Category: Ideas

Big and small.

Drawing on memories

dannygregory15 Comments

memory-media1

Patti had a birthday last month, the 22nd we’ve celebrated together. When you’ve been together as long as we have, you have to think  a little hard at birthdays and anniversaries and Christmas time to keep things fresh, to make sure that you can still express how much you love each other without falling back on the tried and trite.

Anyway, this year, I decided that one of the ways I would commemorate our history together was to take our ancient home movies and transfer them onto DVDs so we could watch them over and over. We have scads of old video tapes but the cameras that recorded and played them are long defunct. In fact, we have never looked at any of them since we initially shot them – films of our first trips together, of our wedding, of Jack’s early days and so on, all moldering in shoe boxes. Now we have a dozen gleaming DVDs, a box set of our lives up to about 1997 or so.  We have all watched them together over and again, particularly the ones when Jack first learned to use the potty and his first big argument with us on a trip  to Nova Scotia.

One of the more profound DVDs is the one I made when Patti had her accident and I was alone each night at home with the baby. For two months, I made videos of our daily life to take up to the hospital to show Patti that we were okay, that life was going on, that she had something to come back to. These are the hardest tapes to watch because I feel so sorry for the me that was, giving Jack a bath, rocking him to sleep, listening to music (Teddy Bear’s Picnic, The Ugly Bug’s Ball, Let’s Go Fly a KIte…) that was once so sweet and important to us but forevermore will signify the hollowness of those days.

Funnily, the more I got into drawing, the less video tape I shot. As the films peter out, my journals expand, so our whole life is recorded but just in very different media — and with very different effect. I read recently that when you look at old photos, they stir up old memories, facilitating recall. But when you look at old home movies, those images tend to actually replace your memories of the periods being recorded. When you think back on those times, your brain tends to pull up scenes from the films rather than organic (but not necessarily as reliable) memories. My mum had an 8 mm. movie camera when I was a baby and the images from those old reels are the only scenes I can remember from when I was two or three or four. Maybe nobody has much memory from that time, and mine are quite vivid, but I know they are all just scenes from one movie or another.

When I watch these old movies, I sort of vaguely remember the times when they were taken. When I look at these old videos, my experience is often of surprise. I think about how young well look, or weird my hair was, or how I seem to speak out of the side of my mouth. The experience is from outside — I am watching myself but not as myself. In fact I would venture that most of my experience is not radically different from what a total stranger or an acquaintance might think of the same footage.

The drawings in my journals, however, summon up a completely personal and intimate feeling. It’s more like a time machine than watching TV. I am in the moment, I am me now and also the me I was then.The act of drawing, painting and writing rather than just pushing a button on a  machine, forms completely different sorts of memories, When I look back at a page, even one that’ s more than a decade old, I remember so much about what I was doing that day, my mood, the weather, even the smells in the air. The experience itself is deeply embedded in my head and just glancing at the drawing takes me back there.

I am so glad to have both sorts of records of my past (not to mention dozens of photo albums and zillions of digital snapshots). I can travel back to any period of my life now and see my life as a continuum. There are so many lessons to be learned by looking back and seeing where one has come from, who one has known, how one made choices, how one felt.

Creating these records, particularly the ones that consists of just some feeble drawings and a few scratchy notes, is probably one of the most important things I’ve done. That sounds odd perhaps, that recording and observing one’s life could be of the most important things one can do with it, but that is the true purpose of art — at least to me. The value of taking a step back, of putting a frame around a moment so that it can stand for a thousand other moments unrecorded, to learn from one’s mistakes and to cherish one’s blessings, to hold up one’s experience so that others can share it and learn from it,  these things seem like the very purpose of art — and of life as well.

