Category: Ideas

Big and small.

Thank you, Internet.

dannygregory22 Comments

A dozen years ago, I started this blog with my first silly post. Since then I have always had a place to go to share how I am feeling, what I am learning, and what I am doing. I do have a few relationships that have lasted longer than that — but not many.

So thank you, Internet, for being there to listen and provide me an endless creative workplace.

Before I met you, I knew of two other people who, like me, thought it worthwhile to record their lives in words and pictures between the pages of a book. One, d.price, I met in 1998 or so, through a Xeroxed ‘zine in the magazine rack in Tower Records. I wrote him a letter, dropped it in the mail, and we became pals. The other, Hannah Hinchman, I found in a second-hand book store. She was far too intimidating for me to approach and I didn’t correspond with her for at least another decade. Then the web finally happened and I set up the Yahoo group, Everyday Matters, and soon I found many new friends who also kept illustrated journals, people around the world to inspire and educate me.

So, thank you, Internet, for giving me a creative community to support my passion for drawing.

(this is currently my favorite video and I run it all my waking hours)

It’s cold out today and the streets are jammed with frenzied shoppers. But I don’t have to leave my cozy spot by my virtual fireplace (thank you, YouTube). With a couple of clicks, I can buy anything I need and have it delivered to my door.

But here’s the thing — the easier it is to buy anything, the less I actually want. I want to streamline my life and reduce it to a couple of pairs of well-worn jeans, some t-shirts, a sketchbook, and my laptop. I don’t need or want to own much more — knowing it’s within reach means I’m fine just leaving it all at Amazon.com. So thank you, Internet, for make me want less — by giving me more.

Two years ago, I stopped going to a big brick building on the shores of the Hudson River each day and started working on the Internet instead. I met my partner-to-be Koosje Koene and we started Sketchbook Skool. Now tens of thousand of people come to learn and create in a schoolhouse built of ones and zeroes that stretches from Moscow to Capetown, from New York to Walla Walla. My coworkers live thousands of miles apart and commute each day via keyboard and mousepad. Thank you, Internet, for the best workplace I’ve ever had.

Internet, you bring me lunch, pens, ideas, and cat videos. You’ve let me express myself, find people who are interested in what I make, tell my son I miss him, and learn why my dog drags his butt on the rug.

The world is far from perfect but I am hopeful about its future because if all 7,389,160,216 people on this planet (thank you, Google) can experience 1/10 of what I have online, we can look past our differences and start to work on solutions. Together. Thanks to you, Internet.

Zork!

dannygregory17 Comments

Many moons ago, my late wife Patti and I started playing a simple, text-based video game on our first generation Apple IIc. ‘Zork’ was an adventure into an underground world where we had to solve puzzles and battle evil forces in a quest for some thing or other. Imagine Lord of the Rings, only in glowing green letters on a small black screen.

We became pretty obsessed by this, our very first video game, and many a night, one of us would wake up at 2 am and say to the other, ‘What if we took the left hand tunnel, climbed the rope, and used the rusty screwdriver to open the golden cask?’ and we would pop up, throw on our dressing gowns, and scurry off to to try this new strategy — usually ending up groaning with failure and collapsing back in bed hours later.

Every night, we would try and die. Try and die. Try and…

The next year, we continued to find ourselves popping up at 2 am — but now it was because Jack had been born and he needed something in the night. What was it? A bottle? A fresh diaper? A blanket? A song? A cuddle? We would work through different combinations of strategies (first the bottle, then read ‘Goodnight Moon’, then bounce him up and down. No, try it in reverse, etc.) until we found something that worked and we all went back to bed.

Jack’s first nickname: Baby Zork.

When Jack was seven, he got his first skateboard. He would run to the park with it each morning, practicing Ollies, trying to hop up and down steps, grinding, bailing, tripping, slamming and wiping out. Day after day, he would work and work and bring home bruises and scrapes. But Jack was determined and, slowly he went from a complete lummox to a reasonably rad rider.

