Category: Ideas

Big and small.

Advertising and Its Discontents – Part I

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adnotes.gif Above: Notes taken during a really important meeting I no longer remember.


One of the chief obstacles many creative people face is how to cope with the intersection between our creative and our professional lives. Is drawing, painting, photography, music, whittling, just a hobby? Or are we serious about it and wiling to throw ourselves over the cliff’s edge and base our livelihood up on it? Anxiety over this issue is what derails a lot of us when we are young. Do we go to art school or a “real” college? Do we spend the rest of our lives in a split-level ranch or a garret? Do we break our parents’ hearts or become accountants?
Like most things in life, it’s not that black and white. People who make money doing creative things usually reap a varied harvest. It’s never 9 to 5 and the paychecks are rarely steady but there are more and more ways to sell your creative products. It’s not about getting your slides accepted at a New York gallery. And your patrons may be people just like you, not just investment bankers looking for investable art. For example, the internet means you can show and sell posters of your work and never leave the farm. You can sell drawings and jewelry and t-shirts and greeting cards and zillions of things.
And most importantly, you can call yourself an artist, regardless of how much money you make or how many pieces you sell.
I make a smallish percentage of my living from my personal work. I write books, I write articles, I do illustrations, but the lions’ share of my income is from my job in a company, working for the Man. I am pretty comfortable with this arrangement. It means I don’t feel desperate, I do the projects I want to do, and the extra money keeps me in 24 karat fountain pens and hand-bound unborn-calf-velllum sketchbooks.
Recently, I asked two successful illustrator to share some of the details of their lives, particularly to explain this issue of commitment and financial survival. First, Penelope Dullaghan, whom you may know as the originator of Illustration Friday. She took the leap from advertising into full-time illustration a Notes from a really important meeting I no longer remember.
A few years ago, I temporarily detached from the ad teat. It had been a good run. Ad agencies had provided a good steady income, kept my family health-insured, taken me on some all expense-paid junkets to interesting places. But the experience has often been depleting, humiliating, demoralizing, and I had to see what it was like it cut loose. Eventually I got sucked back in but I still question the wisdom of succumbing.

I’m not alone in wondering. Most advertising creatives would like to break free. A few brave ones do. A couple of weeks ago, I asked some pals who had jumped ship to tell me what drove them to do it, how they did it, and how they feel in retrospect. I was going to gang them together in a single post but when the first one arrived, from Trevor Romain, it was so good, I had to get it to you right away.

Have you had a similar or completely different experience? Please let me know, either by posting a comment below or by writing me a longer description. And stay tuned for more in this series.

The Very Moment by Trevor Romain

I’ll never forget that day.

It was the morning after I had pulled an all-nighter creating an advertising campaign for a client. The campaign was a good one. I felt great about it. With a number of Clio awards and dozens of Addy and One Show awards under my belt I felt confident that the client would love the ideas we were presenting.

The cigar-chomping, excessively-sweating client – who I created the campaign for – was reviewing the work. He was looking over the ad campaign with disdain.

He said. “This is bad. I hate it. Why don’t you just take the logo and fill the page with the entire thing? Now that would be branding.”

My heart sank. Then I felt anger. Extreme anger. Not at the client, but at myself. I remembered a promise I had made to myself twenty years before. A promise I had not kept.

It happened when I was in the army in South Africa. I was walking through a field hospital filled with kids from small rural villages who had been brought to a clinic for treatment from the army medical corps. The conditions were abysmal. There were almost six kids per bed, it was nauseatingly hot and there were flies everywhere, especially around the corners of the children’s eyes and mouths.

As I was walked down the center aisle I caught sight of a little boy who was about five years old sitting on the edge of one of the hospital beds. I looked into his huge brown eyes as I walked by and then noticed with shock that he had no legs. Instead I saw dirty bandages wrapped around two stumps. The boy had lost his legs in a landmine accident on the Angolan border.

As I walked by, the little boy put up his hands and said “Sir, can you please hold me.”

I will never forget the haunting look of sadness in his eyes. Huge tears rolled slowly down his cheeks and dropped to the floor, their significance lost in the dust and grime of war.

The Sergeant Major, who was walking alongside me, grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the child.

“Romain,” he grunted. “Leave him alone. Don’t get emotionally involved. We’re here for security, not child-care.”

As the Sergeant Major pulled me away the little boy, in a broken chocked-up whisper, spoke again. His voice tugged at me from behind.

“Sir, please, please can you just hold me?”

Something happened to me that moment that I will never forget. My life changed instantly. It felt like a hand came out of the sky, reached inside me, and flipped a switch that turned on my soul.

I pushed the Sergeant Major’s hand away, turned, walked back and picked up the little boy. I have never been held so tightly in my life. His trembling little body clung to me for all it was worth.

He put his head against my chest and he began to cry. His tears ran down my neck and inside my shirt. I held that little boy with my arms, my heart and my soul and every ounce of compassion in my being. I never wanted to let him go, ever.

At that second I promised myself that I would never waste a second of my valuable life. That I would use my creative talents to change the world for children.

But I didn’t.

I went into advertising because it was safe and the money was good and everyone told me that it was almost impossible to make a living writing and illustrating children’s books.

I believed them.

I got sucked into the advertising vortex. I allowed client after client put my work down, destroy my exciting ideas and turn me into a cynic, who spent every day, using my talents to convince consumers to buy things they didn’t need.

