Category: Life

Rusty beans and dusty gold.

dannygregory15 Comments

One evening, you go to a friend’s house and she has rented a movie. She paid for it, but you get to watch it for free.

You notice a bestseller on the table and ask if you can borrow it. Your friend waves it away and tells you how disappointing it was. Instead, she urges another book on you that you never knew about. That book changes your life.

You have coffee with a friend who offers to introduce you to a colleague with professional experience that dovetails perfectly with yours.

You are on your phone, about to jaywalk. A bicyclist zooms past you and through a red light, almost getting clipped by a taxi. Your heart spasms with adrenaline as you step back on the curb and swallow hard.

You read a memoir of a man who went against the herd to start a business in an industry others had long since abandoned. He struggles, backslides, struggles some more, but by using certain surprising skills, he reverses the trend and creates a successful, beloved business. His book is full of specific descriptions that you can use to pursue your own dream.

You read a review on Amazon for a product you have been considering for a while. The review points out three unusual criteria you had never considered which make you act immediately.

Your mother-in-law smokes like a chimney. At sixty, she is dead of lung cancer. You used to have an occasional cigarette with your second martini. No longer.

You had a parent who withheld affection to the point of abuse.  When you have your own children, you use his behavior as a yardstick, a warning of things never to do.

Distracted, you say something unthinking to your spouse — who gasps aloud. You look up, suddenly aware of what you’ve said, and grow shocked at your own insensitivity.

Your grandfather survived the Great Depression. For the next sixty years, he counts every penny, then dies alone in a shabby house, its basement full of rusting canned goods and thirty pounds of gold bullion.

Every day life offers you a lesson you may or may not notice. What did you learn today? What did you teach someone else?

(Can’t think of anything? Well, that’s why there’s this.)

Working out the bad

dannygregory10 Comments

Recently I have been doing a lot of drawings that emerge for the womb of my mind with dents and lumps and stork bites all over. They look just ugly to me, five minutes in. I know this is a function of my being out of shape — I need to keep limbering up my powers of observation and forcing myself to slow down.

To deal with these lifeless pups, I turn to advice for my old pal, Tommy Kane. If you took “Beginning” at Sketchbook Skool you will remember his lecture exhorting us to keep working on bad drawings, massaging them until they cough, splutter and start to breathe.

I have been wondering why this works.

Is it like taking a wrong turn early in the journey and then continuing to drive, circling, perambulating until eventually you get back on track, slowing down, recalculating, finally getting oriented, our earlier mistakes now buried in many miles of tire tracks?

Or maybe you keep making mistakes, more and more inaccurate observations, until they all even out, balancing too long with too short, too left with too right. The mean is accurate.

Or does all the effort show, the layers, the thousands of strokes, the many decisions all evident on the page so they coalesce to exude an air of confidence that make the early mistakes seem intentional, now polished and upholstered in finger sweat?

Regardless, the act of concentration and dogged perseverance clear my mind, assuage the pain of earlier blunders to bring me a doodly peace.

Once again, drawing is like living. Perseverance will out.

Five beautiful things I saw today.

dannygregory23 Comments

I looked up from my book and glimpsed the setting sun reflected in a window across West 3rd Street. It was enormous, an incredible, unnatural, cherry red. I rushed to the corner of the terrace to look at the actual sun but it was hidden behind a tangle of water towers and satellite dishes. I watched the last slivers disappear in the mirrors of my neighbors’ picture windows.

In the park, a woman in a black pinafore spun lime green hula hoops ’round her hips, her waist, and knees, and then suddenly convulsed and folded them all into a single shape, a globe with all its meridians demarcated by the buzzing hoops.

The fur on Tim’s back is curly as Persian lamb today. The air is still but he is knotted and wavy. His fur is a dusky rainbow: eggplant, auburn, battleship grey, matte black, all threaded with silver highlights.

I went to Jack’s room to put away some towels. On his top bookshelf, the albums of his drawings that we collected when he was just starting to draw, aged 2 to 4. On their spines, they’re labeled “The Art of Jack Tea Gregory, Vols 1-4.”  On the shelf below them, arranged, apparently in the last few weeks, a row of books of art notes Jack’s been making this year.  Each is labeled with a Brother P-Touch that I didn’t even know he had.  Those two rows of books encompass the last twenty years of his life. And of mine.