When Jack got new video games, he thought nothing of investing weekends, evenings, holidays, hunkered down alone or with friends, working through level after level, trying and dying. Ask him why he put so much work in to it, and he would look at you aghast. That was the point, to try and die and try and die, until eventually you mastered the game.If you didn’t die, you couldn’t fly.

Neither Patti not I were athletic in any way. And yet we had this boy who pushed to overcome his genetic disadvantage to ride a skateboard, play soccer, basketball, football, whatever his buddies were into it. He never achieved the highest heights but he never really cared. It was fun.

Similarly, despite the obvious fact that nobody in our family could even carry a tune, Jack learned to play the guitar, then the drums, played in bands, had fun making music with his pals. Did it come naturally? Not at all. Was he planning on music as profession? Fortunately, not. Did he seem in any way ‘talented’? Uh, no.

Sure, Jack had friends who went on to record albums, play in clubs, achieve the heights, but Jack was just happy for them. He felt in no way like his time behind the drum kit was wasted. Playing music was just a new set of problems to crack, another fun thing to do. As was soccer, Call of Duty, cooking lasagna, and writing computer code.

Life is Zork. Your job is Zork. Your relationship is Zork. And learning to draw is Zork. You’ll make horrible blunders, create ugly things, waste paper, take wrong turns, cringe at your mistakes. Maybe you have a ‘talent’ for it, probably you don’t. Whatevs.

What matters is the journey, exploring the wrong paths, going on misadventures, tripping upon discoveries, learning from mistakes just so you can make fresh ones. Trying and dying and flying — and dying again.

That’s the game we are all here to play. Please enjoy it.

 

 

How to live forever.

dannygregory20 Comments

If we want to understand what our earliest ancestors were like, our best evidence are the paintings they left deep in the caves of Southern Europe. When we think of Ancient Egypt, we see the paintings anonymous artisans made on sarcophagi, grand sculptures like the Sphinx, monuments like the Great Pyramids at Giza. The Greeks and Romans are represented by marble statues and architecture too. The Medici, all-powerful merchants live on, long after their last pennies were spent, as sponsors of da Vinci and Raphael. Popes like Julius and Leo, who led armies and converted millions, are instead remembered by Michelangelo’s creations.

And when our civilization is over, what will represent us to the future? When every company on the Fortune 500 has vanished, when the borders of all the world’s nations have been redrawn a hundred times, when our glass and steel towers have tumbled, when hard drives have been wiped and silicon decayed, what will stand as our legacy? Will it be our wars, our laws, our economy? Or will it be Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan and George Lucas?

When I visited the Jewish Museum on Prague and saw all those pencil drawings by children long since consigned to the pyres of Auschwitz, I felt their spirits, felt them enter and inhabit me, felt them live on through those faint marks on paper. Hitler should have been more diligent in burning those drawings too, if he was so hellbent on wiping those children from the earth.

When I think of my grandparents, I don’t think of their success as doctors, their accumulated capital, their role in their community — I think of my grandmother’s garden, designed to look like a Persian carpet, her roses, her topiary of a peacock, her frangipani trees and her cacti. I think of my grandfather’s short stories about his childhood in the stetls of Poland and his experiences in post-partition Pakistan, all written painstakingly at his walnut desk in a cloud of pipe smoke, then hand-bound between shirt cardboards.

My grandfather would have been 106 this week. His body is under Mount Olives in Jerusalem. His house is occupied by strangers. His friends and siblings are but dust. But his stories live on in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute.

Long after your will has been executed, your real estate dispersed, your Instagram feed expunged, the drawings you make, the recipes you write down, those are the things that will keep your spirit alive.

Art is our way to immortality. Long after your will has been executed, your real estate dispersed, your Instagram feed expunged, the drawings you make, the recipes you write down, those are the things that will keep your spirit alive. Your illustrated journals, records of what you did and experienced and felt, they will be your mark on this earth.