Me Time

dannygregory3 Comments

metime

My grandfather died last winter at 98 so I’m not even half his age yet. Maybe I’m only approaching the midpoint of my life, or maybe I’ll have massive heart attack and keel over at my desk this afternoon. There’s no telling.
Regardless, I know each day and hour are precious. But it’s hard to keep the relentless tsunami of stuff, or responsibilities, of things I want to do, from swiftly wiping each day off the board before I can even wipe the sleep out of my eyes. Life moves quickly and the further along the road I get, the faster the pages fly off the calendar.
Knowing this, trying to hold it on my mind, can help me to prioritize. But it’s still tough to keep the world at bay and to decided how to spend my time well. Often I lie in bed and think, damn, when am I going to get to read all those books I want to read or spend more time drawing with Jack or more time cooking dinner with Patti. When am I going to get to live in Micronesia or the South of France or in that little house in the meadow? When will I get to spend two hours a day at the gym or four hours a day doing oil paintings or six hours a day reading Proust? When will I learn Italian? Learn to drive a motorcycle? Defend my heavyweight boxing title?
I’m not filled with regret because I somehow feel I will get to do these things. I’m just not sure how or when. Perhaps my appetite is just larger than my calendar. Fortunately I am often insomniac so I get to spend 3 to 4 a.m. thinking about stuff I didn’t fit in during the day (most of it actually just anxious nonsense).
Anyway, this consideration of my gallon of ambition and my pint glass of life set me on the way to a new project. It’s something I’ve mulled over for a while and finally out into action. It’s an effort to really think about the things I wished I could have fit into a day and then an attempt to fit one of them into the next day.
I have just completed a project called ‘Me Time’, which is an attempt to find an opportunity to pursue the many things, small and large, that my normal waking hours just don’t allow for.
I created a record of this process, in words and watercolors, had it printed up in a cute, square format, and I must say I like it a lot.
This summer, I published “Bad to the Bone“, my first book with blurb.com, and I was pretty pleased with the results. The printing quality was great and by squeezing my markup I could offer it to for a pretty reasonable price. The book itself was a collection of drawings and paintings of dogs I’d done earlier in the year, combined with some slight doggerel, a noble but ultimately experimental effort.
‘Me Time’ is pretty different. It’s also a small and affordable book,but it was conceived as much more of a book than its predecessor. It’s tightly designed, carefully written and profusely illustrated. I also think that, as a lifestyle experiment, it was illuminating. I think that it might give readers a few ideas about how to make more of their own time, and add depth and richness to their lives. If not, well, it has a few good jokes and a couple of nice paintings.

If you’d like to check out the book and maybe order yourself a copy or two (I think it might make a nice, modest year-end gift for friends, at least that’s how I plan to use it), click the preview link on the box below.

If you order a copy, I’d love to know what you think and, whether I should continue with this sort of experiment.

How I found an ext…
By Danny Gregory

Air Devils and Mad Men

dannygregory1 Comment

 