At least seven blocks away, there’s a railroad apartment. It has windows at the west end near me and at the far eastern side. A slice of sky is visible through that far window and, across that bright patch, the silhouette of a person passes back and forth. A single leaf on the crabapple tree across the street appears larger than that tiny silhouette yet somehow, I am connected, and know something about how that miniature person feels, pacing so many blocks away.

Bulletproof

dannygregory18 Comments

I saw some cops having lunch at the diner the other day. There were three of them, big guys crammed into a booth, working through sandwiches and fries.  They each wore a heavy leather utility belt with a flashlight, handcuffs, mace, a Taser, a notebook, a radio, a nightstick, a big handgun and God knows what else.  These cops sat very erect — under their uniforms, their torsos were girded in a thick bulletproof vest.

When their meal was done, one officer reached for the bill — but it slipped out of his grip and fluttered to the floor. He leaned over, grunting, to pick it up. Straining and cursing, he couldn’t bend in the middle to reach it. The gun, the vest, all the clobber had him strapped down and inflexible. Eventually, the waitress saw his predicament and darted down to lightly pick up the bill and replace it in front of him.

Life can force us to armor up. As we endure traumas, abuse, poor judgment, we layer on defenses to protect us from what has happened. As they say in the Pentagon, we are always preparing to fight the last war. But many of our shields are redundant, obsolete, and confining. As we bolster ourselves against more and more possible eventualities, we become like medieval knights struggling to get back on the horse under a load of steel plate.

Do you need it all? Look at your ramparts. Monitor your reactions. Check your gear and see if, maybe, you can lighten your load.

Spare the rod.

dannygregory46 Comments

My second stepfather was quick with his fists. He would escalate disagreements with waiters into brawls in parking lots.  He threw chairs in parent-teacher conferences. He wouldn’t hesitate to pull the car over and reach into the back seat to swing at me and my little sister. He was six feet tall with meaty forearms covered with red hairs. When I was ten years old, his right hand left an imprint on my left cheek which I wore to school for a week.

We moved a lot when I was little and, as the new kid, I was an easy target for bullies. I was tripped, teased, and occasionally had to get stitches. I was told to just walk away or to stand up for myself or to name names, but nothing made much difference. I was a wimp and a weed.

I’m no longer the new kid. And my second stepfather has been dead of pancreatic cancer for over a decade. These days, the only likely sources of physical violence I encounter are drunks and madmen. I live in Greenwich Village so there are a fair number of each around but I haven’t been struck since a large, intoxicated man appeared out of nowhere and knocked me to the ground in Washington DC. That was during the first Clinton Administration. Except for 9/11, the Bush and Obama years have been without incident.

It’s pretty unusual to see an adult strike a child in public these days. When it happens, it seems so barbaric, like witnessing a street fight. No doubt family services will soon be called, courts, foster care, but when I was a kid, it was an everyday thing, never discussed with outsiders, a family affair. I can’t imagine striking Jack. He’s taller than me these days and goes to the gym all the time, but even when he was knee-high, I would never have turned my frustration into any sort of physical response. It just wasn’t in me.

But what is in me is the battle against the impending threat. While I haven’t been physically assaulted in this millennium, a part of me is ever vigilant, waiting for an attack. It’s the part of me that bruises too easily. My ego. The slings and arrows of garden-variety disagreements and critiques can still sting disproportionately. A blog comment, a client request, a passing suggestion from my girlfriend, all can raise the specter of my second stepfather, his shadow on my doorstep.  My only weapons are flimsy and malfunctioning: defensiveness, sarcasm, withdrawal — the sorts of things that do me more harm than good.

I have long been working on toughening up. I’ve had to. I spent decades in the trenches of advertising where curt dismissal was part of the job, where hard-earned ideas would ride out of conference rooms on their shields, where creative competitions are called “gang bangs.” I have spent decades on the Internet too, where anonymous trolls are free to lumber in, 24/7, and empty their bowels on my creations with the click of  a mouse.

Here’s what I tell myself, not always successfully:

A) Everyone has the right to an opinion.

B) Each critique is an opportunity to better my work.

C) My second stepfather is dead. Even if he does live on in my head.

I force myself to first take a deep breath and try to clear the fog of emotion. This is now. It is not the past. (I know, I know. Easier said than done).

