What goes on when three grizzled illustrated superjournalistas go on an innocent drawing trip? A Clash of the Titans that transforms the art world (kinda). Enjoy the dramatic first installment of “The Drawminator”. Click on thumbnails for successive page.
It’s hot as a bastard and we are all recovering from four performances of Annie Get Your Gun in three days. I have spent the past two mornings in the air-conditioned apartment working on an assignment for The Morning News which is about to launch its year long redesign. Rosecrans, my editor, asked me to draw three illustrations to work as launch-pads for the serialized books that appear on the site every couple of weeks.
I had already done a couple of different icons for Peanut:
This one is meant to look like a sonogram of a peanut. It’s okay though a little gimmicky.
Then I came up with this one based on a photo of an embryo, sort of 2001-ish but not really uniquely mine.
I decided to start from scratch with more conventional ink and watercolor drawings, each about 4-5 inches square. I painted this fairly scary drawing; still it’s somehow cute in a plucked chick kind of way and I like it.
For The letters of Gary Benchley, Rock Star, I bypassed my initial thought of painting some instruments ( I have recently done three different illustration jobs requiring sketches of guitars) and decided to try to capture some rock’n’roll energy. I did this drawing fairly quickly and I like it too.
I struggled most with The Education of Elisabeth Eckleman. It seemed that every story had Elisabeth in tears at some point so I decided to tackle it this way. I was a little worried that I had been overly influenced by fantasies of Molly Ringwold and was listening to too much of the new 9 Inch Nails album and Elisabeth isn’t quite in that nexus.
I fired off an email to Sarah Hepola, Elisabeth’s creator, who wrote: “She’s a cute 18 year old girl — brown shoulder-length hair that’s a bit curly/frizzy (she likes to straighten it out), a little girlish pudge in her cheeks. Blue eyes. She’s from a small town, so she doesn’t have that natural college girl look yet — she wears a lot of makeup, probably earrings. she probably wears a lot of tank tops and shorts.”
I’m no expert on the nuances of 18-year-old girls anymore and I was a little tense as I went back to the drawing board.
This was my second and final effort. It has personality and particularity more than the first but tells less of a story and has a little too much Walter Keane in it
I’ll let Rosecrans pick.
hey 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
I have written a new book which I’d like to share with you … for free.
The catch is that it’ll be served up in installments by the Morning News. You can read it all here.
This book is not quite my usual topic. It’s about creativity but this time about the creation of a human being. It’s a raw tale of my introduction to fatherhood.
Usually I am fairly confident in sharing my stories; this one is so personal it makes me a little nervous. A few people have read and liked it. Some say it’s funny, moving, shockingly frank.
Tell me what you say.
My pal, Jim, is directing our commercials out here in LA. After reading Everyday Matters, he’s become increasingly intrigued with learning to draw. He told me he knew he couldn’t draw, didn’t think he ever could, but still always wanted to know how. I told him about Betty Edwards’ book and the next day, he showed up with his own copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
Each day he reads the book between takes and each night he works on drawing exercises. Just three days in, he drew the drawing above, a copy of Picasso’s Stravinsky.
This is one of the most powerful exercises in Edward’s book. You are told to copy this image which is printed upside down in the book. You draw each line individually, then move on to the next, building up the picture stroke by stroke. Everyone who tries it describes the same reaction. They are beating themselves up as they do it, ‘Oh, you drew that line wrong, this is a mess, you’ll never do this, etc.’ and yet persevere. When they are finished and turn the page around, they are blown away. They cannot believe their eyes. The drawing looks remarkably like Picasso’s original.
For almost everyone, this simple fifteen minute exercise transforms their view of themselves. It flips a switch in your head that says I can draw! and gives you permission to keep going, to polish your skills, to trust that you’ll keep improving, and get on the road to drawing as you only dreamed you could.
If you’d like to try this exercise, use Jim’s drawing (You can download a bigger scan of it here.). Print it out, turn it upside down, then slowly and carefully copy each line with a pen onto a sheet of paper. Then, brace yourself and turn it around.
What do you think? Let me know.