When I was a boy and living in Israel, my mum happened upon an ad in the Jerusalem Post looking for children who spoke English and were interested in appearing in an American TV commercial. I was both and so I went to an audition in Tel Aviv. A group of people behind a table asked me to run around a small yard and look like I was having the time of my life. Getting attention like this was sort of fun but also a little nerve wracking.
A few days later, I was invited back to Tel Aviv for the shoot. I walked on the sound-stage in awe. Someone had built a perfect replica of a perfect boy’s room surrounded by bright lights and a camera. In the middle of the room, there sat a circular cardboard runway with a plastic mountain in one corner and a control tower in the center.
I was one of three boys in the cast. One had brought his mother, a plump and bossy woman carrying a makeup case which she used to polish her son’s perfection. The other boy was quiet and shrugged when spoken to. The plump mother told the director that she insisted her boy should get the lead role; he was very handsome, she said, a great actor and extremely sensitive. The director told her son that, indeed, he would get to fly the toy plane while I was to look on with enthusiasm. The shrugging boy was used as hand model and plugged the toy into the wall socket in a close-up shot.
Air Devils proved to be one of those elaborate toys that are interesting for about five minutes and then up in pieces or gathering dust. A wire on the control tower spun the plane around in a circle; it landed and took off and not much else. There was no room for imagination in playing with it but it took up a lot of floor space, even in the gigantic idealized American boy’s room on the sound-stage.
I don’t remember much else about the shoot except it lasted for thirteen hours and that the director said the plastic mountain looked like someone had pissed on it (which, for a twelve year old boy, was the height of subversive humor). I was paid the equivalent of $10 for my day’s work, which went toward buying some candy and a soccer ball which my neighbor kicked onto the roof of an adjoining building a few days later.
Six months after the shoot, we moved to New York. One day after school, I was watching TV and the Air Devils commercial came on. I was shocked by the weirdness of seeing myself on television. I don’t think I ever saw the spot on the air again but the memory of it stuck somewhere in my brain, replaying in weirder and weirder re-edits over the years. I have sat through so many auditions and shoots over the past quarter century and the memory of myself, a twelve year old weird, multi-national kid standing in front of that table of strangers, flickers past me now and then.
I have casually looked for a copy of the spot every so often, screening reels of old commercials, thinking it would be amusing to add it to my own reel of commercials. However, it never turned up.
Then this afternoon, bored in an editing session, I typed the words ‘Air Devils” in the YouTube search field… and there it was. You can see me in a wide shot and then a close-up of my home-cut hair and fake enthusiasm.
It’s funny, as a person who makes and judges ads all day, to be a part of this commercial. The complete absence of an idea, the histrionic voice-over and completely unpersuasive cop[y. I can imagine the poor creative team, working on Hasbro, knowing they have a shoestring budget, knocking together a script and then flying to Israel, of all places, to avoid union costs and produce something, anything to throw on the air for a few weeks before Christmas.
It’s so much a conceit of my business that what we do matters very much, that every commercial must be polished and crafted and made as good as possible, that we must fall on our swords for every creative decision … and yet, after they have served their purpose, our well-cut gems retain as much appeal as last month’s milk. I assume that the zillions of other people’s dollars I have spent on high-end production will end up, if I am lucky, being just someone else’s blogged memory in twenty years from now.
Sic transit.

Beyond the finish line

dannygregory1 Comment

Jack just made this beautiful piece by making a squiggle and then drawing portraits in each section.

Last weekend, Jack had his ‘audition’ at the art high school, doing three drawings under supervision and showing the portfolio of work he’s done over the past few months. He reports that he was quite happy with his work: a still life drawn from memory (oranges slices, a box and bowl of cereal), a portrait of a student who posed for them, and a pastel of a rock show, showing at least three people. However, he said the experience was pretty unpleasant. The art supplies were crummy, the sheets of paper was small, about 5×7, and the teacher who looked at his portfolio was rushed and uncommunicative. It was as I had feared, that the school is so big, had so many applicants, that it would be a very different experience from the schools he’s attended so far.

Art teaching can be terrific. But more often, it is either useless or off-putting. It’s not like teaching math or Spanish, and the emphasis on a right way and a wrong way can be chilling. Jack is also pretty averse to art instruction, though I have fantasies about finding a great extra-curricular program for him, a course designed for kids that are talented and motivated, a teacher that will help expand him, guide him, and keep him fired up. If you have any suggestion on how to find such a person, let me know.

Speaking of your input, Patti and I were so pleased to read all of the solid advice readers sent in regarding my last entry. It helped us to solidify our view — that Jack should go to a strong, progressive, general sort of school and we are lucky to have several great options. Jack has had to write application essays for several of them. One asked him to describe a commitment he had made and how it effected him. He decided to write about his love of art and I thought you might enjoy reading it:

Addicted to Art
I push my pencil to the paper once again and I hear a faint buzzing of the model’s timer and papers begin rustling. I look up and see that “Victoria” is up and stretching her legs. I sigh and put down my pencil to look at what I’ve done so far. Yellow teeth, chin hairs, and two green eyes fill the page. While it seems like I’m almost done with her face, I’m really just getting started. I look up and see about 20 people, each at least 15 years older than me. A sign missing a few letters reads, Li_e Dra_ing Classes! Two hours earlier, my friends had asked me if I wanted to head up to Central Park for a game of soccer. I had turned them down without even thinking. Why? Because art is my obsession.