The inner explosion had been building for months. The cigar-chomping client wasn’t the reason I quit that day. He just lit the fuse.

My wife and I discussed the situation and both decided that I HAD to follow my dream.

I woke up the next day, sat in front of my yellow pad and started my new job as an un-published children’s author and illustrator.

Although getting started was difficult and sometimes frustrating, the sheer passion and joy of doing what I love was there. And it still is. I have been hungry, rejected, under-appreciated and often ignored but I LOVE what I do. I have been writing full time for ten years now and I am one of the happiest people I have ever met.

During my journey, after every book rejection I received, I heard the little boys voice in my head saying, “Sir, please can you just hold me.

And in my heart and soul I did.

And I still do.

I now have 30 books in print with over one million copies in circulation in twelve different languages.

And I’m not done yet. I still hear the little boy’s voice.couple of years ago and I remember how suspenseful but ultimately very satisfying the whole process was for her.
Second is Torontian Alana Machnicki. I like her drawings a lot and am inspired by the broad range of ways she applies them. I have learned a lot from both their stories. I hope you find them useful too.

Penelope Dullaghan

I think that leading a creative life is both rewarding and really really hard. It’s not just creative painting and being messy all the time. It is a real business, like any other. (Well, maybe not like any other. I think this is way more fun.)

To manage a creative life, I think first and foremost you need to be a good planner. You are not guaranteed a paycheck or steady income, so sometimes it gets really thin and you have to adjust accordingly. If you have a bad month, you better have some money left over from a good month to float through it. The people who work at the phone company and the power company have steady jobs and will not understand if you tell them you’ve had a bad month. 🙂 So you need to budget!

But planning goes beyond financial. Time is also yours to plan. A good balance of work and gathering inspiration and personal time is important (I struggle with this a lot). Being an entrepreneur is hard. No one makes the rules for you and no one is there to tell you to work (or to stop working). If you decide to take time off and accidentally miss a deadline, you’re in trouble. At the same time, if you work around the clock and burn out, that’s no good either. Balance is in planning.

Secondly, I think it takes faith. Faith that the next job will eventually come, even if it sometimes feels like no one will ever call again. If no client has called with a new job or assignment, it can be really scary. Self doubt creeps in and you start to wonder if you’re really cut out for this. Working at the mall starts looking really appealing. But this is something to be waited out…and not sitting down. If you are bored, you’re doing it wrong. If no paid work is coming in, do something for your business. Start working on a new image for self-promotion. Update your website. Write some thoughts down about avenues to get your name out there. Work on personal work for yourself, while at the same time, bettering your skills. Give yourself an assignment…challenge yourself to think conceptually. Read a business book to hone that side of things. There’s always something you can work on. Always room for improvement.

Or, if you are a workaholic like me, try to relax and take some downtime. Go to a movie (a matinee to save money) or go for a walk in the park. Fill your well. By the time a client calls again (and they will!), you’ll be ready and inspired to do the project at hand.

And thirdly, it takes a lot of plain, hard work. I have a lot of things going on all the time (maybe too much) to help me pay my bills as well as keep the creative fire burning (for both me and others). But it’s work I enjoy doing. I get a lot out of having fun little contests (just finished up a “Draw a Witch” contest for Halloween) and doing free things like Paper Doll Mix n Match to help promote my new tshirts. I have an online store to sell prints and stuff to help financially and just for fun (I like thinking up new tees and postcards to print).

I also started Illustration Friday as a way to challenge myself…to grow my portfolio and force myself to think conceptually. Then I opened it up to others because I figured they would like the challenge too. And now it’s a huge, fun thing that many people participate in each week. I love seeing all the new names pop up in the column and checking their illustrations to see how their minds work. It’s also become a great form of self-promotion… even though that’s not why I created it (I think of it as a perk for running it!). The site was recently named a HOW Top Ten Website, which I thought was cool not only because it’s good promotion for the site, but because it kind of speaks to the creative community at large… maybe we’re not all isolated artists, but we seek to be a part of something bigger by supporting each other and talking to each other. Illustration Friday helps with that.

I’m also a part of a local illustrators group. I look forward to getting together with them once a month to chat about the industry, ask questions, give answers and just be with like-minded people. Part of a community, again…

I’m going to be honest and say that it is sometimes really hard to have so much going on. I get stressed out and unbalanced. Keeping up with my normal workload, Illustration Friday, doing self-promo, creative-community things, running an online store, gallery shows and trying to maintain a personal life… can be a bit much. I sometimes miss having a regular job with regular hours and regular paychecks. But I really can’t imagine giving it up. I feel like it’s kind of built itself…each thing I do is a part of me. It’s good for my creative spirit and hopefully feeds my business, too.

More on Penelope here, here and here.