In The Art Spirit, my pal Bob Henri talks about the importance of that original intention which sparks one to make a drawing or a painting. What caught my interest? And, all critically, how do I hold on to that intention so my art is infused with that interest? It’s not enough to decide to draw a tree, one must feel something about that tree and have that feeling right in front of one’s eyes and one observes. His advice is to work fast and furiously, blocking in the big masses while the flame is still burning.
My usual technique is to move slowly, with a blank mind. I enter a meditative state and let my eyes cruise around the contours, laying down every line with equal weight until I have explored the whole object. I rarely try to feel anything as I do this but I must be. I choose certain subjects over others because I like them or am curious about them. So I decided to be more aware and to explore some other ways of looking at a tree a few blocks from my hotel.
I spent a good long time working in ink first. I was very into the carbuncles and folds of the tree’s skin. As I drew, I became increasingly aware of the tree’s colors: it was quite yellow but cloaked in purple, two complimentary colors. I kept thinking about how these colors inter-played and then I painted over my line with watercolors. I was using my new paper, this Yupo pad I picked up on the weekend. The ink went down very smoothly on it but had a tendency to smear. As I painted I was pretty aware of how unnaturally the paint went down, pooling on the paper instead of soaking in. The colors remained pretty vivid, undimmed by the fibers, but it all felt temporary somehow. I couldn’t really let go, worrying that the whole thing would wipe of the page when I was done. I also felt like I had a long lens on — I was only looking at each square inch of the tree but had little sense of the whole as I drew.
While the pad lay drying in the afternoon sun, I decided to have another go and grabbed my trusty Japanese journal with its 100+lb paper ( intended for drawing but it’ll take watercolor pretty well) and my Faber-Castell PITT bold brown brush marker. In three minutes, I knocked out a sketch, thinking all the while about the flow and energy of the tree. I did a caricature of the yellow and violet and capped my pen.
Next I took a black PITT pen and thought about the tree’s architecture, how it anchored into the ground and how the limbs were bolted onto the spine of the creature. I bore down harder on my pen, drawing firmer lines and painting in more defined shapes of color.
Finally I took my cheap Sheaffer italic pen, loaded with dark brown non-waterproof ink and this time I thought about the movement of the trees, how the carbunckly growth flowed like water or vomit from the trees crotch, how the limbs pulled in different directions and how that tension held the tree together and propelled it into the sky. Now the tree seemed almost serpentine to me, writhing out of the soil, phallic, twisting, alive. The watercolors dulled the lines but it felt okay, as if the fusing the whole thing together.
I look at these four drawings and I’m not sure yet what conclusion to draw about them. I like the earthy energy of my last drawing (as if it was made by a goat or a mole) but there’s still something lovely and light about the first bird-like one. Each has something to say in its way, like the varied members of a string quartet, the ingredients of a cassoulet.
One conclusion is clear: Drawing never fails to amaze me; how it can rip open the doors into your head, how it can transform the world and your place in it. Nobody but me can see this process, this unfolding, as it happens to me. All that’s left for others to see are the pages in my journal, the ass wipings on paper — but never the feast.
“Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.” — Robert Henri
I have always been a fan of Walt Disney. Not just of his animated films but of a certain image I have of the man himself. It’s not the dictatorial egomaniac that some biographers have depicted but the gentle, welcoming character who appeared at the beginning of each episode of the Wonderful World of Disney — small moustache, grey gabardine suit, warm smile, standing in his book-lined office.
When I flew home from LA for the weekend, I decided to re-screen one of my favorite videotapes for an infusion of inspiration. It’s an episode of the Disney show that I Tivo-ed a couple of years ago in which Walt answers letters from art students seeking direction in life. His advice to them is to read a book called “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri. Henri was a painter and art teacher in the early part of the twentieth century, a terrifically inspiring guy who taught the generation of American realists that emerged in the 20s; people like Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis and John Sloan and Rockwell Kent, many of whom I like a lot. He encouraged his students to paint what they saw around them, urban scenes of everyday life — gritty, bold, and true. Henri’s students collected their noted from his lectures and assembled them into The Art Spirit and it has been a valuable guide for artists ever since, full of observations and ideas that are accessible and encouraging.