Make sure your family understands that your art is you. It is not to be consigned to eBay or the dump. It is the most precious part of your legacy and it should live on.

Oh, and make sure that the monkey doesn’t prevent you from making those pages, from creating the art that will keep your spirit alive. Don’t kill your memories before they can be born. Be brave, be creative, rock on.

True dat.

dannygregory10 Comments

Donald Trump. Ben Carson. Bernie Sanders. Microbrews. Artisanal pickles. Documentaries. Memoirs. Ukuleles. Normcore. Etsy. Real Housewives. YouTube. What do they have in common?

A claim to authenticity. Their appeal is a rejection of the cynical, corporate polish of the 21st century and a willingness to show it like it is.

Granted that behind a lot of these ‘authentics’ is the same old cold calculation, cynical manipulation, and ancient biases — but our hunger for them is real.

When everything seems to have passed through Photoshop, Autotune, TelePrompTers, 3D printers, Instagram filters, product placement and GMOs, we come to crave authenticity. We tire of bullshit and hidden agendas. We have all seen the DVDs extras and know how special effects can easily manipulate the truth. And so we prefer politicians who don’t seem like they are. We reject Spiderman VI and Billboard charts and McDonalds breakfasts. We hunger for the truth.

So why is authenticity at such a premium? If people want to wind back the clock, why not just let ’em? What’s the big deal?

Well, authentic authenticity is hard. It’s hard because it’s naked and vulnerable and exposing your warts can cost you dearly. Because you can’t delegate authenticity to consultants. Can’t guarantee its outcome through past success. Can’t slash its costs, can’t ship it overnight, can’t outsource it. Authenticity doesn’t fit neatly in a box so it sends shock waves through the system.

It’s easier to keep to the status quo which gleams and glistens and reflects back a shinier, faster, cheaper world.

But you have a choice. How could committing to authenticity effect your art? Your creative goals? How can you replace perfectionism and self judgement with honesty? How can you avoid succumbing to the artificiality that technology makes easy and instead reveal your soul, share the truth, make something interesting and fresh and honestly you?

Here’s one answer.

The Sin of WRATH

dannygregory16 Comments

For the first half of my career in advertising, I would often have irrational feelings of anger during a creative briefing. I would resent being given the assignment. Then I would be pissed off that I had to sit in a conference room with loads of other creative people while the strategists took us through the brief.

I simmered with impatience. I would ask critical, acerbic questions. I would strain against the deadline.

The monkey would tell me that the people briefing us were idiots, that their insights were lame or wrong, that I already knew more than they did about the subject, that it was wrong that we creatives had to compete for the assignment, the playing field wasn’t level, that the whole project was a waste of my time, blah blah and blah.

It was pretty crazy — and incomprehensible.

With time, I became sufficiently self-aware to identify this pattern and dampen it. But I can still feel the impulse when it comes time to get creative feedback or in the final days before a big presentation — a frothing resentment with no legitimate cause.

This reaction maybe in the minority but it’s not unique to me, alas. I often hired great creative people who would have explosions of rage at the most inappropriate times.

What is the fear that drives it? Vulnerability at having to show one’s ideas where they might be rejected? Of being misunderstood? Of losing control somehow?

Recently, I read of a study in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology  that examined the effects of anger on creativity — and found that it could actually be helpful to the creative process.

Anger provides two benefits: an energy boost in the form of an adrenaline rush which focuses the mind on the problem at hand. Secondly, anger makes your thinking irrational — which can jolt you out of creative ways of thinking. In a paroxysm of rage, you may spit out some crazy truth that makes a wild and fruitful association.

Another study found that many creative people begin their days with negativity and then shift to positive feelings. By channeling the negative energy into their work, they find sharper focus and productivity. If you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, try channeling your bad mood into energy to solve a creative problem.

