Category: Workshops and classes
Corrupting the youth of Switzerland.
I’ve just completed the first leg of my European crusade: a week in Switzerland. Basel is a lovely medieval city along the Rhine right on the edge of Germany and France. It’s home to loads of banks and pharmaceutical corporations and two dozen museums — some with extremely contemporary contemporary art, one which is the size of a doorway.
I’ll tell you more about my visit to the city in another post. Today I’ll just try to summarize why I was there.
Last winter, I was invited to be an artist-in-residency at the International School of Basel this September. Perhaps you remember that a year ago, I was in residency at another ISB (the International School of Beijing) and had a lovely and illuminating time, so this invitation was very welcome. I was pumped to spend more time with kids, making art, and wallowing in their creative energy. Additional pluses: I’ve never been to Switzerland and, of course, Basel is a mecca for art.
My week began with a school assembly. Six hundred children under the age of 11 sat on the ground while I introduced myself and talked about all we would do in the week ahead.
Then each morning at 8:15, I’d let a couple hundred kids and their teachers into my gigantic office/studio/lecture hall and showed them films and gave them creative assignments. We drew breakfast and lunch and shoes and upside-down bicycles and portraits and more. We made enormous murals that covered all the halls and stair wells. We ended the week with a sprawling field trip to the natural history museum to draw dinosaurs and endangered animals and then drew the cathedral and the twisting medieval streets.
It didn’t stop in my classroom. The kids went home at night mad for drawing. Each morning, moms and dads came into the school with stories of kids transformed. They filled up sketchbooks at home, drew with their parents and teachers, insisted that nobody eat their dinners until they had been drawn.
After school on Tuesday, I met with all the teachers and showed them how art had opened my eyes. I told them that art is not just for art class — it’s for learning about the world and can be applied to any discipline, from literature to social studies to science to music to gym. I pulled out examples of my travel journals, of my investigations into homelessness, fishing in Manhattan, and dogs in coats. I showed them my maps and Koosje’s recipes and the SBS students’ instruction manuals.
The next day, an inspired math teacher asked her 4th graders to make drawings that explain the concept of ’rounding up’ numbers. She showed me dozens of stories and watercolors the kids made in response to her assignment. They were all different, all clear, all beautiful. She was able to see how well they understood the concept and they could use their pieces to teach the 3rd graders this concept.
On Thursday evening, I met with the parents and told them why I had come to Basel and why I thought it mattered that their kids had started keeping illustrated journals.
It was to prepare them for the future — not a future as professional artists necessarily, but as successful people in an ever-changing world. The days of being able to assume that a well-educated person could finish school, get a corporate job, and rise up the ladder till retirement, are over. Instead, kids need to be prepared for the unforeseeable. Technology is upending every industry, traditional jobs are withering while new opportunities are springing up in surprising places. Change is the constant. Kids need to learn to swim in it.
Parents can no longer assume that a traditional education in math, science, literature, language and history will be enough prepare a child for the future. A crucial new skill will be the ability to think creatively. That doesn’t mean dabbling in fingerpaints, but knowing how to spark innovations, to develop ideas, to present them clearly and persuasively, to find resources and collaborators to bring them to fruition, to build networks, to be entrepreneurial. I told them that’s why I supported my own son’s plan to go to art school, so he could learn skills I think will be essential to his future. If he had majored in English or pre-med, I wouldn’t have the same sense of confidence that I had given him the necessary tools.
I told them that they should look at art not just as a sign of being cultured, a middle-class luxury, but as a key component of their children’s total education. I suggested they insist the school’s administration support and look for ways to incorporate art and creativity into all aspects of the curriculum.
If a student is encouraged to look everywhere for inspiration, to combine ideas into new ones, to replace competition with collaboration, to accept mistakes and ambiguity and learn from them, to have faith in the creative process, to know how to overcome its pitfalls, only then will he or she be prepared for a world full of self-driving cars, delivery drones, mobile apps, and Donald Trump.
Knowledge alone is no longer power — it’s something that pops up in your browser. Knowing how to use that knowledge to create new ideas and solve new problems, that will be the source of true power, a power that will serve all mankind.
Hungry Tim and other news
I know I promised to eschew advertising on my blog but, come on, people, it’s in my blood! I can’t help it. So here’re a few announcements, updates and, yes, ads about things I’m doing that you might like. to know about.
• First, a mini film about an innovation at Sketchbook Skool.
The gist: Sketchbook Skool kourses are now available on-demand rather than by semester. Sign up and plunge in any day of the year. We’re like Orange is the New Black — but with a full palette of colors.
• Next, an exciting announcement: we have just completed the final nips and tucks to the design of Shut Your Monkey: How to control your inner critic and get more done and it heads to the printer next Tuesday! You can preorder your copy today, however.
• My other new book, the Art Before Breakfast Workbook has just come back from my editor and I am ready to continue work on the design phase of the book. It looks quite gorgeous already, I must say.