Then I consider the content of the input. (God, even the way I wrote that last sentence shows how tightly I clutch the reins). I look at my idea as objectively as I can, as if it was not mine, unvested — and then I apply the critique. Is it helpful? Can I use it? If so, all good. Thanks very much for saving me from myself. Now I can do better.

But if I am unsure of the critique, if it seems not to fit at all with the way I see the situation, then it’s time to consider the intention behind it. Is the critic there to help? Or to throw a fist? Do they want me and my idea to succeed? Or will they profit in some way from my failure? Will it make them bigger? Will it prop up their vanity and insecurity?  Because if their motives are suspect, maybe their criticism is too.

This is easier said than done, but I think it’s right.

Whatever sort of childhood you’ve had, being creative thins your skin. You take your work so personally. You have to, that why you care enough to make it good.  Not because of the money or the acclaim but because it’s a part of you that you are putting out there.

But remember that the world is essentially kind and welcoming. The people who matter want you to succeed. They will collaborate with you to help you make your work as good as it can be, because good work makes the world a better place for all of us.  And the assholes? They see your success as further proof of their own failures. That’s not your concern.

Unfortunately, I have long given my second stepfather a sort of immortality by letting him enter my dreams. But I won’t let him crush them too.

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

dannygregory189 Comments

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

Where did I go wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was working for a company again.

How the hell did that happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honestly, I do.

Living on purpose.

dannygregory27 Comments

What if success meant living a life of purpose?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could you make one?

The worst of times, the best of times.

dannygregory23 Comments

What if:

You could know,
with absolute certainty,
that the worst day of your life was behind you.
And the second worst too.
Would that knowledge change how you lived,
what risks you took,
what dreams you had?

And what if you could know that
the best day of your life
was yet to come.
How would that change your life?

And, even if you couldn’t really know for sure,
what would happen if you lived
as if you did?

Smoky memories of setting myself on fire

dannygregory9 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top 16 moments of 2014

dannygregory33 Comments

This has been a wild and unpredictable year that has taken me around the world and home again.   I sat down this morning with my calendar and recalled the best moments.