But proceed with caution for anger is still a sin. Its benefits dissipate fairly quickly. And once the red mists blow away, you may find you’ve alienated potential partners, wasted time and resources, derailed the process, and damaged your reputation. And if people dislike and fear you, they are a lot less likely to be objective about the merit of your ideas.

Being a genius doesn’t excuse being an asshole.

The last in a series on the seven deadly creative sins.

The Sin of SLOTH

dannygregory15 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a whole but, (sigh) I’ve been tired, I’m sooo busy, I feel kinda run down, the World Series was on, I had Halloween candy to eat…

The monkey loves a good excuse for not doing what you really oughta (and wanna) get done. Maybe your small reserve of creative energy is  being tapped only to make those excuses.

There’s no real shortcut to drawing, bestselling, Sgt. Peppering, or making a perfect soufflé.

It’s easy to tell yourself that you just don’t have talent. But the people you admire didn’t get to where they are just through some God-given gift or amazing luck. They worked their asses off. They sweated over their sketchbooks, threw away draft after draft, built their networks, filled their wells of inspiration, and tried, failed, tried, failed, tried, failed until their humps were busted — and only then did they became overnight successes.

When the Beatles played in Hamburg, they did six 90-minute sets a night. Lennon said: “Every song lasted twenty minutes and had twenty solos in it. That’s what improved the playing.”

Before Picasso sent Les Demoiselles D’Avignon to the framer, he made over 700 sketches and studies in preparation.

Gone With the Wind was rejected by 38 publishers. The 39th sold 20 million copies.

And Isaac Asimov wrote five hundred books. And had cool sideburns.

Sowwy. There’s no real shortcut to drawing, bestselling, Sgt. Peppering, or making a perfect soufflé. You gotta break eggs and you gotta scramble.

You have talent. Or maybe you don’t. Whatevs. But don’t let excuses and torpor and depression and sorrow and keep you from where you want to go. The world needs what you will dream up. Your contribution is anticipated and will be valued.

It could seem easier to stay on the couch with a beer in one hand and a remote in the other — until you go to the john and catch sight of yourself in the mirror.

Failure may scare you into not trying. Sloth should scare you more.

Just do it.

Sixth in a series on seven deadly creative sins.

Inspiration Monday: Filling the well.

dannygregory80 Comments

Several experiences topped up my well of inspiration. Maybe they’ll feed you too.

I’ve been reading Brian Grazer’s book, A Curious Mind. Grazer is a mega-successful movie producer (Splash, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, etc) and he identifies curiosity as the key to his success, his creativity and a happy and engaged life. By having an open and enquiring mind, he has been comfortable with risk taking and exploration. Curiosity is the spark that kindles new creative explorations.

If you can look at learning a new skill, like, say, drawing, as a thing to learn about and explore, rather than an grim evaluation of yourself and your skills, you will make eager progress. If you are genuinely curious to learn about people, you will search out new connections and ask questions without preconceptions. If you are curious, you will not let the past hold you back. If you live a curious life, you will fill your head with a rich soup of influences, ideas and inspiration. You will make new connections which will lead to new ideas and creations.

As Glazer puts it, “Life isn’t about finding the answers. It’s about asking the questions.”

Last week, Jenny and I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see Refuse the Hour, William Kentridge’s multimedia chamber opera. We went with zero knowledge about what the piece was about (Jenny impulsively bought the tickets on craigslist at the last minute). I vaguely knew of Kentridge as an artist but was surprised to think he had made a stage work. Turns out he has a rich resumé in many forms and has even staged operas at La Scala, the mecca of grand opera.

Refuse the Hour is about his lifelong fascination with time, its plasticity and relativity, and the piece brimmed with fresh insights. It combines a poetic script, incredible vocal performances enhanced with audio processing, mechanical musical sculptures, dance, an orchestra playing modified instruments and film projections that layer drawings over performances

What I took away from the evening was the incredible act of creative collaboration between a score of enormously talented people. The program fairly bulged with accomplishment. Each person — the dramaturg, the choreographer, each musician, the singers — had paragraph after paragraph of accomplishments. Honestly, any one of them could have been the headliner, but they all worked together in a joyous harmony. There were so many unusual intersections between the forms, it couldn’t possibly have come from a single creative mind.

