Category: Ideas

Big and small.

Why I started to suck & how I plan to stop.

dannygregory189 Comments

Let me be honest. Over the past few months, I’ve abandoned this blog — a vital part of my creative life for the last dozen years. I have been just using it as a soapbox for hawking books, talks, interviews and klasses. I’ve ignored why I’ve kept it for so many years: to explore my ideas about creativity and my experiences as an artist and a human being.

Where did I go wrong?

To find the answer, I’ve been doing a lot of self-analysis and reflection. And I’ve realized that I started to lose my perspective last September, around the time that Jenny and I drove across country, leaving sunny Cali behind for the familiar grey canyons of a New York winter.

This wasn’t how it was meant to be. When I left my advertising job almost two years ago, it was to set myself free. I wanted to slow down, to paint, to draw, to write, to ruminate, and to see if the path I had been following since college was in fact the best one for me.

Moving to LA with Jenny scared me at first but I understood myself well enough to know that, if we stayed in New York, walking the same streets I have for decades, my resolve to leave advertising and pursue my own path would be sorely tested. Before long, someone would tempt me into putting on a jacket and tie and sitting in a conference room once again. I had to get outta town.

Before long, someone would tempt me into putting on a jacket and tie and sitting in a conference room once again.

Going West transformed me. I fed hummingbirds, bought a truck, grew kale in the backyard, built a studio in my garage, made Art Before Breakfast, met Koosje on my travels and we launched Sketchbook Skool.

The first six months of SBS were amazing. It was mind-blowing that so many people signed up straight out of the gates and we were having an absolute blast working with talented friends and seeing our dream come to life.

Our ambition was grand: ‘art for all’ was our mantra from the get-go. We wanted to inspire people everywhere to start making stuff. We wanted to capture the sketchbooks and processes and ideas and experience of brilliant artists and share them with anyone looking for a fresh start.

At first, we thought, let’s just make it free — but we discovered that would mean a severely compromised version of our vision. So we settled on charging the minimum that we could to still deliver on our promise to pack each klass with quality. But charging tuition led us into a whole new world.

Welcome to Capitalism®. If you take money, you must have a bank account. To open a business bank account, you need to be a corporation. To be a corporation, you need a lawyer and accountants. To operate globally in a non-traditional business, you need more lawyers and accountants. Soon, instead of spending all our time making videos with our friends, we were doing a lot of administrative work that was not in our DNA.

We live in a time that celebrates entrepreneurialism, where twenty-year-olds assume they’ll be billionaires, where people make a living selling artisanal okra instead of taking corporate jobs. There are endless online tools and services that entice anyone anywhere to start a corporation, set up a website, and be a star.

We live in a time that celebrates entrepreneurialism, where twenty-year-olds assume they’ll be billionaires, where people make a living selling artisanal okra instead of taking corporate jobs.

I knew the appeal. Although I started a Marx-Engels study circle in high school, I spent much of my career writing poetry about business, corporate manifestos, sixty-second Super Bowl commercials about ideals and values and romantic visions for the future of mankind for my clients.

Inevitably, Sketchbook Skool was morphing from a pure passion project into a demanding business. We had to bring on a raft of advisors to cope with the ever-shifting matrix of requirements for operating a global online business. It became clear that if we didn’t want to raise prices, we had to increase sales — so we added a bunch of marketing consultants. In order to grow, we had to address the emerging limitations of our existing platform which just couldn’t handle so many students so next we brought in a team of developers.   I was working for a company again. How the hell did that happen?

I was working for a company again.

How the hell did that happen?

After much development and expense, we launched our new platform. It caused a lot of confusion among our students. Thousands of people with different computers, browsers, operating systems and varying bandwidth speeds mean that, despite all our Beta testing, we had to deal with a steady stream of concerns. Anyone who understood what we were doing told us that this was totally normal, that every new platform or system has bugs that take time to work out but it was still painful. One by one, we knocked them each down and the platform works reliably now, in a way that our old one never could. But people were unhappy and that was awful.

