talk discuss the whys and wherefores of cross hatching. let me try.
Cross hatching is quite miraculous. How is it that black ink lines on white paper have the ability to create an infinite number of shades of grey, to evoke all the colors of the rainbow and to suggest textures and materials and varied as silk and stone, glass and schnauzer hair?

The first thing to do is to get in the groove. Practice drawing lines until you can lay them down in fairly predictable parallel strokes. Do it in boring practice sessions or just start working them into your drawings. Try greying gradations, filling boxes from pure white to solid black — space the lines far apart in the first box, then halve the distance in the second box, then halve it again in the third and so on until your final block is completely black. Next, try crossing your vertical lines with horizontal ones, weaving darker and darker gradations. Then lay a diagonal set of lines over the grid, upper left to lower right, then cross back upper right to lower left. Try keeping them as regular and even as you can, so you can create various sorts of grey with various sorts of combinations of lines. Don’t make yourself nuts just experiment with lines at 45 and 90 degree angles.
The next things to consider: What do these shades of grey represent? The answer seems to fall into three main effects: Tone, color and texture. You can decide that darker greys mean things in shadow, or that different greys represent different surface colors, or that the lines represent different textures.

These drawings (by Guptill — see below*) are basically about light and dark. The lines tell you the volume and direction of the light on the object and that’s about it.

These lines tell you a lot more about the materials the objects are made from; straw, wood, wicker, etc. all accomplished with crosshatching various sorts of lines.

In this drawings, my pal Tom Kane uses lines to suggest different colors in a girl’s kerchief.

But here he uses the same sorts of lines to express the direction and shading of light on a girl’s hair.
As you can see, once you start introducing these tones, you have a lot more decisions to make. You aren’t just recoding shapes; you are expressing an opinion about what you found interesting in the scene.

Consider the differences that values and tones make in these three interpretations of a scene:the various choices evoke different temperatures, distances, moods and degrees of importance.

It’s interesting to play around with line quality and stippling too: Consider the different feelings these drawings have because of the varying degree of regularity and the direction of the lines used in each identical composition.
My inclination is to avoid incredibly regular lines; they seem mechanical and inorganic to me. I lay down one value in the middle then go back and firth balancing areas with more or less crosshatching until I have described the effect I want. It’;s all a matter of balance and crosshatching is pretty forgiving, If things feel off, just go back and hit your darker areas with a new layer of lines to get the emphasis right.
Like so many things in drawing, there aren’t a lot of hard fast rules or rights and wrongs. Crosshatching is just another opportunity to record your observations, capture your feelings and have fun. And there’s something about that hypnotic regularity of drawing parallel lines that is very soothing.

“Drawing is just an excuse to crosshatch”— R.Crumb
———–
* The greatest practitioners and teachers worked and published in the 19th century, when every day’s paper was full of endless engraved examples of cross hatching. I have learned a lot from the publications of Watson Guptill, beginning with seminal works by Arthur L. Guptill himself, like Rendering in Pen and Ink and moving on to the less encyclopedic but crystalline Henry C. Pitz’s Ink Drawing Techniques. I also love Paul Hogarth’s Creative Ink Drawing. Many of these are still in print or can be picked up cheaply second-hand.