One of Walt’s correspondents asks him how he can develop style and Disney responds via Henri, with something like, “Don’t worry about your originality. You couldn’t get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.” To demonstrate how individual vision is really at the heart of style, he takes four animators form his studio, men who by day are paid to subvert their individuality in the service of creating a unified look for Disney movies and films them, of a Sunday, painting a tree. Each has his own way of painting, but more importantly his own way of seeing. One describes the tree in terms of architecture, like a solidly engineered structure on the landscape. He paints the tree as if it were made of steel pylons. Another artist is fascinated by the movement of the tree’s bark and studies the surface textures in detail. A third sees the tree’s relationship to the sky behind it and studies the negative space of the branches. A fourth observes the entire tree as unified shape and works on its relationship to the rectangle of his canvas.
Then we see how each artists interprets his vision in different ways through his materials. One paints of a big slab of plywood thrown down on a rock, painting with long brushes in a muscular way. Another draws in charcoal and then fills in with casein. When the paintings are done, they are juxtaposed and we can really see the varieties of worldviews in the four men. Even though they are talented artists, the real lesson comes from their willingness to put their own characters in their work.
It’s all shot in muddy black and white, typical old TV images, and the painters are not fine artists showing in NY galleries, just modestly paid artisans working for the Man. But the little film demystifies the process of art making in a wonderful way. It’s also a reminder of how the world has changed. Hard to imagine these days prime time Sunday night TV being devoted to something as ethereal as this. And the Disney Company, marred by well-publicized corporate battles and an surfeit of marketing and promotion, seems pretty far removed from the gentle art lesson on this show.
If you can, Tivo the Wonderful World of Disney, and see if you stumble on this gem. Or pickup a copy of The Art Spirit and be directly inspired by a great teacher. Try to keep in mind the wisdom of this thought from Robert Henri: “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
— Written in a rental car in a rainy parking lot by the Rose Bowl, a few miles from the Walt Disney studios.
I have been holding on to my jet lag quite well while here in LA; getting up early and going to sleep most nights before ten. Still my internal clock has slowly drifted west a little more each day; I’m probably somewhere over Oklahoma today, rising at 6:30 and feeling rested (last week it was 4:30). It’s been great to get up at dawn and have a couple of hours to myself. I usually walk along the beach for forty five minutes; to the Santa Monica Pier and back before breakfast, passing the homeless people still in their sleeping bags under the palm trees.
After breakfast, I work on my book. I am able to dart on to my computer several times a day to make adjustments to the work in progress, rewriting, redesigning, lettering and drawing elements to insert into the layout. Last night, while waiting for a final meeting on casting, I finished my final read through and am pretty much satisfied. The book is 208 pages long; each with a unique design, rimming with drawing and colors and thoughts and weird lettering. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done and I feel deeply satisfied by it. I could go on tweaking forever and yet it also feels quite complete, organically whole. I will look at it on the plane again tonight and then send it off to my editor.
I’ve spent most of my days over the past week and a half working on the campaign we are set to start shooting next week. We’ve figured out every shot and transition, pulling the spots apart and reassembling them, challenging them to their basic premises and seeing how we can plus them. We have dozens of roles to cast across the campaign and each day look at DVDs full of actors in LA and New York. Last night was our last round of callbacks and we are in pretty good shape. This afternoon we will take our clients through all of the decisions we make and on Tuesday the cameras will start to roll. We have tested so-called ‘animatics’ (basically cartoon versions of the spots that let us see how people respond to the basic plots of the spots) with consumers and they have all done exceptionally well, hitting historic highs for communication, persuasion and likeability, so we are hoping that our clients will be filly on board with all of the subsequent decisions we’ve been making. But, of course, one never knows. Our director has just finished shooting a movie and every day must meet with the studio and discuss the edit; he says it is a horrible experience and one he won’t repeat any time soon.
This evening, I’ll be on the red-eye back to New York. I’ll get to spend a few days with my family (who I miss terribly) and to duck into my office and straighten out some things on the other parts of my account. We are in the midst of launching a huge print campaign too and have photographers to hire and many, many details to work out.