Meanwhile, Art Before Breakfast, came out to stellar reviews and my publisher and I were ecstatic. Only problem: there was a strike at the docks and new copies of the book were stuck in the harbor on container ships coming in from our printers in China. Despite all the NPR interviews whipping up enthusiasm for the book, no one had copies for a month or more. More people were unhappy.

Ironically (and this strikes me as the dictionary definition of irony), I was also in the middle of writing a book called Shut Your Monkey: How to control your inner critic and get more done. It was the hardest book I’ve ever written because the subject of the book, my own inner critic, was having a field day with all of the stresses I’d taken on, delighting in telling me I was the cause of them all.

Now, I don’t think I was wrong to have so many balls in the air. My error was in losing sight of what I wanted. I was defaulting to a lot of ancient habits, using a few overdeveloped muscles instead of developing the ones I really cared about. It was easy to default to having wall-to-wall logistical meetings and never saying no.

Soon, I got to the point that I just didn’t want to do anything. It was really scary to think that I had no one to blame but myself but here I was, in a rut, not having fun, feeling beleaguered. I barely had the energy to do any drawing of my own, let alone write my blog or teach. I’d been in this corner before but I could always blame my job, my boss, the Man. Now I was the Man.

… I could always blame my job, my boss, the Man. Now I was the Man.

At first, I didn’t know what to do. I was apprehensive about telling anyone how I felt because there had been so much hoopla around the success of Sketchbook Skool and Art Before Breakfast. Who would understand if I wasn’t happy about it? I felt like an ungrateful ass.

Eventually I discussed it with Jenny. We decided that something had to change. Should I just quit? Should we fold the Skool? It meant so much to so many people, especially me, but there had to be a better way.

Next, with a lump in my throat, I called Koosje. It turned out she was feeling much the same way. We talked about how we had lost our original reason for creating the Skool and we needed to have more creative fun, to reset expectations, and dial back the scope of our plans for the Skool.

First up, in the next kourse, we would be the teachers. That would give us a chance to make stuff again, to express ourselves, to get out from the back office. It would be a total departure from anything we’d done before —  playful, light, experimental and fresh. Our inspiration comes from when we most loved to draw and explore as kids, full of animation and crayons and fart sounds. It’ll take work but it’s the sort of work that creates energy rather than depletes it. Maybe some people won’t like it. Oh well, Koosje and I do. We’ll see what folks think when it starts in about a month.

I also decided that I would have to deeply examine and reconsider everything else I had on my plate. Blogging helps me further that goal. It is the seed-bed out of which grow all my ideas, projects and connections. I pledged to get back to writing new (non-self-promoting essays) several times a week, starting today.

Next, Shut Your Monkey is an important book to me and it needs to be treated with care. I am working with an incredibly talented book designer to make it look beautiful and wild and new. I think it has the potential to help a lot of people and I really want it to be great.

I also need to fill my well. That means more time reading, drawing, visiting museums and galleries, hanging out with artists and traveling. I have been invited to be an artist in residency in several international schools this fall and I can’t wait. Working with kids is the greatest inspiration for me and I crave being immersed in their creative energy. Plus, I will get to visit some amazing new places on this beautiful world we live in.

I’ve also been thinking about why I stopped blogging. Busyness isn’t the whole reason. I have written even at the busiest times over the years. I think the issue has been honesty, honestly.

I’ve always tried to be painfully straightforward when I write here. Similarly in my books and when I teach classes. I try to be myself, warts, carbuncles and all. As a writer, an artist and person, I can be flawed and vulnerable. This works less well as an entrepreneur. As person taking credit card payments, I need to project an unimpeachable face.

I try to be myself, warts, carbuncles and all.

It’s not a face I’m unfamiliar with. I wore it for years, in board meetings, client presentations, job interviews and staff briefings. The authority. The decider. 100% sure. But it’s just not me. And it’s just not my voice, especially not the one I use here, among friends. But increasingly, as the face of Sketchbook Skool, when I came to write here on my blog, I felt I had to be the shill, the Mad Man of Mad Ave, always upbeat, bringing the most awesome! things.

And that’s probably not why you read this blog. I know it’s not why I wrote it all these years. That Slick Willy facade (a close pal of the Monkey’s) is strongly advising me not to post this little diatribe on my blog today, that it’s Too Much Information, that it’s whiney. But I owe it to you and to me to explain what has been going on and why I think it has to change.