Alana Machnicki

As a creative I’ve always found it important not to put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. I like to have a little going on in different aspects. I have a tendency to get bored really easily and having a cornucopia of outlets to choose from keeps me happy.
I also find it much easier to live as a creative when I’m not under financial pressure. Because of this I’ve come to accept that having a part time job in the background is essential for me. Also, having the foresight to keep the job, even when I’m having a particularly profitable month, is even more important. I never know when a dry spell is going to come along and leave me scrambling to pay the bills.
I try to promote myself as best as I can. I hand out business cards at every opportunity, even if it is to someone who will never need my services. There’s always that chance they’ll pass the card or my website on to someone who does. I also travel to Comic Conventions with my fiancé where I sell prints of my work. This has lead to jobs, commissions and sometimes the print sales add up to more than what I would have made selling the original. It’s also a great way to expose my work to the masses and hand out more business cards.
I also sell my prints online, but I’ve found people are quite wary of the whole system. The orders I have processed have been through email and the “I’ll mail you a cheque” method, rather than Paypal. I guess people prefer to deal with a real person.
I rarely turn down any job that comes my way, unless I’m totally swamped. Even those with a lower budget could be seen by another art director who wants to offer me my dream job. I’ve also done a couple “sample” jobs where I’ll work on a piece just to show them what I can do for them. Sometimes I get the job (this is how I got my Absolut Vodka ad) other times I’m left with another piece in my files. A few of these filed samples have lead into other jobs.
I do a little graphic design here and there. I design websites occasionally. I used to even have a part time job where I altered travel photos to make grey skies blue and erase trash from the street. I think it’s just a matter of being open minded and knowing what you’re capable of. I’m also a very quick learner, so I usually know if people just give me a chance I’ll pick up on the skills needed.
A lot of artists have issues with being labeled a “sellout,” especially when working commercially. Personally, I think I’m very lucky to be able to do what I love and get paid for it.
Currently I’m trying my hand a sculpting my wedding cake topper (maybe this could parlay into some kind of wedding topper business), and have plans for a line of t-shirts. I’ve also been thinking of different things to sell at the comic conventions, such as smaller pre-framed prints. I’m also working on a children’s book for Scholastic that features intricate paintings of carousel horses, as well as 400 spot illustrations for a Kitchen Dictionary.

Change of scene

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When I was drawing with my pal Roz Stendahl, I was amazed to see that certain pages of her journals were randomly pretreated before she turned to them. She might have a fat, wet brush stroke across a spread or have some lovely textured paper glued onto a page. When she turned to that page, she just worked on it like any other blank sheet.
I found this very disconcerting at first. “What if the colors you’ve slopped onto the page don’t fit in with what you’re drawing,” I asked. She explained that this what made it fun. Each new spread became a double challenge: to capture the drawing and also resolve it with the obstacle she had set up for herself (Roz has just set up a gallery of some of these pages pre- and post-drawing here).
I spent a year with this in the back of my head and then, last month, I decided to try it. As readers of this site will have noticed, most of the drawings I did in December were on orangish blotchy backgrounds. This happened to have worked really well when I was in Mexico, an orangish blotchy sort of place, but that was just serendipitous.

I chose this palette at the beginning of my journal #43 because I had been looking at a lot of 18th and 19th century drawings in sepia ink (best of all the wonderful Van Gogh exhibit at the Met) and wanted to focus on warm colors rather than the black ink and bright watercolors I have been using for the past year. I unspiraled my book and took a handful of pages into the kitchen and one by one doused them in water. Then I took various bottles of orange and brown and yellow Dr. Martin’s and dripped and sloshed them around . Then I popped the pages into the toaster oven and, when they had dried, added some more layers. Patti described the results as ‘very Cheetos’. She also pointed out the drips of Doc Martin’s on the counter that only came out with bleach and elbow grease.
I drew most of the time with Faber-Castell PITT brown S nib pens and did my writing with a dip pen for maximal splashiness. But one of my favorite things about this technique has been the opportunity to use white pencils to bring out highlights. I just love the look of this.

Last weekend, I inaugurated Vol. 44, which has heavy Kraft paper and so I have stopped the Doc Martin’s pre-treatment. I am still using the same media to draw with but am doing a more traditional illustrated diary sort of thing with each right hand page being a drawing and each left hand page a straightforward record of my day. It’s another way of getting a drawing and some writing into each day and also having a sort of ancient looking document to work in. I have fantasies about burning certain pages and sloshing wine around.
Drawing on colored backgrounds is giving me a chance to think more clearly in terms of values. Because I have at least three tones in my palette right off (brown lines, tan paper, white pencil) and then the infinite variations in between (varying degrees of solid ink and cross hatching, different line weights, different degrees of pressure on the pencil from light dusting to solid opaque), I really pay attention to what is the darkest and brightest points in my subject and then try to capture the correct variations in between.

RATART

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This post was inspired by Brenda.
Jack has been working on drawing rats for the last few days (he is studying the Bubonic plague in school) and we have been thinking a lot about them. He doesn’t want them to be cute so we have been thinking about what makes things cute. He doesn’t want them to be mistaken for mice so we have been thinking about the differences between mice and rats.
Here’s some new stuff we’ve learned:

Rats have longish, lozenge shaped heads. Their ears are small, like little cupped leaves, and are set back on their skulls. Their eyes should be drawn smallish and are best when smoldering with coal-like intensity as if lit by some inner demonic desire to spread the plague. They are sort of hunch-backed with wringing little claw-hands and long naked tails.
There are so many issues with rats and we have worked through many of them in the past few days.
My friend Dan used to always say that his son Shane was his favorite artist and he would send me drawings Shane had made of spaceships and laser guns and weird robots locked in conflict. For a while, I didn’t get it. My own kid was still a baby and I didn’t understand the power of watching a child make anything but filled diapers at the time. Then, when my own little artist-in-residence was able to use crayons, I started to experience that magic of this little person who you thought you made suddenly being able to make and see things that were so amazing. Perhaps the element of love makes Jack’s art all the more incredible to me but I think anyone would see that they are cool.
Watching him bent over his drawing book has often prompted me to draw as well, to loosen up my stroke, to experiment, to be as cavalier with my finished works as he is. Nonetheless, we have gathered every drawing and doodle he has done in to a bookshelf of binders, each labeled “The Art of Jack Tea Gregory“. We have filled many big fat volumes and he has filled another few dozen sketchbooks.