One singer took a refrain from the script Kentridge read, and turned it into a aria running up and down the scales. Another singer then sang the same aria backwards into a megaphone, perfectly mimicking all of the reversed breaths and shifts. Then an artist played an array of airpumps venting through brass horns. Next a tuba and a modified trombone took over. Meanwhile, a flickering projection of Kentridge’s hand turning the pages of a sketchbook was layered on top of a couple fighting in a stark painted kitchen set in gorgeously coordinated graphic costumes. I could go on and I would never approximate the tapestry of ideas and skills on display.

Above all, the experience urged me to think of new ways I can collaborate with others in such an open and generous way. The power of Ours over Mine is immense and exciting.

BigMagicFinalI am also reading Elizabeth Gilberts’ latest book: Big Magic. The author of Eat Pray Love has become somewhat of a self-help guru and is now focussed on thinking about the creative process and how to overcome fear.

I really like the book. Liz has a wonderful, chatty writing style, confessional and inspiring. I was particularly caught up with one notion: that ideas are a life form that inhabit the world just like dogs and walruses and have a single purpose — to be made manifest. They appear to us creators and it is up to us to shun them or to adopt them.

If we do take them on, we now have a responsibility to show up and do the work to make them come to life. If we fail in holding up our end, the ideas will wither and then slip away. Ultimately it will then appear to someone else. Drag your feet if you must, but don’t be surprised if ‘your’ idea eventually blossoms attached to another artist’s name.

I love this idea. It takes away the pressure of judgment, of self-evaluation, and replaces it with a spark which it is up to us to kindle. We don’t own the idea. We are simply its collaborator. Liz’s perspective turns the wasteful drama of self flagellation into a joyous, if sweaty, dance.

What have you read, seen, experienced, or thought of recently that could inspire me and others? Please share your discoveries and help fill my well with inspiration.

The Sin of LUST

dannygregory11 Comments

Ironically, the classic bio of my favorite painter is called Lust for Life. But lust is a sin that has sabotaged loads of great artists too. Lust is any intense sort of intense and uncontrolled desire — be it for sex, food, drugs, money, fame, power or freshly-poured, frosty lager. Society loves to depict the artist as a lusty, carnal creature — snorting, boozing, copulating, and then self-destructing at 27.

Uncontrolled. Undisciplined. Lust replaces thoughtfulness with raw impulse. You cave in to self-destructive abandon. Instead of doing the necessary work you are distracted. Instead of drawing the model, you drool on him.

Lust makes you myopic. It distorts your normal perspective and gives you tunnel vision, tuning out everything but the object of your desire. And what you see is not real. It’s a thickly veiled concoction of your fevered mind.

Perhaps you are slender and celibate and sugar-free and believe lust is a sin that doesn’t apply to you…

At the heart of sexual lust is a form of depersonalization. Instead of seeing people as human beings, they become sex symbols. Lust for money isn’t about acquiring the things you need. It’s about the symbolic value of wealth, the illusion that it will provide security and satisfy all your needs. You want gazillions you’d probably never spend.  Lust for power makes you ruthless, disconnected from the effects of your actions, reduces people to symbols, to pawns on your board. Mwahahahah!

Lust turns reality into abstraction, turns people into symbols, replaces authentic needs with insatiable hunger. And an artist who cannot see or feel or connect is lost. An artist who only deals in symbols cannot find her way to truth.

Lust is obsessiveness. Lust is abstraction. Lust is infantile, sacrificing your higher goals to your basest weakness. Lust is lost in the future, a future of quelled desire that may never come, a future you cannot control.

But creativity requires control. Control over your skills, your materials, but most of all over your vision of the world you are creating.