Clarification

July 30, 2005 dannygregory1 Comment

I’ve been following a discussion on the Everyday Matters group and it has gotten my wheels turning. The talk has been about the utility of specific drawing assignments suggested by others, whether there’s really utility or purpose to everyone deciding to draw a piece of fruit one week, a pair of shoes the next, and then sharing their work and discussing it. While some people love it and have made it the main business of the group, others have complained that it has diverted the purpose of the group and distracted it from its original intention.
I’m not interested in taking sides because I think any sort of drawing is a good thing. However, I’d like to clarify what I’m up to with my drawing. While I have done some nice drawings here in Rome, I’m not interested in being a travel writer or an illustrator or a fine artist.
I want to live my life to its fullest and I find that drawing what I encounter deepens my appreciation. While I share my work with others, I make it for me. When I have unusual and interesting experiences like I’m having in Rome right now, my drawings seem to have a wider interest. But my core philosophy is that every day matters. Every single day. The day you meet the president. The day you have a baby. The day you find a special on sirloin at the supermarket. The day you get your shoes back from the cobbler. I find that drawing helps me to commemorate those events, large and small, dull and transformative. For me, that’s the point of art. To deepen my understanding of my life.
If someone else’s suggestion that I draw a particular thing opens my eye to fruit or glasses or the pattern of sunshine on my counterpane, then that’s great. But ultimately, we all live different lives and are handed assignments by each dawning day. Each day we’re handed a new set of challenges, new rivers to ford, new choices and wonders and pains and lessons. If we think the day is full and familiar, we need just dig deeper into it, look for fresh insight, peel back the layers of the onion. I find that drawing helps me do that.
Art lessons familiarize one with the tools but they are not a substitute for digging one’s own ditches, constructing one’s own nest. They are just abstractions and life is very concrete. I enjoy what I learn in life-drawing classes, but learn far more by drawing my wife’s sleeping body, my reflection in the bedroom mirror.
To draw, one must draw. Exercises and academic and books provide examples of what one might do, but experience is the real teacher. Take tomorrow as your assignment. Draw your breakfast, your bus stop, your bathroom wall while you’re shitting, your laundry as you fold it, your children as they watch TV, your pillow as you wait for lights out.
Be bold with your exploration. Capture what you do and have always done. Then push yourself to new experiences if only to draw them. Visit new neighborhoods and draw them. Meet new people and draw them. Try new foods, read new books, smell new flowers, do anything that will deepen your understanding and your appreciation of your world and your place in it.
I don’t care if you think your drawings suck, if you are ashamed to show them to anyone else. What matters is that you pause and contemplate. If your record of that contemplation is inaccurate, try again. Feel deeper. See deeper. Slow down. Relax. And tomorrow, do it again. You aren’t being graded or evaluated on your drawing. No more than you are being evaluated on your life itself. The only thing that matters is you. What you experience. How you experience it. How much you get out of this day and the next. This is your life. Dig into it. Embrace it. Notice its curves and angles. Explore its corners. Feels its edges and put them down on paper. The pen, the page, are just tools for you to take time and slow it down. I can’t make you do it my way, any more than I can force you to live your life my way. You decide, you forge your style, you pick the line that draws your life.
Take tomorrow and instead of hesitating and questioning and doubting and fretting, draw your breakfast, draw your day. Then try it again the day after. With each successive day, you’ll be clearer and deeper. If you miss a day, don’t freak out or beat yourself up. Just take on the day after that.
Share the results if you’d like. By sharing you will find commonality and support. But maybe you don’t need more than self sufficiency. In that case, keep your drawings for yourself. Or toss them out as you do them. The drawings don’t matter, the drawing does.

Technologica Artistica di Roma

July 23, 2005 dannygregoryLeave a comment

So there have been various technical questions from readers who wonder what sort of mountain of gear I have brought with me here to the Holy City to get shit* onto paper and onto this site. It’s an important and pressing issue so I will explore it here in full.
Here’re the highlights: I carry an aluminum alloy Soltek Pro Easel in a calfskin and spandex torsal harness and a Herman Miller folding titanium stool with translucent Cygnus mesh; a 22×30″ Roma Luss Journal re-bound with 300 lb. Fabriano Artistico Cold Press; a full set of Series 44-14 Dan Smith Autograph Series Watercolor Round brushes in Russian winter male Kolinsky sable fur; my trusty 18 Kt rose gold finished Mother of Pearl 85th Anniversary Aurora fountain pen and three different sets of Daniel Smith watercolor pans, each customized for optimal performance under varying heat and humidity conditions.
Oh, and my personal assistant, Franellika, carries a 72″ linen parasol; two Art Bin Ultimate Solutions tote full of miscellaneous markers, pencils, paints, brushes, scalpels, quills, sandwiches, and iced martini fixins; a fully loaded iPod plus backup; a portable library of travel guides, art monographs and r.crumb sketchbooks; and a yellowing skull for contemplation
Back at the hotel, I have two Power Mac G5s (2.7GHz dual-processors) each rigged up to 30-inch Cinema HD Displays and 2-terrabyte external drives; I digitize my drawings with my Aztek Premier drum scanner and run off prints of each page on my HP Color LaserJet 3700dtn Printer. The gear takes up most of the extra hotel room I set up as EDM production HQ but it’s worth it to bring you my high quality art work in the sort of breath taking verisimilitude you have come to expect from this site.
Any further questions on techniques? Please post a comment and/or refer to this profile of my usual gear inventory and inventory of art supplies.