Danny's Not Got a Brand New Bag

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bag.jpg
Thursday, 8:10 a.m. Getting ready to leave the house and start the frigid, two-and-a-half-mile walk to my office, I suddenly realize I don’t have the bag I use to tote my pens, paints, and my journal. I feel my heart actually move in my chest and my eyes tear up.

A shot of adrenaline sizzles up my neck. It’s not by my desk or next to the couch or hanging on the coat rack. I don’t even look ’cause I know where it is.

Flashback

Wednesday 7:30 p.m. The annual MorningNews.Org holiday party is being held at Thady Con’s Bar in Midtown. I strip off my coat, throw it on a pile on a bar stool and accept my first Dewars’ and water. I sling my bag on to the floor, next to the bar rail, and then retrieve it to pull out gifts: copies of my new book, The Creative License, for my editors, Rosecrans and Andrew. As the crowd converges around the pristine copies of my book and the Highland’s finest blended scotch courses down my gullet, my bag sinks back down into the dark on the floor.

Wednesday 9:30p.m. I yank my coat off the pile, wish everyone a good year, and, warmed by the conviviality of my colleagues and a reasonable amount of good cheer, sail out into the night and plunk myself in a cab. Obliviously bagless.

Flash forward

Thursday 9:30 a.m. A call to Rosecrans confirms my fears. The rest of the gang also left the bar last night without my bag.

9:32 a.m. I call Thady Con’s. The bar opens at 11 but a man with a thick accent picks up the phone. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to understand my question and asks me to call back at 10.

9:34 a.m I reminisce to myself about my bag and its contents. It’s made of olive canvas, with many pockets and a shoulder strap. Inside, there are about a dozen pens. Most of them are brown Faber-Castells, some Fs, some Ms, some Ss. There’s even a B. A few, though I’m not sure which, I bought last summer at a pen store near Mussolini’s former headquarters in Rome. There’s a small bottle of brown ink with a wax stopper that my pal, Kane, brought me from Venice. It’s in a snack sized Ziploc bag along with a pen holder and my favorite nib and a waterbrush filled with sepia Dr.Martin’s transparent watercolor.
In the inner pocket, there’s a mitten I found on the street a few weeks ago. It has a special flap that folds back to expose my fingers and then Velcros back into position, ideal for drawing outside in cold weather. The mitten was dirty and lying on the sidewalk but after a good wash it proved to be white and very comfy. There’s also a copy of the 51st issue of Dan Price’s Moonlight Chronicles, dog-eared from its third consecutive reading.
The most valuable object in the bag, at least to me, is my journal, Volume 46. I lost one earlier volume, I think it was #7, when it slid between the cushion and the arm rest of a window seat of an United flight to Chicago and for some reason didn’t deplane with me. I’d neglected to write my name and number in it and we never saw each other again.
Volume 46 has been a good friend to me. I decided to do the whole thing only in shades of brown and black. It begins with a record of Chelsea art shows I’ve enjoyed, followed by several pages of drawings of dogs and tools. Then I began preparing pages before I drew on them, soaking and spattering them in Dr.Martin’s colors, generally yellows, oranges and browns. There are drawings of my office, of a trip to a radio performance of King Kong, of a breakfast with my friend Steve, an egg sandwich, last weekend’s Sketchcrawl, my visit to the Beerhorsts’, some flowers I got from Julie and Bill, and various other things. I had not scanned any of the pages except for the few I posted here last week.

I have thought, and said, and written that what matters is not the product of art, but the process of making it. I’ve said that one might as well toss away every drawing you make, wipe your arse with it, give it to a stranger, as hang on to it like some sort of cherished totem. That what matters is the slow careful study of reality, the meditative calm that comes with drawing, the counting of one’s blessings as one learns to appreciate the world around. And yet, here I am with thundering heart and sour stomach worrying about a little Canson watercolor book as if it were my second (or 46th) born. I love my journals, the rows of them on their shelves, flipping back through past ones, soothing their pages, brushing their hair.
What hypocrisy! Oh, shut up, I’m grieving.

10:01 am. I call the bar again and speak to Graham, He puts me on hold, roots around a bit, finally returning to tell me, in a lilting brogue, that he indeed has my bag. I tell him I’ll drop by at lunch time to get it.

10:02 a.m. I ask myself,” Should I bother to post this? Or should I get back to work?”

Addendum: Exciting conclusion

11:30 a.m. I duck out of the office and take the E train to Lexington Avenue. I walk down the street with my iPod blasting and up to the door of the bar. Suddenly, over the screech of MC5 I hear people yelling at me, “Don’t go in!”. I look around and saw that there were firemen and fire engines swarming up and down the block. One was stretching out a yellow line of tape. Someone else yells “The building could fall down at any minute.!” I back up and huddle with the Irish barmen and waitstaff, explaining that my bag is inside. They tell me that they were getting ready to open when someone noticed a huge crack running across the kitchen floor. Some construction workers around the corner, excavating a hole for a new building, had accidentally damaged the foundations of the old bar. Firemen run around turning off the gas and electricity, worried that the building could blow up.
Then a fireman comes out of the bar carrying two axes and my drawing bag and hands it to me.
I’m not sure if the bar will survive. But at least Volume 46 is safe

Childish things

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Frog

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child;
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Corinthians 13:11

I’m not a child psychologist. Nor do I have a terribly accurate or comprehensive memory of my own childhood. So I am struggling a little to get to the roots of what happens to children in adolescence that makes most of us stray from the art-making that is the hallmark of every childhood. When and why do we abandon crayons and coloring books and singing and dressing up?