• On Saturday night, I will strap myself into a Lufthansa flight to Switzerland to work with the students, teachers and parents of the International School of Basel. I have been working on lots of little films and projects to inspire them and can’t wait to see the art we make together during my artist-in-residency.
I am also excited to see Basel which I hear is brimming with dozens of amazing museums. I also plan to eat chocolate. I’ll post news of my trip here, maybe even before I get back.
• Next, I will RyanAir to Rome to spend a few days with Jack who has just begun his semester abroad (he’s in Abruzzo today). He has promised he will take me to his favorite places to draw. We also plan to eat pasta.
Ciao!
Rethinking my story.
Earlier this year, I got a lovely invitation to come out to Phoenix to talk about what I do. Jenny was born and raised there so we travel to Arizona at all times of the year to see her family and I have come to quite like the city and the desert. Besides, it was mid-winter and the idea of the desert in August had a powerful appeal.
The climate was not the only allure. Some of my pals like Jane LaFazio and Seth Apter will be there too. But most of all, it was as an opportunity to turn to a fresh page. I decided to use the invitation as an incentive to think of a whole new approach to talking to groups of people about creativity. I often present my ideas on creative blocks and the struggles we have with drawing as adults but, over the past couple of years, I have wanted to think about illustrated journaling from a different vantage point.
As part of this fresh start, I went back through every page of my illustrated journals in chronological order. From my first tentative collages and chicken scratching, through the books I bound myself, through my trips around the world, my experimentation with media, my growing confidence, Patti’s death, Jack’s departure for college, the move Jenny and I took to LA and so much more. I paged through almost twenty years of life and it was exhilarating and sobering, emotional and revelatory.
Now I have managed to turn all those pages into a brand-new story that I am really excited to present.
My presentation is open to all and the folks in Phoenix have set up a lovely evening with wine and desert and such — but reservations are filling up fast. If you’d like to come, meet some other great creative people and see what I have concocted, I’d love to see you there.
The evening begins at 7:00pm on Saturday, August 8 MT. To find out more and register, click here. There’s also a Facebook event.
I hope to see you there!
All I wanna do…
Child’s Play
Sometimes I want a spoonful or two of sugar in my tea. I want to reread The Wind in the Willows. I want to watch Tom & Jerry. I want to eat Lucky Charms, or a meat pie with ketchup, peanut butter and jelly on white bread. I want to listen to Danny Kaye singing Hans Christian Andersen.
I want to spoil the kid in me.
My childhood was far from idyllic but things from my childhood can make me feel comfortable and free. And that freedom makes me feel creative in a visceral, fundamental way. The smell of paste, the feeling of scribbling with crayons, splattering poster paint with a big mushy brush, they loosen something in my head, the something that binds me to judgment and fear. School art supplies release me from rules and expectations and let me free to play.
I’ve been using materials like these more and more, since I started to explore in my California garage and then spent time with schoolkids in Beijing. I bought tempera and huge rolls of brown paper and Play-Do and sheets of cardboard and started to let loose.
It took work to let go, to undo the handcuffs and shake off the rust, but poster paints and fat cheap brushes helped a lot. There was nothing at stake. I could chuck paint around then toss the results in the trash. I didn’t care. And the kids in China didn’t either. We were just playing.
A couple of months ago, I started working on some projects using these childhood materials I’d rediscovered. I made some videos for an imaginary kid, someone six or eight or ten, to show him or her some cool things we could make together. I turned my thumbs into rubber-stamps, I melted crayons, I made masks out of grocery bags, I made stop-motion animations — and I had a lot of fun.
These videos were the foundation of a new set of lessons that I plan to take with me to Switzerland and Dubai these fall, to work with kids and show them some new ways to play. But they are also a new kourse we created for Sketchbook Skool because playing is something that’s not just for kids, it’s for the kids in all of us. I’ve seen time and again that when grow-ups are given permission to mess around with cheap art supplies, they reconnect with their original creative impulse, that impulse that fuels even the most sophisticated art and professional creative projects. Without that wild child, art becomes business, stiff and academic and overthought, and driven by fear and judgment. But unleashed it can produce anything.
I also liked the idea of creative projects that kids and grownups could take together and inspire each other. And that kids, out of school for the summer, could do on their own to keep their creative flames a flickering.
The monkey fought me a lot as I put these lessons together. What if adults resented being treated like children, felt patronized? What if I looked foolish? Unprofessional? Lost my ‘authority’?
Aw, screw it. I had fun and I think anyone watching the lessons will find some fun in them too — or might want to ask themselves why not. They gave me the same sort of comfort I find in childish things and my drawings and writing have been a lot looser since I started, more open to experimentation, less filled with consequence. I can’t wait to work with schoolkids again this fall. And to see what you make of our new kourses, Playing and More Playing at Sketchbook Skool. Here’s a little preview of the kourse if you’re interested:
Join me in klass this Friday!