—— *My language may be a little questionable today as I have discovered my new favorite filthy thing: The Dawn and Drew Show, the fucking funniest thing I have heard at least since coming to Italy if not before, and am listening to it on iTunes while I write this)

Romin'

July 18, 2005 dannygregoryLeave a comment

Yesterday I managed to throw down a quick drawing at the Trevi fountain before becoming overwhelmed by sun and jetlag. This morning, chipper and well-rested, I packed up my gear to head over to the Vatican. A block from my hotel, I stepped off the too-high curb and crumpled to the ground as tendons thwanged unnaturally in my ankle. Fortunately I had the self-control to get up, hobble back up the hill to the hotel and tell the desk clerk to send me up some ice.
My outer ankle had quickly developed a lump the size of a Mallomar but after three hours in bed, pack on, hoof on pillow pile (RICE- rest, ice, compression, elevation) the patient is still pink and healthy looking and my toes waggle freely so amputation can probably be postponed. I am going to be here for a couple of more weeks so I think I’ll curb my lust for the Sistine Chapel and take it easy.
Was it the Pope, cursing me? Michelangelo pegging me for an interloper? A frustrated cobble-stone-layer who, wishing he too could be watercoloring of a Monday, decided to thwart brush wielding tourists of the future?
The irony: I was crossing the road (or trying to) to check out a place that rents Vespas. Maybe it was just as well I took my spill in my sandals, rather than scraping off several layers of skin and a handful of teeth while zooming around the Coliseum on a two stroke bike.

I have constrained my drawing to my hotel’s neighborhood which in Rome
is not much of a liability. One could spend the rest of one’s life
drawing this city — the architecture is so rich and organic, the light
is wonderful, the juxtapositions are endlessly diverse. I did this
first piece during an exorbitant pasta lunch (more than $50 for a handful of
pasta and a cappuccino) at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant. Slumped low,
my hoof propped up on another chair, I strained to see the view over
the parapet.

A few blocks away on the Via Veneto, I discovered this marvelous
church. Beneath is a wonderfully macabre series of crypts, room after
room of Benedictine monks’ dismembered skeletons arranged into
sculptures and decorations — piles of skulls, chandeliers made of
tailbones, shoulder blade rosettes and baldacchinos made of pelvises.
Long lines of teenaged American girls file in and out, squealing “Ew,
gross!” and “Creeeeepy!”. I found it quite beautiful and touching, so
many 17th century bones committed to remind one of the temporary nature
of life on this planet, “As you were so once was I ; as I am so shall
you be.”
It was impossible to draw down there among the crowds so I retired to
the Church of the Immaculate above and drew its back room as the light
slowly faded and my watercolor box disappeared into the gloom. At one
point, a nut brown monk came over and wished me “Pace” but I was
already suffused with peace.

On the Piazza Barberini, I started to draw an old cinema surrounded by
lovely crumbling facades when a big white panel van pulled right up in
front of me and blocked my view. Instead I worked on another building,
listening with one ear to two slurring Englishwomen at the next table
who were drinking huge vasefuls of lager and snapping pix of each other
and emailing them to pals back home. Eventually my friends, the Pratts,
came and joined me and I laid down my pen.
Annie Pratt is a believer in homeopathic medicine and prescribed some
Arnica to me. The next morning my ankle was a lot less swollen and,
after various meetings on casting and production, we headed off to
visit the Colosseum and the rest of ruined Rome. It was blazing hot and
crowded and I couldn’t bring myself to tackle drawings of the broken
columns. En route, my pocket was picked on the subway; the bastards
made off with about $100. Sprained ankle, thieving gypsies, John
Roberts … I wonder what sort of bad luck I’ll face today.