Art has inspired me to do many things. I draw all kinds of stuff, create t-shirts, and even paint skateboards. There’s nothing quite like the rush you get from hopping on a board fresh with the smell of acrylics and oil. I scratch the art off the bottom then repeat the entire process. My t-shirts designs are drawings I am very proud of and want the rest of the world to see. I draw live models, animals, photographs, monsters, cartoons, and superheroes, just about everything. You name it; I’ve drawn it.

My whole family has been a huge influence on me. I write different designs of my name because my grandmother writes poems and designs art with calligraphy. I work with Photoshop and tried different designs on it, inspired by my aunt, a printer. My father and I talk about art at least fifteen times a day because of our shared interests. My mother studied fashion and
textiles, which has led me to want to learn how to create shirts and work with collages.

Part of the reason I love art so much is because I’m surrounded by it. Living in New York and having galleries, museums, and movies to study and go to has really made it grow on me. I also make art so much because of how it makes me feel. The moment my pen or pencil hits the paper and my iPod starts to play, I forget all about any homework or stress I may have and I am sucked into the page. There’s nothing like going out on a brisk morning and studying the streets around me. Capturing the scene on paper is the icing on the cake.

While I love art, I’m only thirteen, so I have no idea whether or not I’ll commit to it as a career. I know a lot of people who do this as well, businessmen and women who are artists at heart and all share a very strong love for art with no need to make it their jobs. We share ideas, visit museums, and go out together on ‘Ssketchcrawls,’ trips to museums and parks for drawing. Sometimes we even make art to raise money for different organizations and people in need of food or shelter.

I love art (as I’m sure you know and I’m sorry for being a bit repetitive) and I hope that as I grow older, I continue to work at it. Over the years art has expanded my view of the world and taught me discipline. It has taught me to become a better student at art and the world as well. I think that if I keep it a major part of my life, I will do it more and more and hopefully, one day, I will have mastered all different aspects and it will stay with me for my entire life, ‘til death do us part.

If you’d like to buy one of Jack’s t-shirt designs. he’s made a little online store here:

http://www.zazzle.com/assets/swf/zp/zp.swf?cn=238860589517453985&st=date_created&tl=My+Zazzle+Panel&skn=default&ch=jacktea

