Category: A Kiss Before You Go

Two Years

dannygregory22 Comments

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.

New stuff

dannygregory17 Comments

– We finished filming our second drawing movie. This one was a bit more ambitious and may take some time to edit.
– The first draft of my next book is almost done. We’ve had some back and forth on the size of it which has meant redesigning the pages but I am happy with where it has ended up. Though sad in places, it is my favorite book so far and I hope you like it too.
– Jack and I are going on a brief European tour soon. Packing has begun.

Progress Report

dannygregory6 Comments

I know I have developed an annoying new habit of teasing you with vague announcements of upcoming projects. So here’s a status update on a few of the pots bubbling on the stove.

• My next book, currently known only as “The Patti Book” is coming along very well. I have shared the first draft with my editor Bridget and she has had a lot of useful input. The second draft is almost finished and I will soon start polishing it for final transmission to San Francisco. I’ll probably do a third before I officially submit it bto Chronicle — my deadline is in the early fall. I am struggling with the best title for the book — that’s always the hardest part of the process for me.

• I have received lots of spectacular suggestions for artists to include in my book on travel journaling. Thanks so much to everyone who sent in submissions and refferals. If you have any other ideas, I am a still wide open, particularly for journals that include both great drawings and writing. Even if all of the artists don’t end up in the book, this list of travelling journalistas as a wonderful resource that has already inspired me a great deal. Post your suggestions here in the comments section; I check it regularly.

• We had a sneek screening of the first drawing film this week. Everyone seemed to like it a lot and we got lots of suggestions that will serve to make it even better. We’re heading back into the editing suite and hope to have a world premiere very soon. Here are stills from a few of my favorite scenes:

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• My travel schedule continues. I will be taking a quick jaunt down the C&O canal, cycling 100 miles or so in what may prove to be debilitating heat. Then Jack and I head to Paris and Rome for a brief sketching interlude. I’ll be shooting in California in September and may or may not go to Indonesia and Kazakhstan in the fall as well. I think I will have circumnavigated the globe (or the equivalent) three times by year’s end!

• Cathy Johnson’s book is #1 on Amazon’s Drawing best steller list! Wahoo!

• I have been invited to apply to speak at the HOW design conference in Boston next spring. I had a great time when I did it last time, addressing thousands of designers and encouraging them to draw. I really hope I get to go again.

Misty watercolored memories

dannygregory23 Comments

It’s exciting getting to work on a new book. The excitement kicks off with the first advance check, now nestled in my bank — but that’s short-lived. The real fun is figuring out all of the bits and pieces and how they fit together. I don’t have a huge amount of time to work on this book but enough so that I can go back and rewrite and redraw things until I really like them.

When my editor read my blogpost announcing my deal with Chronicle, she wrote to me to remind me that the book is not in fact scheduled for next year but the middle of 2013. Yipes. I promised I could get things done faster if she could compress the schedule on her end and we managed to swap things around so now the book will come out six months earlier in the Fall/Winter 2012. I have until October 1 to get the first draft in which should be plenty of time (famous last words).

Much of this book is drawn from the illustrated journals I’ve kept over the past 13 months but they’re all being reworked and augmented. My journal captures the here and now so vividly but a book needs to have a more lofty perspective too, a way of winding everything together into a narrative. While the book has a clear beginning, the end is fuzzier and so I have decided to bring the story to an end after a full year, the official mourning period. Mourning, of course, takes a lot longer than a year — it seems to be  a lifelong process — but the book has to stop somewhere.

Beyond my illustrated journals, I have been writing a lot, little paragraphs, captured thoughts, revelations, and I am blending them into the pages I have already drawn and painted. That means a fair amount of editing but it’s all being created with snapshots of my moods taken as they appear.

The book will open with a section focussed on Patti’s life, trying to bring her to life on the page, to tell her story before I start to hog the stage. That section of the book is going to be done in a new way, quite different from my usual style, drawings done entirely with a brush and watercolors. There’s no ink, no solid lines. And I am working from photographs, as they are all I have of her now.

I worked with this palette of eight different shades of Dr.Ph Martin watercolors. I keep them in a dark bag because they just can’t stand the sunlight. They work fine in books that remain closed most of the time.

First I drew a light contour drawing in pencil, so I would have a vague sense of where I am going.

Then I used a couple of shades of blue to do an underpainting, getting a sense of the tones. Often, this is my favorite part of a painting and I wished I’d just left it monochromatic.

I next added two dark shades of brown to build up contrast.

Next I added warm tones and started to work on the skin.

Now I added more reds and yellows.

And here’s where I left off today, with a little bit of writing in the corner. Chances are I’ll tackle this picture again after it’s been lying around for a few days.There’s still something sort of frozen and taxidermic about this, one of the reasons I ‘m not wild about working from photos, particularly contrasty ones taken with a  flash. Hopefully it will also improve once I;ve written all around it. Look for it (or some descendant) in my next book.