I’m not the tourist type. My neighborhood in New York is always
overrun by people wearing comfortable clothes and cameras clutching
guide books and asking “Scusi, where Greenwich Village?” I am always gracious but wish they would walk a little faster and get a clue.
But in Rome, do as the Romanians do. Get a guide book, a map, and start
blundering around town. Nonetheless, despite my backpack, my folding
stool, my sandals, and my sweaty, parched ways, I try to pretend not to
be desperately foreign. Of course, I fail. Waiters address me in
English, vendors hawk after me with postcards and foot high replicas of
David
My self-loathing came to an end in Vatican City. When I lined up with
the rest of the unwashed and finally reached the portal of St.Peter’s,
I was so overcome by the beauty and splendor of the place that I just
let go and gawked. Wow. The plundered marble and bronze of the Coliseum
is mind-bpoggling lavish.. And then, waiting until the end of the day
to avoid the lines, I swept through the Vatican Museum to the Sistine
Chapel, discovering amazing things I’d never known along the way. The
map room, hundreds of yards long and encrusted with thousands of
perfect paintings worked into the walls and ceilings, the Raphael
frescoes (how could the Pope manage the hubris to command such geniuses
to paint his apartment floor to ceiling, wall after wall? Here he is a
single guy with the most ornate, Baroque pad in the universe.. How did
he sleep in there at night? It’s awesome), and then finally the
Sistine. I have read books about it, seen endless reproductions and
thought I grasped Michelangelo’s accomplishment. But to be confronted
by so much epic scenery, so many perfect, enormous bodies…; whether he painted it alone or with a crew, it’s an incredible, deeply moving feat.
I gush. I can’t help it. Despite my cynicism and my discomfort with the
Papacy’s greed, I may have to go again. My name is Danny and I’m a
tourist (don’t tell my boss — I am here working after all).

Two Roman drawings that took a while. The first about an hour, the
second, close to it,
I was moved by police three times during the first which screwed up my
sight lines a bit. The second I’m less happy with, too many stylized
people, less observed, more illustrative, too much blue underpainting,
but, whatever, it was fun to do.
Rome is just insanely great to draw because of all the details and textures and juxtapositions. Work is

done for the week — I can’t wait to spend my weekend out on my stool.

This wonderful building is on the corner of my block. It sits on top of its own little hill, surrounded by gardens. I pass it most days and finally took the time, on two separate occasions, to study it in detail.
This city is so full of surprises. Turn a corner and a wonderful composition or juxtaposition will just jump out. This one suddenly appeared between the trees as I was hiking out to eat dinner; branches parted like a curtain to reveal this vista backed by the setting sun.

Another view that popped out; this one seen from above from a hill. These little temples must have been restored in the Roman fashion; the little tubby demons are so sweet.

The Borghese Gardens have a giant air ballon in the style of the Gondolfier Brothers. It rises silently in the air for fifteen minute trips from which one can see the whole city. Nothing in Rome is more than six stories so the big landmarks pop out across the landscape. I have now been here long enough to identify the Vatican, the Victor Emanuel Monument, the various piazzas, the Coliseum, etc.

A little bit of color, exaggerated, as it was painted in the failing light of an ending day.

I’m finally getting the hang of tires. Wheels have always confounded me when I draw cars and stuff but as I say, in Europe, I’m finally getting the hang of tyres.
Notice the small brown mini dots on this drawing? That’s because when I start doing and drawing of something so complicated or big or whatever that I get nervous, I take a few measurements with an outstretched arm and a pen and then make little marks to indicate where things fall.
Despite all that, this drawing, made as people were rushing to work at 9 am and I had to get my ass moving for a 10 o’clock meeting, is lopsided and misisng all sorts of bits that didn’t end up fitting on the page.

Another drawing done in decline, lopsided, colored like a coloring book and full of cheats to fit stuff in. When I slow my ass way way down, I can draw things like that Vespa up above. When I rush and people hang over my shoulder and I’m roasting in the sun, Things get bleak. I know that about myself and yet I keep doing it. Sometime I can save a drawing afterwards with loads of crosshatching but it’s a lost cause, a charade, not in the moment. But, then, later in the afternoon, during the wardrobe fitting, waiting for our actors to change, I drew the Vespa which I’m pretty happy with, particularly the tyres. So even when the knack hides, it resurfaces. So shut up and do another drawing.

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