C

The Mouse Race

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In most normal parts of the world, when children graduate from their local middle school (also known as intermediate school or junior high school), they go onto their local high school. Their school choice is pretty much set by their address. New York City, however, given its position as most extraordinary city in the solar system, has to have a far more complex and stressful solution.
Jack, who is now 13, has to submit almost two dozen choices for school next year.
First of all, we had to decide if he should continue to go to private school or return to the public school system. If we had chosen the former, he’d have to take a very long multiple choice math and reading exam, then write essays and be interviewed at however many schools we had visited and thought good candidates. Then, if we he was accepted at one, we would spend over $100,000 to make sure he got a high school diploma.
Because we’ve opted to send him to public school. his choices are multiplied. First we had to go through a directory of NYC High schools that is over 600 pages long, listing choices from the FDNY High School for Fire and Life Safety to the Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports, from the EL Puente Academy for Peace and Justice to the School for the Future.
Patti, Jack and I, collectively and separately, have gone on scores of school tours, grilled acquaintances for inside info, read books, articles and websites, and finally narrowed down on our list to the mandatory top 12 schools. That’s right — everyone who applies to NYC public high school must rank their top dozen choices to get into even one.
Some of the schools are really amazingand we are so lucky to have them as options (we visited one that just got 12 million bucks from Bill and Melinda Gates, another which takes the kids on trips to Europe) while others are scary and ringed with metal detectors and classrooms full of hooligans and pre-cons.
There’s more. New York also has a group of “Specialized” High schools that includes schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science that are among the very best schools in the country. To even be considered for admission to these schools, Jack had to study for several months and then, last weekend, along with 25,000 other students, took a three hour test with a few insanely hard questions (in helping him prepare for this test I have had to take a nightmarish stroll down memory lanes to my dusty repository of algebra and geometry, knowledge I haven’t accessed once since Carter was in the White House). He also took yet another test for entrance to Bard, which covers all of high school and the first two years of college before the students turn eighteen.
If all all of this sounds like I am a neurotic, over achieving yuppie parent, I promise you, we are merely average in this city. As soon as you enter the maelstrom of high school selection, you inevitably are faced with all these choices and feel you must at least do what you can to give your kid the best options. And, because you have to rank those twelve schools without knowing whether your kid will get his first choice or his twelfth, you must get somewhat involved and get the lay of the land. Every one does it, from bus drivers in Staten Island to investment bankers in Brooklyn to short order cooks in the Bronx. If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere. Otherwise, move to New Jersey (shudder).
Alright, I hear you wondering, so what does all this have to do with drawing?
Well, about a dozen of the schools in town are art schools of one kind of another. Most seem to be training people who will end up in making mechanicals or painting signs, anything to divert talented kids who would otherwise be spraying graffiti everywhere. We checked out a couple of these schools and they seemed quite grim, with lousy facilities, unimaginative teachers and slack-jawed students. One school, however, LaGuardia High School of Music and Performing Arts has been top Jack’s list for a while. The guitar player from his band was admitted last year and he raves about it. LaGuardia was the basis for the movie and TV show “Fame” (“I’m gonna live forever…) and it full of amazing singers, dancers, musicians, actors and artists. Each year thousands of the most talented kids in the most talented town audition for entry. Less than 10% get in.
Jack has been working hard on his portfolio for the art program. He has to submit fewer than twenty mounted pieces and then take a test: drawing a figure from life, a still from memory and a pastel painting form his imagination.
Jack loves to draw and had filled many sketchbooks with masterpieces. However, he has never really taken much in the way of academic art and usually resists formal teaching. For his application, however, he has had to sit down and really concentrate on the sort of art neither of us particularly love to make. He has drawn long careful portraits of Patti and me, has drawn a range of still-lifes in various media, had drawn urnban landscapes, done some watercolors and has even attended four hour life drawing studio classes with me, sticking it out for the whole session (no nudes, alas).
I am amazed at his commitment and at the strength of his drawings, I had neither the ability ntr the commitment at his age.
The question of course is, will he get in? And the next question is, if he does, should he spend this much time on art? That’ss an interesting question coming form me — I have always bemoaned my own lack of formal training and would personally love to go to art school. But Jack is also a very good student, getting As and B+s in every other subject and we are concerned with whether the academics at LaGuardia will be enough. The fact is, other schools offer better social studies and writing and math programs, no question. But he loves to draw… Well, we’ll see what’s what this spring when the decisions are made by the Board of Ed and we learn the options
Meanwhile, I am posting the pieces he has made for his portfolio. Would you accept him?

Jack Tea’s Portfolio gallery

Brush Twice a Day

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Maybe I’m my own worst enemy. Or maybe I just love being a novice. Or maybe I’m bored too easily. But if I gaze back on the course of my passage across the infinite drawing landscape, I look like a veering drunkard, swerving between POVs, pens, paper, subjects, experimenting like Dr. Hyde. When I talk to people I know who are successful professional illustrators, they seemed to have done all this experimentation back in art school and then settled on a style, a technique and a set of tools long ago, so their work is predictable and knowable — that’s what make it commercially viable. When it comes to tools and techniques, I tend to be a serial monogamist. For a while I was madly in love with drawing with grey markers and white pencils on butcher paper. Then I was passionate about using the teeniest possible Rapidograph point on watercolor paper in the smallest size Moleskine, colored with water colors. I went through a period of just doing comic strips in pencil and shades of grey ink. I have always liked the effect of rough, indifferent or spidery marks, splattered with ink, grubby, and wild. In part, that’s a necessity because I am impatient and incapable of neatness. But I like it in others too, from Ronald Searle to Francis Bacon.