Thanks for hanging in here with me, despite my ups and downs. I appreciate it.

Honestly, I do.

Time travel coffee.

dannygregory38 Comments

What if you could go back in time — and talk to an earlier version of yourself?

Let’s say that after years (decades?) of struggle and self-denial, you have finally allowed yourself to be creative. After all that self-flagellation, you have started drawing, painting, writing, singing, tap dancing … just as you have always dreamt of doing for years.

Think back on the person you were when all this self-defeating behavior began.  How you felt about yourself and the world.

Think back on all those things that prevented you from getting to where you are now. All the ways you sabotaged yourself.  All the classes you signed up for but never attended. All the money you wasted on art supplies you never used. All the sneers, the indifference, the judgement. All the vile things your monkey muttered in your ear to prevent you from starting a creative habit.

Next, think about the things that made a difference in your turnaround.  What lit the fuse? What helped you blast through all those obstacles you’d arrayed in your path?

And finally, how do you feel today, now that you have finally given yourself permission to be the artist you truly are, that you were all along, but couldn’t see?

Next, create a time machine and travel back in it.  Go to that person you were and take him or her out for a cup of coffee.

What will you say?

(P.S. And, if you don’t yet feel you have made it to full-fledged, liberated-artist mode, tell us what you’d say anyway.  You know what you need to hear.)

Please share your conversations in the comments area below.

Living on purpose.

dannygregory27 Comments

What if success meant living a life of purpose?

What if your high school and college educations were designed to help you do one thing: to discover what you are truly good at and what you love to do? That instead of emphasizing test scores and grades and cutthroat placements in prestigious universities and high starting salaries, the system acknowledged that we are all born with different skills and abilities, needs and wants. And that we all need a mission to guide us.

What if we said you don’t have to be good at math or science if you have no natural aptitude, that you might be better at building something with your hands than constructing a paragraph? That we will help you discover if you are more visually oriented, or more intuitive about people, or better at concrete thinking or abstractions or that you were born to be a great chef or a gardener or a cab driver or a banker. What if that was the whole purpose of your education — to help you lead a life that perfectly fits who you are?

What would a planet full of people working with passion and conviction look like?

What if it was the norm to pause every decade or so and assess whether that purpose still fits you, whether you need some variation or specialization, new skills or new experiences? What if was expected that every major decision you made was measured against the yard stick of your purpose and your mission, not your salary or your retirement package? That each person was expected to be true to their nature and their passion. That each of us did what we did to genuinely be of service to the greater good. Not because it was tax-deductible but because it felt right and part of who we are.

Would things unravel? Would certain jobs never be filled? Or might we discover that some people were genuinely born to enthusiastically empty septic tanks or write parking tickets or run hedge funds, to do things that now people seem to do only for money? Would we still dread Mondays? Or would we work with passion and conviction, doing more and better things than we could conceive of today.

What if everyone in our society did what they did because they loved it, were born to it, were passionate about it would do it just as a hobby? What if we all lived authentically according to our talents and drives? What would a planet full of people working with passion and conviction look like?

What would it take for that to happen? An act of Congress? An act of God? Or a commitment made by each of us as we lay in bed and pondered the road ahead. A commitment to who you truly are.

Could you make one?

What rhymes with “Danny’s drawings?”

dannygregory11 Comments

I am so honored.

The poet Isabelle Barry invited a group of her colleagues at dVerse to write poems based on my drawings.  She also interviewed me to give some context for my work.

The interview is here.

Links to the poems are here.

Enjoy them — I did!

Baby steps

dannygregory18 Comments

When I started working with Keith, I was not in great shape.  I had pains in my lower back, carpal tunnel syndrome, and chronic headaches. But I just grinned and bore these maladies. As far as I was concerned, these were just part of being me, aches and pains that I’d developed since I’d first started pounding on a computer all day, decades before — my imperfections, unfixable.

As for going to a trainer, well, that was all very well, paying someone to hold my hand while I walked around the gym, counting off reps, giving me encouragement, helping me build my biceps or lose a few pounds. Eventually, there were some meager results so I could take it or leave it.