  1. Jan 4, Manhattan.  I screened footage I’d shot with my old pal, Tommy Kane. The week before, I’d slogged over to Tommy’s house in Brooklyn to shoot his klass videos for Sketchbook Skool.  It was a long and wonderful day, marred only by the rain hammering on the windows.  Filming this klass was the culmination of the years of videos I’d made with Tommy and Jack.  And the idea that I was working on this huge new project with old friends like Tom, Roz and Prashant, made me really happy, working with family on something I really loved.
  2. Jan 10, Downtown LA. In a moment of wonderful recklessness, I signed up for Clown School and spent several days with a group of complete strangers, revealing myself to them and to me.  It was an intense and transformative experience, breaking down my barriers and showing me I was capable of surprising things.
  3. Jan 15, San Francisco. I hopped on a plane north for the day to see David Hockney’s A Bigger Exhibition. Room after room of huge works by the master, colors, and risk taking that left me humbled.  I never tire of Hockney and he teaches me so much each time. I hope I am a quarter as creative and energetic at 80.
  4. Jan 19, Scottsdale. Jenny and I drove down to stay at the Arizona Biltmore to visit her family and give a talk at a conference.  That night we sat by a fire pit, sipped a beer, and watched the skies and I thought — how lucky I am. Being in this warm and wonderful place with my girl, getting new  people excited about drawing, this is what I want to be doing with my days.
  5. March 5, Los Angeles. I unfolded the boxes we had uses to ship our stuff from New York, set up a chair on the sidewalk, and drew the street I now live, whipping a big black Sharpie across the giant, battered sheets of cardboard.  Then I went back to my garage/studio and started an eleven-foot painting of my neighborhood, the first piece I’d ever done outside of my sketchbook since I’d started drawing again, many years ago.  I felt a new freedom and energy, using bright colors, big shapes, moving my brush with my whole painting.  Later that painting would decorate the walls of Jenny’s Venice office, and for the first time I felt like an artist,  expressing how I felt about my life for the world to see.
  6. April 4, the World. The first klass of Sketchbook Skool opened to maximum capacity. Two thousand students from around the world watched our first videos and started to upload their drawings. This was it!
  7. April 5, New York City. I taught a drawing workshop at the Open Center. It was sold out and many of the attendees had also just started at Sketchbook Skool the day before.  I hadn’t led the sort of workshop since the summer before in Rowe, Massachusetts, and it was so nice to be with people who wanted to learn, to create together, and to show them what I had learned. The cumulative affect of all these folks starting at SBS plus these great students here in person in the classroom was almost disorientingly wonderful.
  8. May 8, Fullerton, CA.  Tommy Kane was staying with us in LA and joined me for trip down to a college near San Diego. The school had a surprisingly great illustration program and loads of enthusiastic students and they asked me to come down and talk about my work. In the audience I also discovered a bunch of my other friends, Jane LaFazio and Brenda Swenson and many students from SBS.  Once again, I had this great cocktail of friends all together, real and virtual, old and new, all celebrating drawing together.
  9. May 12, Boston. Despite feeling like a fraud and an imposter, I gave two back-to-back presentations to thousands of people at the HOW Design conference about my ideas about the Inner critic. Amazingly, Shut Your Monkey was a hit and, immediately after, my editor came up to tell me we just have to turn the Monkey into book. I had a great time at the conference once the ordeal of the presentation was over, hanging with Stefan Sagmeister, and meeting Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell. The monkey’s fond of name dropping.
  10. Aug 4, Marfa, TX. Jenny and I realized a long-held dream, driving cross-country from LA to NYC. We stopped midway in this little farm town, which Donald Judd has turned into an art mecca. Sipping long-neck beers, watching the mysterious lights of Marfa, meeting new friends and listening to the train’s whistle, we made memories of a place I’d never known existed two days and at thousand miles before.
  11. Aug 24, NYC.  To celebrate the end of the official three-day Jenny’s Birthday weekend, Jack and I took her on a sunset cruise down the East River on a floating restaurant called the Water Table. As we ate lobster and watch the sunset over Manhattan, I felt a great wave of relief. Despite the wonderful adventures we’d had on the West Coast, it was so calming to be home again with my favorite girl and my tall boy floating past the greatest city of earth,
  12. Sep 21, Bejing.  There were so many wonderful and memorable days during my weeks in China, amazing meals, incredible art, and wild adventures.  I’ll pick one: drawing with a roomful of 8th graders, many mawkish and giggling, sweeping me back to my own days in junior high school when I started to lose my love of art-making for the first time,  as I  began to submerge under the pressure of adolescence. To revive the fun of drawing in these Chinese kids made me feel like my life had a real purpose and I felt incredibly fulfilled, so far from home.
  13. Oct 25, NYC. My partner Koosje and our dean of students, Morgan, came to stay with us in NY to talk about all things SBS.  We ended the visit with a massive drawing meet-up with students followed by a fakulty dinner at our house.  Once again I was struck by all we have done this year, the changes we’ve made to our lives, and the power of art to make us wiser and happier. It might have been the free-flowing bottles of of wine but I welled up at with awe and love for this community and my enormous good fortune at being a party of it.
  14. October 29, NYC. The first advance copies of my new book, Art Before Breakfast, arrives in the mail.  It looks amazing and more than I’d hoped.  It’s filled with art I’ve made over the past year in LA so for me it will always be a powerful memento of a wonderful time of change in my life.
  15. Nov 24, NYC. We asked the students of SBS to make videos describing their experience at the Skool.  I sat down to edit them together and was just so excited by what they’d made and said.That people would take the time and express such honest enthusiasm is more than I’d dreamt would happen when Koosje and I first talked about the Skool a year ago.  There have been ups and downs and loads of work and sacrifice  in this process but seeing these videos brought home to me why leaving my last job to focus on drawing and talking about art was probably not such a bad idea.
  16. Dec 4, Kutztown PA.  I have given lot of presentations about my work over the years but this time was really special.  We’d been invited by our old friend Ann who teaches at Kutztown and it was a crisp autumn day in a lovely town. Ann had put us up in a cozy B&B  and, after the long drive and lulled by the roaring fire place in our bedroom Jenny and I napped for an hour.  Then we popped up, headed to the campus, gave the talk to an enthusiastic room full of folks and went out to dinner. I felt loose, personable, myself — everything flowed. Maybe it was the lingering effects of clown school, or the kid energy in Beijing, or the expanding impact of the Grand Canyon or a sense of well-being that came from having a new book out and another on the way, or maybe it was being in a big room with friends and the girl I love, but it all came together and as I stoodd by the podium, I felt free and strong and right. And a strange feeling I realized was happiness.