It has been a very stressful experience because so much is riding on our efforts both at the clients and at the agency. Hopefully things will all go smoothly and the tension will subside.
My book is keeping me sane, quite honestly. It is like a quiet lagoon I can dive in to when all around me is chaos. It’s not just the fact that it’s a real project that has been met with so much good energy so far. It’s also that it’s mine; a little world of my own making that reflects nothing but my own experience of reality. It’s also something I hope will be very positive for those who share it and will help them to embrace their own creativity and make lagoons of their own. Drawing has always brought me such peace and happiness and the further I wander into the Valley of Darkness, the more important a beacon it becomes.
Sure, my book is going to be published — but that’s not it; all of the books that precede it, the 38 volumes of drawings I have filled in the past few years, have all brought me this satisfaction, helping me see the world as it truly is, not a tangle of subjectivity and judgment and tensions and ego, but a place of peace and great beauty, even in the smallest things.
That said, I’ve finished my breakfast now. I’m going to go and do a little drawing in the sunshine before my day takes off.
I am writing this on a flight to Los Angeles where we are going to shoot the first five commercials for the campaign I began last summer. It was July 27th when I stood at a urinal on 22nd street and was suddenly struck with the idea which, through various barrel jumps, backflips and slaloms, has brought me to this seat on American Airlines.
Of course, it’s absurd that it should have taken 200 days for three or four minutes of advertising to go from my urinal to your television. Well, actually the commercials haven’t even been filmed yet. It’ll be closer to 300 days before they actually hit the airwaves. This is certainly a long time for even advertising to be birthed, but not unheard of.
When you sell your creative work, the results are invariably a collaboration between your imagination and the processes of the person or corporation who is funding them. In the case of a new brand advertising campaign, your collaborators include various levels of decision makers in your agency, some ‘creative’, some administrative and some strategic, all of who provide input based on their own experience, ego, time and attention span.
Next, the work runs through the filter of the client company’s marketing executives. Some have long and illustrious careers producing great advertising and can often make your ideas better and sharper. Others have ended up in marketing by virtue of their success or failure in another part of the company. I have worked with clients who were former antifreeze salesman, flight attendants, bank tellers, and tax attorneys. When I created ads for the Postal Service, my client was a former mail carrier. However, their past is not necessarily an indication of their utility as creative collaborators.
As I have done a lot of corporate and brand advertising, I invariably end up presenting to CEOs and CFOs. Most of them have little interest in advertising and consider it a waste of time and money. They tend to be results oriented, I’m from Missouri, kind of left brainers, Some, by virtue of having a lot of money and a lot of power, have odd and interesting ideas about how advertising should work. They often cite their wives’ or children’s opinions. Because they are unused to talking about executional creative matters, their words are often ambiguous and hard to take at face value and much time is spent by others, parsing their phrases and trying to determine the hidden meaning behind all sorts of cabalistic executive signs. I have worked with agencies who note down the colors of executives’ ties and shirts in an effort to come up with logo and advertising palettes that will pass muster.
These creative approvals are funny things. They are so often subjective and frankly irrelevant to the effectiveness of advertising. The best clients are the ones who are extremely clear and smart about what they know best. They tell you what they want to accomplish with their businesses and how advertising can help. They couch their reactions to the work you bring them in terms of their original intent. Often they are surprisingly lucid and insightful, demonstrating in spades how they got to where they are. They respect the people they hire and assume that they will do their work well. They keep their egos in check and use their authority to clear impasses further down the food chain. They can break loggerheads with a phrase or two. As one CEO said to me recently, ‘People assume that because everyone has a voice that this is a democracy. It’s not. I want this done so let’s move on.” Someone who works for someone who works for someone who works for him and who had been our daily contact had said something equally memorable and candid in an earlier meeting:” My boss told me that my job is to tell you what you have done wrong. I can’t see anything wrong in what you’ve done but I still have to figure out how to do my job.”