The year of magical drawing

dannygregory57 Comments

I’ve kept an illustrated journal, fairly consistently, for the last dozen years or more. There have been times I got too involved with office work or other distractions and my entries grew more intermittent, but I’ve always come back to a pen and a book to get perspective on my life. When I published Everyday Matters and the books that followed, I made a decision to share this ongoing record of the  events of my life with people who I don’t know personally. It was never a particularly hard choice to make because I think that an essential part of art making is a desire to share one’s view of the world with others. It’s not just creation, it’s communication.

I also discovered that the actual details of my private life that I put on display were less important than the fact that I was recording my life in the way that I was. People were far more interested in this practice as an idea that they too could embrace and adopt themselves than in the revelations of the contents of my medicine cabinet or the places I walk my dogs.

The dialogue that I established between the people who viewed and commented on my work in my books and on the web, also helped to sustain my interest — like a vast, relatively quiet audience insisting that I keep up the habit. When I first began drawing in my solitary book, it was something that only I knew and cared about. All these years later, there are so many people doing the same sort of thing and sharing it with me and others, and the act of keeping an illustrated journal has become  far richer and more satisfying all around.

I went back to keeping a  journal soon after Patti was killed. In fact, I did it with a new sense of purpose because my life needed perspective and clarity more than ever. I discovered a whole new style of journaling too, far more colorful and intense than before, an approach that matched my whole take on life after facing this turn of events. My life has become quite different and so have my journals.

I also continued to share what I was doing, right here on this blog. But after a while, the well-meaning, compassionate outpouring of my readers started to weigh on me. I felt like I was making myself carry out this process in the most public way, adding all sorts of additional pressures that I  couldn’t handle at the time. But I felt I needed to carry on because there were so many people who seemed to care about us and what we were going through, who wanted to know how we were doing, and I didn’t feel I could just vanish and withdraw. But people close to me said, “All that matters right now is taking care of yourself and Jack. Take time to focus on what matters most and everything else can wait.”

So eventually, I started to fade away, blogging less and less and then not at all.

But I kept on drawing and confiding in my books, continuing to feel that what I have been going through is something I ought to capture and (eventually) examine. And I knew, from some of the most heart-wrenching emails and comments I got, that there were people out there who were going through similar trauma and transition and that eventually I might want to share what I was experiencing with them and others.

At times, I’ve felt like it might be possible to  tie this whole experience into a neat package, something with a beginning, middle and end. A story with a moral, a bunch of quippy epigrams that would pass on my lessons earned. It’s turned out to be a lot messier, as life is prone to be.

When the anniversary of Patti’s death came and went, a date I had been long anticipating as the official end of my mourning period, at first it seemed like nothing much had changed. I still felt alternately good, bad, shitty, and fine. There was no massive parting of the clouds or turning of a giant page. I was still alive, Patti was still dead. I hadn’t forgotten much; in fact, I think I now remember more about our lives than I had before. Life goes on but in lots of ways I guess I am pretty different.

As Jack and I began our second lap of the calendar, I felt a shift. We were no longer going through the first day of Spring without Patti, the first birthdays, the first Christmas. Instead, we had were firming up our own era, more clearly defining the way we live as two independent people without a wife and a mom. Sadness is no longer overwhelming and debilitating, it’s just a feeling that ‘s there, that can be summoned up and hugged or put back on the shelf for another time.

Now, when I think about Patti, I am rarely sad. And I do think about her, several times every single day. But lots of the  guilt and fear and darkness and panic that accompanied those thoughts are rarely present. Instead, I feel like she’s just by my side, accompanying me through a new set of doors, advising, encouraging, being my friend and my love.

So maybe that’s closure. I don’t really know the meaning of the word and I don’t feel like anything is closed. It’s more that I am mounting a staircase out of the darkness, seeing more and more around me, but my eyes are still sufficiently accommodated to the darkness I’ve passed through to be able to look back without fear and see what was what.

… Actually, I started writing this to tell you some news.

Those pages I’ve been filling (and a bunch more that I am making that will lend some introduction and perspective to my journal) are going to be made into a new book. It’s going to be published by a wonderful publisher in San Francisco, Chronicle Books, and they will be bringing it out sometime next year. Fortunately, I have a while to work on it and to figure out how to turn this experience into something coherent and good enough to be a tribute to Patti and her life.

A rather unpleasant book editor in New York told someone I know, “I can understand why he feels the need to write such a book but I can’t see why anyone would want to read it.” She may well turn out to be right.

But right now, I’m focussing more on how to do it well and make it true. If it turns out to be of no real use to anyone but me, I can live with that. I may regret sharing the pain and discovery of this last year with more strangers but I doubt it. I have been lucky enough to have so much encouragement in the work I have done over the years and I like to think it has been helpful to share my perspective with others.

I know it has been helpful to me.