Perhaps you are slender and celibate and sugar-free and believe lust is a sin that doesn’t apply to you. But look deep and honestly within and look for those impulses that cloud your objectivity, that distort your actions, and color your perceptions.

Really, what about you? Do you lust for perfection? For acknowledgement? For a Winsor & Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sable Pointed Round #10 watercolor brush with a seamless, cupro-nickel ferrule (list $499.99)?

Fifth in a series on seven deadly creative sins.

The Sin of ENVY

dannygregory14 Comments

According to Dante’s Purgatorio, if you get sent to hell for the sin of envy, demons will sew your eyelids shut with wire. Ouchy. You get this iron mascara treatment because you spent your days on Earth getting a kick out of seeing others in pain. Now, you just get to see total blackness and writhe around on a spit.

Envy isn’t just garden-variety, green with jealousy. It’s meaner. Envy means you don’t just resent someone else’s good fortune — you want to take it away from them. It’s not enough to wish you’d made that great painting. You have to rip it out of the frame and jump up and down on it. In other words, you need to become a critic.

Envy is another sin born of fear. It begins when you see someone else making something great. Instead of just enjoying it, you feel threatened by it. The monkey whispers in your ear: ‘You could never do that. Ever.’ So you get out your knives.

One response to this fear is to dismiss the accomplishment. The artist was obviously just lucky. Or some sort of con man. She was born into a talented family. He sucked up to the top gallery owners. She has a famous boy friend. He will be forgotten in a year.

When you are envious, you set yourself back. Instead of learning from greatness, you run from it. You swaddle yourself in hostility. You withhold any kind of generosity or support. Your refuse to collaborate. You refuse to learn.

You don’t see how much work it takes to be successful. You don’t see how to acquire skills, connections, vision, happiness, all the things you really want. You are so afraid of losing, of failing, of falling  behind, of being called out, that you lash out and destroy.

You sew your own eyes shut with wire.

And while the biggest victims of envy are the envious themselves, they can also cause loads of collateral damage along the way. Maybe you’ve been a victim of someone else’s envy. See the critic for the scared, myopic monster he is and you’ll be able to understand what his critique really means and defuse its impact.

Fourth in a series on seven deadly creative sins.

The Sin of PRIDE

dannygregory13 Comments

In the 21st century, it’s more difficult to see “pride” as a sin. We think of LGBT pride, Black pride, national pride, Bono singing “In the Name of Love.” Isn’t that song about Martin Luther King — surely he wasn’t a sinner?

Here’s a different take on pride. Actually let’s call it ‘hubris’ so no one gets confused.

Hubris is about insisting on your own greatness. In fact, that’s why Lucifer fell from heaven and ended up on the dark side. He insisted that he was greater than the rest of the crew.  But, Kanye not withstanding, most creative people seem to have a problem with low self-esteem, not grandiosity.

But whereas they would never say that they are better than others, they insist that their work be. They judge their art too harshly, dismissing what they produce with contempt.They demand a higher standard than is reasonable, possible, necessary. They are absolutely intolerant of anything but perfection. It’s hero or zero. Whatever misses the mark gets binned.

If you can’t accept your own normal human weakness, isn’t that hubris? If you are completely intolerant of your own mistakes, isn’t that vanity? Aren’t you saying you can and should be perfect? If it’s a sin to judge others that way, why doesn’t the same apply to how you look at yourself?

If you are unwilling to be vulnerable, you are limited by fear. Overwhelming fear of any form of weakness, of being irrelevant, of being rebuked by others, of falling even slightly below the mark, can prevent you from taking chances. If you are so wary of falling on your face that you won’t take risks, you will never achieve anything great, no matter how high your standards.

Do great work, please, and be proud of it. But don’t let perfectionist, monkey pride stop you from expressing your real, human self.

Third in a series on seven deadly creative sins. Incidentally, and I say this with all due humility, the original list of seven deadly sins was written by Pope Gregory I. Probably no relation.