My adolescence was somewhat unusual. I came to America three weeks before my 13th birthday and I didn’t fit in. I had spent the previous three years in an Israeli public school, speaking only Hebrew. Right before that I had been in an American school in Pakistan. And my elementary school was a Presbyterian boarding school in Australia.

I don’t have any distinct memory of drawing much at that age. I know I read a lot and I wrote stories. But I don’t think I’d lost the pleasure of drawing. However, a couple of years later I’m pretty sure I was thinking of myself as ‘artistic’. I had friends who were ‘artsy’ too; my school didn’t have a distinct jock set but those of us who were interested in art were a clique of a sort, albeit with blurred edges. By sixteen, I’d begun to act in school productions, to write and draw for the school paper and by seventeen, I was selling buttons I made out of little drawings and was then asked to teach a class on ‘Portable Art’ for other students. So by junior year, my self-image was certainly associated with, if not 100% tied to, making things and being creative.

I think what was going on in those years had a lot more to do with other people than with my own sense of myself. When I was a kid, I just made things, drew things, painted things, sang in the bath, made story books, but all for me. It was just stuff I did, like playing. I would no more have thought of myself as an artist than I thought of myself as a Lego engineer or a cowboy. If anything, I wanted to be a veterinarian.

I was pretty clueless in my strange new surroundings; I had no cultural history and was pretty insecure and awkward and shy (not to mention ashamed of the unwelcome hairs and pimples that seemed to be sprouting all over me). So being ‘artistic’ was a way of providing a label for myself –it beat the label of ‘fag’ that my nemesis Tim O’Brien gave me in 8th grade and ‘wimp’ (9th grade) and ‘nerd’ (10th grade). In 11th grade, in a production of Tad Mosel’s Impromptu, I got to kiss the prettiest girl in the senior class in front of the entire student body. Tim O’Brien was the ticket-taker.

So for me, this self-definition was a good thing. I drew and painted and acted more and more in order to solidify this image. (For my best friend, Julian, who was 6’3″ and captain of the basketball team, my image and my cynical, anti-authoritarian presence was a liability; the coach was constantly telling him to stay away from me and concentrate on his jump shot. Ironically, Julian’s mother is a successful artist.) While being a good student wasn’t exactly disparaged, it didn’t give one much social cachet. However, making buttons and painting on my shoes and donating huge canvases of feet to the library and doing snarky cartoons for the school paper was a way of being someone.

Senior year, things seem to have changed. Our school, being progressive and Quaker, didn’t give grades (this was in the late 1970’s) and so applying to college became an anxious affair. We had to do well on the SATs, as they were the main concrete bit of evaluation one had to go on. I. for some reason, became determined to go to Princeton, though I applied to other schools. Somehow under this whole academically intense period of scrutiny, I reinvented my notion of myself as a serious person, a writer, a scholar. Sure, I had diverse interests, but I dismissed all that painting and acting as folderol. I was going to be a typical creature of the 1980s –not quite willing to be an investment banker, perhaps but aware that conformity and Donald Trumpery were the hallmarks of the day. Within a year or two of college, I had more or less stopped painting and drawing and was majoring in Political Science.

I don’t know if my story is typical. However, there is no doubt that adolescence is a time of self-consciousness and identity molding. Added to that pressure is pour society’s deification of wealth and the sense that art = penury.

I worry about my boy –eleven and so in love with drawing and filmmaking and acting and singing and fantasy –will he be twisted away from these loves and become stifled and embarrassed by Art? Will he choose some identity that forbids an acknowledgment of the need we all have to make things? I hope not. And I think, having the sort of family he has, that this is less likely than for most.

But I get a lot of mail from people who have lost their long-ago urge to be creative and who feel very afraid and anxious and unsure about picking up the pieces again. Is there some sort of crossroads we all come to? And what can we do to make sure that we don’t suffer some irrevocable break with our creative selves. I believe very strongly that Art can be spelled with a small ‘a’, that one doesn’t need to be a professional, celebrated, wealthy creative person to be creative at all. I believe that creativity is like exercise or cooking, something that can and should be just a part of everyday life or everybody. Without it, we suffer individually and collectively. It took me two decades to regain my love of making things for its own sake and I mourn those lost years, the painting and photos and films and drawings and sculptures I might have made but didn’t. Now all I can do is make up for that lost time and vow not to lose my way again.

I will admit that my self-image is still tied up with making art. I am part of a community of creative people now – the readers of this blog and my books, my many new friends who make art – and that this community is part of what keeps me going … to an extent. I am working hard to loosen the grip of the ego and I am making progress. Honestly, even if I dwelt in complete obscurity and my internet connection was severed, I would draw just as much for that pure feeling that floods my skull when I concentrate and let the ink flow.

How about you?