Keith taught me otherwise. He showed the point of exercise is not six-pack abs or marathon times. It’s about making the most of the equipment we have for living out the rest of our days and that making certain little changes could make huge differences to my body and to my life.

We worked on tiny muscles hidden deep along my spine and  between my shoulder blades. We focussed on the exact angle of my tailbone when I crouched, correcting and re-correcting. We looked at the angle of my pelvis in the mirror. We rolled the fascia alongside my left thigh with rubber logs and built up strength in my right quadriceps.

After a few months, standing and moving in a balanced way became second nature. The unnatural way I had held my shoulders, my neck, my stance, were replaced with alignment.  Now if I hunched my shoulders or sat in a cramped and twisted way, my body told me something was wrong and I adjusted.

My headaches vanished. My hands no longer tingled. My feet, which had always splayed out like Charlie Chaplin lined up toe to heel. My carriage grew more and more erect. Jenny noticed that I was getting taller, soon by a couple of inches. I felt better all the time. And happier too.

For the first time, my relationship with my body changed because I saw what truly is. Not just a couple hundred pounds of annoying meat but an amazing machine that just needs to be tuned and maintained.

I discovered that my body is a miraculous system of complex interconnected processes that can be adjusted, honed, perfected. The way I was didn’t have to be the way I’d be. The unhealthy adaptations I’d made to certain chairs, desks, sidewalks, stresses, ways of standing, sitting, sleeping, were not carved in stone. And my assumptions about my physical being, that it was some sort of curse to be endured, an uphill battle that would always let me down, was nonsense. Being out of whack, behaving in ways that hurt me, limiting my ability, assuming that there was no solution — all these behaviors and thought patterns were replaced by balance and a better way of being.

For the first time, my relationship with my body changed because I saw what truly is. Not just a couple hundred pounds of annoying meat but an amazing machine that just needs to be tuned and maintained. Not for vanity but because of how it helps me live better and get the most out of each day. A few small adjustments in my body led to a change in my entire being. In my life.

Similarly, when I began to draw, I had no idea what seismic shifts this small change would cause in my life. Many of friends tell me that picking up a pen and opening up a sketchbook ultimately led them to change careers, travel the world, publish books, make new friends, new priorities, new plans for their remaining days.

Why? Why does this simple habit make such a difference? When you start to draw, you set things in motion. You start to see what is. Perhaps you’ll see beauty where you overlooked it. Perhaps you will fill books with stories about your life, an ordinary life, and suddenly see it is actually quite rich and wonderful. And perhaps the power of seeing so clearly will make you want to go and see more. And that desire will cause you, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows or Bilbo Baggins, to lock the door of your cozy little life and wander out into the wide world.

Maybe seeing clearly will show you that you have been hiding your true self from yourself, have been leading a life that wasn’t really what you wanted, that you could do more, that you could be more. That your childhood dreams are still valid, that your parents, your banker, your boss, your children can’t call all your shots. And that time is running out.

When you make art, you slowly brush the cobwebs from your inner life and sunlight starts to stream in. Who knows what it might reveal?

Maybe you will see that drawing is a thing that you actually can do even though the monkey has too long told you that you can’t, because you suck, because you have no talent or time. And, when you discover this power, you may come to wonder what else you have overlooked or deceived yourself about, what else you can do and be. Maybe you could paint or play the piano or visit Rome or hang-glide or open a store or be a clown or run for Prime Minister.  Or hire a trainer and get rid of your headaches.

This can be scary, feeling the first winds of freedom and change sweeping through the open door of your golden cage. But if you don’t face this fear from some angle, how can you ever see your life for what is and can be?

When you make art, you slowly brush the cobwebs from your inner life and sunlight starts to stream in. Who knows what it might reveal? Who knows what journey you are about to embark upon once you uncap that pen and take that first little step? Don’t you want to see?

Smoky memories of setting myself on fire

dannygregory9 Comments

edw1. In this morning’s paper, I read Edward Herriman’s obit which mentioned that he had appeared in a play called Moonchildren by Michael Weller. That sounded familiar to me but I wasn’t sure why. Something to do with high school?