There’s little question that, unfortunately, much of what we are paid for is to deal with the process. To be able to listen to someone’s incoherent rant and turn it into some thing actionable. To respond to the various thumbs stuck in the wet clay of one’s idea and yet emerge with something that isn’t embarrassing and wasteful.
There are different styles that creative people have to deal with this obstacle course. Some defend their work against every single remark and soon devolve into shrill defensiveness. Others sit quietly, waiting for the moment to insert a devastating retort. Some try to come up with constructive responses as the clients lays out his objections. Some give long rebuttals that communicate little but ego and leave the client wondering if they heard a word she said. Some sit gulping in anxiety, waiting for others to defend their efforts. Some smirk smugly, all but saying ‘ You are such an idiot”.
The most constructive approach is, first, just to listen. Particularly when there are lots of clients of various levels in a room, they tend to circle around each other, ideas canceling each other out, objections overruled, problems solving themselves. Then, if the audience has the patience, summarize what they have said and see if they agree with your summary. Then offer a solution or two for the present and withdraw and try to form a coherent plan of response. When you do respond, show them what they asked for, accompanied with a range of other solutions.
I think most clients like the creative process. They want to be wowed. When they come up with their own ideas and insist upon them, they also have a nagging feeling that they’re doing the wrong thing, buying a dog and barking themselves. In some ways, advertising seems easier than other creative forms. When I do illustration work, no one has ever redrawn my pictures like some clients feel they can rewrite my copy. When I work with composers, I have (almost) never seen a client tell them which specific notes to play. A bad and desperate client will push past agency and director and go up to an actor and tell him specifically how to say his lines but he’ll rarely get in front of the camera himself.
The key again is to listen and observe. That’s the way to get the clearest sense of what’s really going on. Then by re-presenting the client’s POV to him or her, you show that you get it, you want to help, you care. Don’t insist on logic — often the process spits up a lot of nonsensical mandates that come about through intricate games of Telephone that make no real sense. People, intimidated by their inarticulate bosses, can resort to just taking dictation and passing the buck on to you. But try to see through that and get to the truth underneath.
Then, try to take all of the comments as a new creative challenge. Be willing to sacrifice your children in order to end up with an even stronger result. I’ve often had good ideas become great ones as they were annealed on the forge of the approval process. Despairing of being able to fix your crippled creation, you toss it aside and fabricate a far more elegant solution.
Am I making it all sound horrible? Do I seem like an arrogant know-it-all who thinks all clients are boobs? Maybe so, but I don’t really feel that, not most of the time. It’s a thin line to tread between making something that fits the needs of the people who hired you to do it and something that you are proud of, that is fresh and exciting to you. I often write commercials based on events or perceptions that have occurred to me and it is heart breaking to see them mangled beyond recognition. It feels very personal. But in the end, it really isn’t. That’s what Art is for, to express the personal. The creative work we are paid to do, while growing from our integrity and values and personal aesthetic, is always a collaboration and must be respected as such. When created honestly and openly and generously, it is is the best sort of collaboration, Rogers and Hammerstein, Dolce & Gabbana. At other times it’s more Rogers & Frankenstein, Dolce & Gambino. So you pick your fights. You say to you yourself, if they want to drive this Lamborghini over the clff, it’s their dollar. I won’t allow myself to be twisted in the wreckage. Recognizing that jobs and millions of dollars are at stake, that these matters are impacting people’s better judgment, doesn’t make you a hack. Just a professional.
So the simple answer is: throw yourself 90% into what you do for money. Reserve that small part for self-protection. Be willing to stand back, to be objective and dispassionate. And channel the feelings you have, the reaction to disappointment and limitations, and put it into the work that really matters: your Art. Now be uncompromising. Insist on the highest quality from yourself. Be clear, be strong, be energetic and bold. Experiment, reach, push. Stay up later than you would on a client project. See yourself in this work, the real you. Keep working, keep fighting, be heedless of others. And keep telling yourself that you work to earn a living and that you must never forget to to do the living that you have earned.
From my visit to Martha’s trial last year. The Morning News editors were advised by their lawyers not to run it in my story. I’m sort of glad as it’s a fairly shitty drawing done in the height of nervous anxiety at breaking New York law.