Perfect storm

dannygregory1 Comment

So far this millennium has been a strained and sweaty passage. As the moorings are loosened, it seems that any and everything could unravel. A terrorist attack a half a mile and four years away, still feels like it could metastasize and engulf my life. A hurricane a thousand miles away prompts my mother to buy new insurance while I seek reassurance that my home sits a hundred feet above the ground, ground made of rooted bedrock.
Our government is hopeless and corrupt rather than governing: our religions are a source of division and destruction rather than comfort and moral guidance. It’s tough to express opinions in this climate, tough to make plans, tough to depend on the wisdom of one’s years. And yet, I’m optimistic.
Our times are about keeping it real and perhaps, as our illusions shatter, we’ll be left with a more reasonable set of expectations. Maybe we’ll stop hoping to be lottery millionaires or movie stars or CEOs. Maybe we’ll stop idolizing fabricated celebrity and vicious gossip and impossible perfection. Maybe we’ll realize that true love doesn’t depend on fake breasts.
Nature is brutal and beautiful. One moment the seas are placid, the next they inundate the condos on the shore. We act surprised, oblivious to the millions of years of hurricanes that have shaped our coasts into random, twisted lines. We fantasize that there is a divine plan, an intelligent design behind this terrible judgment. Instead, we must come to see the beauty and the brutality as unpredictable and inevitable. We must relearn our place on the planet and in the universe. It’s time to get a little humble.
Think about Katrina and New Orleans next time you draw. Release the 20th century need to do it right, to make it perfect, to lay down lines just as you’d planned. Instead, take a moment to acknowledge your own imperfections and contemplate how your personal deviations are helping our species to survive. There is no room for perfectly met expectations on this wobbling globe.

The river is ever flowing, breeching its banks, leeching into its bed, never stopping to pose. Everything you draw is mutating as you draw it. Every nanosecond, your pen, your fingers, your sketchbook are all in a flux of atomic migration. We are not grindingly consistent computers, you and I, and we don’t live in Sim City. A twisted, crooked line is the only true line.
Study the gnarled tree, the rotting apple, the ill-kempt hairdo, the defecating dog. Capture the spirit of this imperfection, this constant change, and allow yourself to breathe as you draw. In and out, up and down, tendons bowing, bones creaking, brain cells dying, ink evaporating, paper curling. Ride the act out, and don’t dare think of posterity. If you draw just so you can hang your work on the wall for eternity, your picture frames will exploded in the hot glow of the ever threatening blast. Draw only for exhibition and your gallery will be washed away in the gathering deluge.

Imperfection, misjudgment, failure, these are what you have and don’t dare flee them. Embrace them, cherish them. For chaos is the true way of the world, of your soul, of your destiny of Art with a twisted capital A.

Study your world and draw it. Draw crooked, draw with a stick, draw in the dark, but draw. Draw for now, for today, for this moment. It’s all we have. And, believe me, it’s more than enough.

Drawing Fire

dannygregoryLeave a comment

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I wrote about Steve Mumford last year when his work was only available on Artnet. Now he has published a sumptuous book collecting all of the watercolors and observations he made during his visits to war-torn Iraq.
He told me that he drew almost exclusively with a dip pen while there and that he carried his art supplies in the pockets of his flak jacket, ready to sweep everything together and haul ass if there was any sort of trouble. Some of his paintings are of bombs blowing up under humvees or soldiers returning sniper fire and those sorts of pictures he admitted he had done from photos he took on the scene and then painted back at his hotel or even in his studio safely in New York.
He said that drawing gave him a sort of access he could never have gotten as a journalist. Many photographers were embedded with troops but the Iraqis were often suspicious when they saw a camera. Women in particular did not like to have their pictures taken and retreated behind their veils.
But when Steve sat down to draw, he was trusted. People could see what he was doing, and knew how they were being depicted. And they had the universal interest most people have to watching a work of art come to life, seeing how the lines emerge and take shape. Iraqis have a rich artistic tradition and enormous respect for artists. Steve was able to sit in meetings between the soldiers and the Iraqis, to capture everyday life as it was led in the streets of Baghdad, because people welcomed him.
Steve says he is a shy person and yet he drew crowds whenever he set up his little folding stool and began to draw. Imagine what it’s like to sit on the sidewalk in a war-zone and sketch. Imagine being under the scrutiny of people who could be suicide bombers. Imagine being in tense situations like negotiations with local mullahs or driving down dusty roads in a US military convoy. I’m amazed he could relax enough to do such wonderful work.
Most people are enormously self-conscious the first time they draw in public. There is something very presumptuous in setting yourself up in public as ‘an artist’. You are sure people are watching your every move (which they may well be doing) and then dismissing your feeble efforts and snickering behind your back at your ineptitude. All of these paranoid thoughts swirl in your mind as you draw, little yammering voices nipping at your pen, distracting you, judging every stroke you make.
Of course, like so many excuses we give ourselves for not taking risks or trying new things, your fears are hogwash. The only reactions people have when they see an artist at work is fascination, respect, and envy. Most people will watch from a distance but some will stand right near you. When I draw in Chinatown, the locals come right up and virtually lean on me as I draw; often the same people will stay glued to my side for a half an hour as I work. Occasionally people will gently ask a question about what I’m drawing or why I’m drawing it. If I wear headphones, they probably won’t. I can stop and engage them and reap some quick admiration, or just carry on with my work. On extremely rare occasions, something a little more dramatic might happen. In Jerusalem, some boys try to rip my sketchbook out of my hands and run off with it. Every so often someone has realized I was drawing them and felt violated and insisted I stop (of course, I always do; I wouldn’t make a good drawarazzi).
I urge you to get out with your journal and capture life in the streets. If you are unbearably nervous, sit with your back against a wall or draw the view through a caf� window. I think it’s nice to share your work with the people you are drawing � though I don�t do it often enough. Last week, my pal Tom drew a fire station; the firemen saw him and loved the piece so much they gave him a t-shirt and asked to make a copy; they said they want to make it into a poster. I had a similar experience at a brothel in Nevada that Dan Price and I drew (long story, another time).
If you ever get horribly anxious as you ply your pen and pad out in public, think of Steve Mumford in his flak jacket surrounded by unfamiliar faces and the smell of smoke, and suck it up.