Would you like a fresh beginning to your creativity? You may never have drawn before or been at it for years — but I’d like to help give you fresh perspective and inspiration.
Please join me and five of my teaching friends in “Beginning” at Sketchbookskool.com. You can enroll right now, right here.
Brand new!
We are SUPER excited to announce our newest course, Stretching, is open for enrollment right now. Classes begin in a week!
We are also open for enrollment for Beginning, Seeing, and Storytelling. These kourses will begin every few weeks over the month ahead.
To get a preview of all the courses and to enroll, just visit sketchbookskool.com.
We are also very excited that all of our klasses* will now take place in our very own Sketchbook SKOOL HOUSE. Our programming team have built a lovely new environment for our classes which is easy to use and highly responsive. Our servers are now all over the world so you can get your videos and comments faster than ever.
The Skool House is also home to our new Student Union. This is a gathering place for everyone in the SBS community. Places to talk, share work, meet with others who live nearby or who have similar interests. There are even special groups for teachers designers, architects and more. The Student Union is open right now, so even if your courses doesn’t begin right away, you can still join the party.
All of our courses (including membership in the Student Union) are still priced at just $99*.
We hope to see you in klass!
*If you took previous semesters of Sketchbook Skool on Ruzuku, you will continue to have access to them in the future on Ruzuku.
**Due to recent changes in EU tax laws covering online courses, we are now required to add additional VAT for all our European students. Sorry!
Spring in my step.
I just wanted to tell you that, though I have not been very active here of late, it’s mainly because Koosje and Morgan and I have been beavering away on several important projects we will soon reveal. I think they will please you. I sure hope so.
I also want to thank you so much for supporting the release of Art Before Breakfast. You have managed to thrill my publisher into wanting me to immediately do other exciting new things — which I will tell you more about as they gel.
Meanwhile, we are waiting for our container ship-full of freshly printed copies to be unloaded onto the Los Angeles docks (which just concluded a long and bad-for-books-and-other-goods strike) and soon the shortage of Arts B4 Breakfast will end (I myself have but a single dog-eared copy)
Also, you (but not my monkey) will be heartened to know that my manuscript for “Shut Your Monkey: How to control your inner critic and get more done” is in my (other) publisher’s hands and will be hitting the shelves this autumn. Thanks you everyone who sent me their monkey tales. They added delicious fodder to my book.
In sum, Spring is finally springing here in New York and many lovely new things are blooming. Details to follow.
My favorite ad campaign.
I spent several decades marketing other people’s products. Banks, cars, soft drinks, hamburgers, shoes, jet engines. I got briefed by clients, came up with ideas to communicate their messages, then helped spend billions of their dollars to share these ideas on TV, magazines, the Internet, etc. I made commercials for the Super Bowl. I helped win “Ad Agency of the Year” twice. It was a great experience and I learned a lot, working with so many smart and talented people.
For the last year, I have been working on marketing a new product. But this time, it’s a product I helped invent and it has the ability to change lives, all around the world.
The product is a special kind of art school unlike anything else that existed. A place where different artists can share their experiences, their techniques, and their sketchbooks with students worldwide — using state-of-the-art technology, beautiful videos, and the vast reach of the internet.
We call it “Sketchbook Skool.” A name that’s not too serious and a little bit, well, unusual.
We don’t have millions of marketing dollars. And it turns out we don’t need them. Instead we have a really good product and a really good network. Loads of friends who believe, as we do, in the core idea behind the product: art for all. To encourage creative freedom. To help people everywhere to conquer old fears. To be supportive. To make the world a more beautiful place because we are all drawing and painting and sharing together.
“Art for all.” It’s not just a slick advertising slogan. It’s a dream, shared by thousands. And they help us share the word about this dream with the people they care about. That’s how we’ve ‘marketed.’
After our first year, Sketchbook Skool has exceeded our wildest imaginings. We have been joined by nearly two dozen teaching artists and thousands of students from every corner of the world. We have filmed klasses on four continents, from Stockholm to Sydney, Barcelona to Brooklyn. And together, we have started a movement that does much more than share drawings — we share our lives.
If you are reading this, you are already part of the Sketchbook Skool family. Whether you are in one of our klasses, on our Facebook group, reading this blog or just taking the leap by starting to believe you can be more creative, you are with us.
Our next big dream is to truly spread “art for all” and grow the Skool beyond just this community of our immediate friends. Starting today, we are going to expand our marketing efforts in lots of interesting ways. We’re going to invite the whole world to join us through conversations, online, radio, tv, magazines, blogs, you name it.
And we invite you to spread the word and to lend your voice to our story. To share the simple joy of putting a pen to paper and the way it can change how you see everything around you. It’s all beautiful and you helped make it so.
Thanks again for making me look like a marketing genius.
Danny Gregory 