My newest journal is big, about 8″ x 12″. Normally I would never use such a large journal because it’s too big for my scanner. Now I’ve decided not to care. Its paper is pretty crummy, too, just ordinary stuff you’d cram into a Xerox machine– the ink easily bleeds through it. And I am not using a pen — just a plastic brush which I dip in a bottle of sumi-ink. It’s a waterbrush but it’s too clogged for the reservoir handle to work properly so I dip it in a puddle of drinking water which I pour on the pavement in front of me. And instead of writing careful, ornate captions with my dip pen I just write some sort of crappy looking note with the brush on the opposite page.

As I describe all this, I wonder is it a matter of some sort of artistic self hatred that’s making me work in this slovenly way? Or am I bored? But no, I really like the feeling of freedom I get from slashing at the page in this way. The drawings have yet to reach any sort of aesthetic that I am completely pleased with but I feel nice and loose and unfettered. I don’t care if the pages are perfect ( I had been becoming so anal in my last book that I was drawing less and less, rarely having the time or mood to be so deliberate) and I like how they are warped and winkled. This may be a summer fling but it’s already forming sweet memories.

Making Today Matter

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Untitled-4
I drew this comic and then, without thinking, filled in the balloons. Somehow it seems right to me but it may just be crap. Whatever.

I am far away from home and have been for ten days. I am also working on a project that is loaded with stress; it is very important to my client and to my agency and I am working with people I haven’t worked with before. It also involves a lot of thorny technical issues, an obscenely large budget, and despite our tests and research, we are none of us sure exactly how it will turn out.
So much of what I am doing is tied up with the issue of trust, with how I perceive how my colleagues are doing their jobs. As we all proceed on something that none of us has ever exactly done before, this group of strangers, charged with something that, reportedly, could cause many people to lose their jobs if it fails, we are all a little tense.
A lot of the time, I worry I am falling apart. I thought I had congested lungs at one point and bought an expectorant. I thought I might have a sinus infection but the pain and stiffiness kept moving around my skull. I have had a burning stomach, sleeplesness, a sore ankle, a sore knee, a pimple, and a two day headache that keeps clenching the left side of my neck and the back of my skull.
My hypochondria has been pretty much in remission for the past six months or so, but in the last week it has given me a heart attack, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, mellanoma, an ulcer, and a knee replacement.
One of the people I am working with told me, “I have a copy of your book and I can’t get past page two. Every time I pick it up I say, ‘Who is this person who wrote this book? He bears no resemblance to the person I am working with’.”
This is the picture of a person who has done one drawing, a small one of a video camera, in the past ten days. Instead of my usual five mile walk, I haven’t had the time to walk more than a block on my own. The primary moments of brightness I have each day are when I call home and speak to my wife and son. Otherwise, it is a seven-day-a-week ordeal, usually a dozen or more hours a day and then room service and bed.
I’m sure by now you are sickened and repelled by this vision of me. Why am I sharing it with you? Why am I painting this extreme and unattractive portait of myself?