Happy Old Me

dannygregoryLeave a comment

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It’ll be my birthday in a few days and this year I’m feeling it. My ankle is still a little shaky and it has made me physically unsure. It gets a little better every day but it has made me contemplate my mortality anew. I step off the curb more deliberately; I put on an elastic bandage if I think I’ll be walking for a while. I think about the body I usually take for granted.
My barber, an old Italian man in a toupee, horrified me yesterday. He said, “You know, your hair is very thick at the back. You could easily do a transplant and put some up front.” I barked out a laugh but he was serious, “One session, not very expensive at all.”. For the briefest of moments, I imagined what it would be like to have a full head of hair and then dismissed it in a vision of doll’s hairplugs and snickering comments behind my vain back. I told him that receding hairlines had been a family tradition for generations and to go easy on the gel.
Time does seem to be fleeting. Jack is nearly up to my shoulder these days. Summer’s almost done. And we are repainting our apartment and replacing the furniture we bought when we moved in nine years ago. Sic transit. Last weekend we went to 18 West 18th Street, the address where Patti and I met in a long defunct restaurant called Café Seiyoken. When we got married there, five years later, it was a another restaurant. Now it is a children’s book store. The spot where we said our vows is now a cupcake counter. The bar where we first met has been replaced by a rack of Eric Carle books.
I know, I know. What’s more tedious than a middle aged man bemoaning the passing of time? The odd thing about it all is how full life seems to be of things I’ve never done or known. In many ways, I feel dumber and more inexperienced withe each year. I am still learning how to be married after two decades, how to be a dad after eleven years. I still wonder where my career is going, still plan on getting into an exercise program, still consider getting a therapist, still consider moving to the other side of the world.
My grandfather was born in 1909 and he’s still alive and kicking, so chances are I may only be halfway through my journey. Then again I may be electrocuted by this computer and die today.
I do know I wish I had more time to draw so I could get really good at it. Last night I was curiously liberated when I spent an hour tracing a devilishly complex drawing by Ronald Searle. For months I have been looking for the right pen to duplicate his lines, thinking he must have used a dip pen or a rubbery fountain pen of some sort. But when I studied and reproduced his drawng, I discovered that his individual lines are remarkably consistent and that my Rapidoliner traced them perfectly. There’s no trick, no tool that I am missing. My pen is just fine.
Enough excuses. I should just take it outside and use it. But first, let me wrap up my ankle and suck down some Geritol.

Clarification

dannygregory1 Comment

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

Avuncular advice

dannygregoryLeave a comment

princeton-man-1hey danny just a (not so quick) question for ya
we’re in the middle of this whole looking for colleges and setting up visits thing and it is absolutely overwhelming. i was told by an admissions dean to find someone who is in the field i want to go into(Art/Art Ed/Art therapy[still deciding..heh]) and come up with a list of questions i can ask to these places i visit to find the school with the best program.not just a good art program but good in integrating art and teaching art. the two art teachers i have are at two oppsite ends of the spectrum. one is a photo teacher that doesnt believe in going to school for art education but just going to some artschool for art, doing what you want all through college, bettering yourself and afterwards consider teaching (after youve spend thousands of dollars on an education already). the other teacher is one of the nicest people i know who is so busy with just being a teacher, having a family, and driving an SUV that she doesnt draw anymore or make things. she’s all for practicality and strictly the teaching aspect. i feel like these people aren’t very much help in that they both have their own ideas of what being an art teacher is and these ideas aren’t mine. and after all this jib jab my real question is do you know any art teachers or professors or anything of the sort that can give me an idea of how to feel these schools out for a program that im looking for? how to narrow down the options. i realize that not knowing for sure what i want to do doesnt help this situation but i know i want to make art myself. learn as much as i possibly can and do the best that I can and work with people/the public and make art mean as much to them as it does to me. if any of the above content made sense, your input would be greatly appreciated.
thanks for your time(!)
-niece in distress

Dear Morgan:

I hear you. Choosing the path you are to take in life is a daunting prospect. But, here’s the secret: you aren’t making that choice right now. It’s a long and gradual process with many twists and turns and none of the crossroads is irreversible. Don’t worry about the end result right now. Don’t think that you have to choose the school that will firmly and clearly deliver you to the door of the job you will do until you retire.

Secondly, don’t be impatient. Don’t rush to get a highly professional education right away. Don’t commit yourself to an idea of what you will do in life. When I was seventeen I couldn’t have described the life I lead today. I know you are anxious about being successful in what you do. You and you parents don’t want you to become a starving artist. Believe me, that’s extremely unlikely.