2. I googled “Moonchildren” and the initials of my high school. An article appeared from our school paper about the controversy around the school production because the play used obscene language. Listed among the cast: my name.

3. I found a copy of the play online, read through the characters and one of them stood out like a beacon. Norman, a character who declares he is going to set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War. I realized I still knew most of Norman’s lines by heart. I had played him at 1 5.

4. My high school paper also had a review of another play I was apparently in, Impromptu by Tad Mosel. I remembered this one vaguely. I played an idealistic and brave young man who tried to overcome the cynicism of the other characters.

5. Next to the review was an editorial I had written, excoriating the school’s administration for making students do janitorial work, especially when the unemployment rate was over 10%. Around that time, I had established a Marx-Engels study circle and was adamant about workers’ rights, particularly if violating them forced me to sweep the stairs with an uncomfortably short-handled broom.

Unexpectedly, Edward Herriman’s death had some unexpected repercussions on me as I contemplated the new year from my snug bed. The main one is a new vision of myself as an adolescent.

Though I often think back to those days, they are  a little hazy. I had just come to the USA a couple of years before, after several years speaking just Hebrew, before that go to a number of schools in Pakistan and Australia. I have always assumed that I was probably a hopelessly awkward dork lurking on the edges of the crowd. The fact that I had plum roles in four or five school plays and was usually chosen to play a naive, idealistic youth suggests something quite different about how I was viewed by the students and teachers. I am now starting to see that I was actually a part of a circle of artists, actors, and writers, a political idealist and a bit of a firebrand.

My point in starting off the new year with this story is not just to stroll down memory lane. To me, it’s about the importance of art-making, risk-taking, and preserving our cultural past. My little example shows us how art can crystallize who we are and how important it is to preserve that for the future, not just so we can create memoir, but so we can have a clearer sense of the inks between us, of the unreliability of memory, and that we never know when one insight will connect with another to create and reveal something new.

It is so important to allow our creative expression to go where it will, not to control it and lock it into the compartments and definitions we think suit it today. What I thought about art-making in general or particular at fifteen and what is think about decades later is one thing or another, but the art itself, as the Romans pointed out, is long while life is increasingly short.

The limit’s the sky.

dannygregory6 Comments

It’s tempting to blame limitations for limiting us.
To wish we had more resources, more time, more help, more talent.
But there’s never enough — and you don’t need it.

Limitations free your efforts and creativity, help you avoid being overwhelmed by infinite possibilities.
If you have no rules, you have no game.
If you have no gravity, no seasons, no wind and rain, you cannot grow.
All creativity work with limits.
Pushing against them moves us to new places.
Limits build up pressure that pops us into new dimensions

Hemingway used just 26 letters.
Miles had but three valves on his horn.
Painters limit themselves with canvas size, with the colors on their palettes, with the history of the artists that precede them.
Binary code limits engineers to just 111s and 000s. That limitation produced the computer you’re reading this on.
Shakespeare didn’t use iambic pentameter just to produce plays with iambic pentameter.
He used it to force himself to use new words which expressed new ideas.

How can you limit yourself?

Can you take a compliment?

dannygregory26 Comments

What happens if someone says you did a great job?

Do you bask in their admiration? Or do you redden with embarrassment?

Do you mumble and shuffle while inside you are rationalizing away their acclaim?

Do you suspect their motives?

Do you question their taste?

 

Praise is a gift. Will you accept it with grace?

Or are you more comfortable with criticism?

Learning to teach beginners. On the teaching philosophy of Sketchbook Skool

dannygregory33 Comments

What is the role of feedback in learning? Especially when starting to do creative things, things that are ultimately pretty subjective? When there are no answers in the back of the book?

The biggest obstacle we need to overcome in learning to create is the belief that we can’t. That’s especially true when we learn as adults. We have spent our entire lives believing that we cannot do this thing, and now, unless we are convinced that we can, we will never get to a point of any sort of mastery.