Perception is not reality.
I’m not sure what is. I can see myself in this way –tense, lonely, mortal –and as I contemplate it, it manifests more and more. Everything is seen through this aperture, everything is about extremes and burden.
But I can also take a bath, some Extra Strength Tylenol, a Heineken, some La Boheme, and the knots uncoil, and I luxuriate in the moment. I am not lonely but alone, master of my own schedule and more importantly, my own perception. The air outside is warm, the night is still, the beer is cold, my headache has been replaced with a calm buzzing as my neck grows smooth and limber. The pain is past, the tension not even a memory.
My mind is so powerful.
It colors my world, sometimes blue or black, sometimes yellow or rosy pink. It sees what it chooses to see. It can reduce a day to a battle field or reveal the lifelines in a wilting lettuce leaf. My mind is my spiritual guide and my most savage persecutor.
When I draw, my mind sits at my elbow. It wants to comment on every line and angle, pointing out the flaw, expressing skepticism about how the whole will come together. It can tell me how much worse my work is than that of anyone I admire or how far it falls short of the goals I set.
But with a certain stoicism, born of experience, I can muzzle my mind. I can grow deaf to its judgments about the line I’m watching my pen make. I can postpone any verdict, until I have capped my pen or until the ink is dry, or until I’ve seen it again the next morning, or in a month, or never at all.
My ego is vast.
It is rippling with muscle and micro-controlling. It helps me pass verdict on the work I am doing and those who are working for me. It is being paid to be here, or so it tells me. It has been given the responsibility for keeping my project on the rails. That judgment is so critical, it tells me. There is no time for laughter or frivolity or any sort of looseness –so much hangs in the balance.
And yet, despite its good intentions, my judgment is flawed because it is so unyielding. There are no absolutes, there is no reality, there’s no such a thing as great commercial, a great drawing, perfection, just moments in which this judgment prevails, moments which can pass and be replaced by other opinions, no more absolute, no more perfect.
What matters is Now, not what we imagine will be.
Do I want a Now that is gripped with tension, with fear of failure, with crippling judgment? Or can I just enjoy the sensation of being Me, of being Here, of doing Right, of being Alive?
This is reality. And now it’s passed, replaced with another. I can only live here, despite what my mind, my ego, my fears may tell me. I can only be here, now. It’s a small, achievable ambition.
And now my headache is gone.
Written and not re-read under the influence of a Heineken and a California moon.

How to avoid having your Creative License revoked.

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In the EDM group, a member recently posted the following:

” … I recently read, I forgot where, that gimmicky [drawing] methods, e.g. left hand work, blind contours, upside down, etc, is a not legitimate way to produce a finished, repeat finished, work. Meaning, I can understand
It is a great practice skill sharpener. And yet I would probably be willing to agree that unusual limiting techniques are a bit gimmicky for finished art. But yet, some of the great pieces of history appear exactly as though one were altering his or her usual perceptions and ability. So how do you do produce unusual art? Without gimmicks?”
–Michael, Boston, MA

To which I responded:

Dear Michael:

I believe that you are referring to the Artists and Illustrators Code that was recently revised in the MCLXII International Convocation of the Art and Creativity Authority (CACA) held in The Hague last November.
In Section 73B, article 14, it clearly states:
“…gimmicky methods, e.g. left hand work, blind contours, upside down, etc, is a not legitimate way to produce a finished, repeat finished, work…”
It goes on to stipulate:
“All drawings must be made in spiral bound books clearly labeled on the cover as “Drawing paper”. They may be made only with a lead pencil, not to exceed 3H, and erasures must be neatly and completely done.”
“Any person or persons working with art materials must work only with in the domains of their licensed class:
To wit:
Doodlers: may only draw with ballpoint pen on lined paper intended for class or meeting notes.
Incompetents: may not draw anything ever.
Sunday painter: may only work within the confines of authorized painting and drawing classes in a local junior college, community center or otherwise sanctioned facility and overseen by a bad-tempered and inattentive disillusioned Class 3 watercolorist.
Art School Graduate: Must have completed certificate and must then have spent a minimum of five years working in an art-unrelated field: video store, coffee shop, falafel stand, ad agency. Many not produce any art of any consequence ever again.
Genius: Must be represented by a major gallery, have been on the cover of Art Forum at least twice, and been interviewed by Morley Safer at least once. Must acknowledge and yet in some cute and non-threatening way challenge the current Art establishment. All works must sell for a minimum of five figures.

All works not adhering to these regulations may not be sold, framed or enjoyed in any way under penalty of law.”

I assume that all members of this group are aware of and operating within these international authorized rules. Failure to do so will mean immediate and humiliating expulsion from the community and confiscation of all art supplies.

Thanks for your continuing cooperation. These rules are made for the enjoyment of all.

Your favorite art authority,
Danny

Gosh darned

dannygregoryLeave a comment


In this country, and many others, it is very unpopular to not believe in god. Some people are coming out and discussing this but it is the taboo topic of our time.

Even here in the Gemorrah called New York City, you can talk about any sort of sexual thing, about your body’s processes, about any intimate matter, but you can’t ever question theocracy. So I won’t.

Yes, he recovered from mouse poison and the attack of the Robotic Rat.