But similarly I wouldn’t want you to make up your mind today that you will be some thing specific. Your experience is simply too limited for you to make the right choice at this point. There are so many sorts of stimulating and lucrative creative jobs you could have, and most of them are careers you have not even heard of yet.

The training for most of them is similar, however. You need to learn as much as you can about as many things as you can. That should be the goal of your college education.

I have met and worked with many young people who went directly into art school and/or an advertising school. They think they know far more than they do. The fact that they have been taught some technical skills does not prepare them for a career in advertising or design. In fact, I would much rather hire a smart, worldly, inquisitive person who traveled the world, read history and sold shoes at Macy’s than a person who focused entirely on getting a career in advertising since they were seventeen. Most of the skills they think they acquired can be learned quickly on the job. But reading good literature, debating politics and philosophy, living among many different sorts of people, those are experiences that will advance you far more in a creative field. The most interesting film directors didn’t limit their educations to film school. The most interesting writers didn’t come out of the Iowa program; the most successful copywriters didn’t limit their educations to the Miami Ad School, etc.

You say you are interested in art therapy and art teaching and you may well end up in those fields. But may I suggest that the reason you are interested in those fields is because you know people who are in them. Frankly, your world is a little limited. There are many, many other options you should look into first.

Here’s a partial list of the jobs of creative people I know, stimulating and lucrative jobs you may not have considered, jobs that may actually be perfect for you: documentary producer, flash animator, magazine illustrator, greeting card designer, software engineer, toy designer, packaging engineer, medical illustrator, court room artist, commercial photographer, automotive designer, production designer, prop maker, line producer, cinematographer, magazine art director, jewelry designer, fashion stylist, typographer, costume designer, film editor, sound designer, architect, urban planner, graphic designer, food stylist, runway photographer, book editor, book jacket designer, museum curator, art historian, retail display designer, fashion director, makeup artist, choreographer, stage manager, commercial composer, industrial film editor, fragrance designer, information architect, strategic planner, potter, art buyer, continuity person, textile designer, set carpenter, industrial chemist, fashion forecaster, copywriter…

You can prepare for most of these jobs the same way.

First of all, do your best in high school. Have diverse interests so you build a good resume: School paper, school play, community stuff, etc. Sports matter far less after high school than they do in high school. Same with TV, Play Station, drugs, liquor and other extracurrics. But don’t be a goody-two shoes either. Live fast but don’t die young.

Apply to the best possible schools. Set your sights high. You are smart and articulate and you can do it. My high school had no formal grades so many of my classmates worried they couldn’t get into a good school. I didn’t know better so I applied to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, University of Chicago and had University of Michigan as my safety. I got into all of them (but Yale) but only visited the one I really wanted to attend: Princeton. I knew very little about it but I like F.Scott Fitzgerald. I also liked the fact that it had no law school, no med school and seemed committed to under graduate education. My parents were not particularly wealthy but family members kicked in some cash so I could go.

Get a very liberal education: This is the last time in life you will get to immerse yourself all day in all sorts of learning among a lot of smart people. Don’t waste it by limiting yourself or your field of interest. I studied French, Latin, History, Geology, Politics, Literature, Economics, Art History, Music, Anthropology, Psychology, and more. Only when you are absolutely forced to, choose a major. Mine was Political Science with a minor in Near Eastern Studies, I wrote my thesis about 1960s radical students. Again, none of it had anything to do with my future career, and yet it was all immensely helpful in separating me from the dull careerists in my peer group. I was and am interesting and interested. I can bring a lot more to the discussion than those who majored in graphic arts or economics. Trust me, if you could learn all the professional skills you need to in four years of college it wouldn’t be worth much in the job market. But the ability to form associations between obscure things is a very valuable skill that you can only hone by reading and experiencing as much as possible throughout your whole life. I go my first job in advertising after a couple of weeks of interviewing. It was easy and I had zero experience.

The future looks bright. There are more and more opportunities for creative people to earn a good and interesting living. In the dawn of the Information Age, technical skills mattered a lot and engineers and economists were Kings. But, frankly, billions of Indians and Chinese are taking over those jobs. What they don’t have and won’t have for the next few decades is a good grasp on culture and a sufficiently free society to encourage individuals with new and fresh ideas. That will give America a competitive advantage for most of my lifetime, if not yours. People who make things will be very valuable for a while to come. The entertainment field will keep America first: fashion, consumer culture, computer gaming, web design, marketing, music, film, etc. Think of how those fields have transformed over your short lifetime. Any hard-core specific learning you get in a second rate college in these fields will be obsolete before you graduate. But if you have a diverse and insatiable hunger for learning and a creative mind, you will always be on the cusp of the new wave.

Education never stops. Apply yourself in school but use your summers to explore other fields. Write to people and ask for internships. Spend half your summer making spending money, the other half working in a gallery, for a commercial production company or a magazine publisher (I worked at the White House, for cryin’ out loud – also newspapers, congressmen, McDonalds, record stores, etc.) Stay with relatives in big cities and immerse yourself in the metropolitan jungle. You can also wait until graduate school to go to an art program; by then you may feel more comfortable about where to specialized. Meantime, keep reading and exploring. My nightstand is piled high with history books, art criticism, books in technique, magazines, etc. I take classes, interview people with diverse careers, and keep hungry and inquisitive. I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up. And you don’t need to be either.

I hope this is a little helpful. But let’s discuss it more. Call me anytime and I’ll help you however I can
Meantime, don’t worry and be happy,
Your uncle,
Danny