The most difficult and crucial lesson for beginners is the importance of failure. You need to make a lot of mistakes. You need to feel good about those mistakes and recognize that they are opportunities to improve. You can’t allow those errors to overwhelm you and make you feel hopeless.

The biggest obstacle we need to overcome in learning to create is the belief that we can’t.

The reason that people struggle with failure is because they believe that their failures are reflections on who they are as human beings. “Only failures fail.” The fact, of course, is that everybody fails on the path to learning, that failing is the most important part of any education. Researchers have shown that people learn far more from watching others fail than they do from watching extremely accomplished people do things without making any mistakes. You can sit and watch Lebron James shoot baskets perfectly all season but that won’t prove very instructive in developing your own game.

It is much more difficult to look at our own failings as educational opportunities if our egos and self-image are wrapped up in success and failure. When we watch other people fail, we are able to separate failure from ourselves, to see the failure as ‘other’ and thus look at it objectively.That is why it is generally better to learn creative things in a group environment where we can see others struggling and failing. We can see where the mishap occurred or how the problem was not fully solved.  The problem exists independently and facing it is an interesting challenge, rather than a demeaning disaster.

…failing is the most important part of any education

What is the value of a teacher’s comments to a new student?

In creative situations, where one’s ego and self-image are tied into the results of an exercise, any sort of perceived criticism can undermine that process. Because we are still so new at learning this new skill, it is difficult to accept that a mistake is not a reflection of who we are and an indication that we shouldn’t even bother tackling this lesson.  That’s why we need as much encouragement as possible in the beginning phase of learning, a phase that can actually last for years. We need to develop self-confidence and faith in our own creative abilities and sometimes criticism of any kind can thwart that  progress.

Students often ask for specific advice on how to improve their composition or how to use a certain medium more effectively, and some teachers are quick to provide lots of guidance, rules, and specific direction. I don’t know if that is especially effective. I find that most students are extremely vulnerable to the most benign sort of commentary — even if they asked for it. Simply telling somebody that they might want to consider a different composition, different medium, consider a slightly different approach, can be extremely undermining. There are so many open wounds as one is going through this creative rebirth that everyone involved must tread lightly. That includes the teacher, the student, and the relative looking over the shoulder.

I think it’s more effective to encourage students to experiment, to make more work, and to gradually developed their own answers to these questions. In fact, my experience is that almost all direct input from the teacher (inevitably an authority figure) is not particularly useful before the student has real confidence in their abilities. Instead the teacher should create an environment of trust, inspiration and fun. They should encourage the process, the experimentation and exploration, provide reassurance and safety, and do demonstrations in which they explain their own process, rather than making specific suggestions about the work the student has done. Turn the key, but don’t grab the wheel.

Turn the key, but don’t grab the wheel.

Many novice students believe that there are shortcuts available that once revealed will turn the student from an amateur into an expert. They want to know what brand of pen the teacher uses under the misimpression that the pen is the secret. The fact is that the student will do much better by discovering answers on their own, by studying the works of others, and by trial and error. There isn’t an accumulated body of knowledge that the student can acquire which will transform them. That knowledge only comes through years of work.

But that doesn’t mean the student can’t be delighted with their accomplishments almost immediately. Especially in the beginning of a creative education, progress happens quite quickly, simply by feeling empowered and free to actually make things. Sometimes that simple realization can wipe out years of anxiety around creative issues. And with that freedom comes an opportunity to continue working and develop one’s own style and techniques.

But that doesn’t mean the student can’t be delighted with their accomplishments almost immediately. 

Personally I find that students with the most technical skills alone rarely make art that I find very interesting.  Instead I’m far more excited by people who make mistakes and discover new and interesting ways to overcome them.

Learning the tried-and-true ways of making art is not necessarily the way to make great art. It is simply the way to rehash the lessons we’ve already learned, to make more art that is ready familiar. Instead you want to create new and exciting directions, to take risks, to see the world afresh, to find answers to new questions. Learning to draw is not like cooking Boeuf Bourguignon, a set of steps one can follow from raw ingredients to final delicious product. Instead it is a voyage, an excursion into the wilderness, an adventure that is mainly rewarding for its own sake, not for its results.

The teacher doesn’t have the answers.  Only the student does.