My office is in a large building on Manhattan’s West Side. Our neighbor, one floor down, is the headquarters of Martha Stewart Living OmniMedia, so we expect to see the old ex-con wandering our halls and lurking around the showers any day now. Her stock has been soaring since she went into the clink, so I imagine we’ll hear well mannered caws of redemption from the many willowy blondes we see in the elevator each morning.
I like Martha (though I wish she’d lighten her ass up a tad) but I’m not going to talk much more about her today.
Instead I want to tell you about Nancy.
Nancy grew up in the South West, I think it was Albuquerque. She was always a creative person and, over Dad’s objections, she majored in Art at U of NM because she loved to draw. This was in the 70s when, frankly, drawing was not the thing. Instead her instructors were pushing performance art, conceptual art, earth works, that sort of thing. Before the first semester was over, Nancy, beaten, changed her major. She decided to become a physical education instructor., She figured art and PE both had something to do with anatomy, so she’d still be in a related field. When she graduated, she got a job as a substitute gym teacher. She would lie in bed each morning with the pillow over her head, hoping not to hear the phone ring and call her in. She hated being a gym teacher.
Nancy loved playing music. She was in band after band, playing the clubs and bars around town, making a little cash here and there. Not enough cash, however, so she got a job in a bank. She was the teller in the drive-through, sending deposits back to the branch over a pneumatic tube. She hated this job too and sucked at it.
One day, Nancy was on her lunch break at the TGIFridays across the road. It was decorated in that nostalgic style that blossomed in the ’60’s, full of mustache cups and barber poles and merry-go-round horse amidst the spiderplants. Hanging over each table was an ersatz Tiffanty lamp. Nancy deiced there and then that what she wanted to do was to work professionally in stained-glass. She found out that one of the country’s largest commercial workshops for stained glass was right there in Albuquerque and she soon had a job there.
Nancy’s friends were envious. She’d quit her straight job and was making money entirely through creative endeavors — glass in the day, music at night.
Nonetheless, Nancy still wasn’t happy. She realized that despite her field, she wasn’t really an artist. The glasswork she did was not original; she was just working from pattern books, filling orders from templates. And her band, good as it was, was really just a cover band. If they ever played original compositions, the audiences squirmed and the bar owner would complain. Albuquerque ain’t no CBGB and there was little appetite for true originality
So Nancy shed her job, her hometown and her husband, and came to New York City. Soon she had a job with the premier stained glass workshop in the country. She worked on St. John the Divine, on corporate headquarters. She even redid the glass in the Statue of Liberty’s torch. For the next fifteen years or so, she was at the top of her game. She had a new band with her new husband and they played the cutting edge clubs of the City. She had two kids. She seemed fulfilled.
Then Nancy reached the next crisis. She was the #2 person in the #1 firm. If she became #1 she would sit in an office at a computer all day and cease plying her craft. She’d topped out. She also felt past the age when she really enjoyed carrying enormous panes of glass into the grimy tops of old buildings. The work was more physical than she wanted. Time for a new page.
The part of glasswork Nancy had always enjoyed the most restoring or creating the hand-lettered legends that adorn big windows, naming the saints, the dates, the greats of the Church or the Corporation. So she decided to try her hand at something brand new to her. During her last year as a stained glass artisan, she spent each night taking classes and practicing calligraphy. She went to workshops, she learned materials and she worked hard at her craft. When the year was up, she opened her first business. She sent out a small announcement to editors and art directors and she was off doing work for weddings, for publishers, for all sorts of exciting and glamorous clients.
Within three years, Nancy went from a novice to the main calligrapher for Martha Stewart. Whenever you see some ornate lovely penmanship in MS Living, chances are Nancy did it.
Is she fulfilled now? More so than ever. But she tells me she’d still like to push further, to create pieces that are she writes herself, works of pure art that are not commercial but express herself at the deepest. She’s working on that now. Nancy and Mark and her kids are about to move out of the City to concentrate completely on their art, to play more music and to breathe fresh country air.
Nancy is a constant reminder to me that you can get what you want, no matter how far fetched it might seem. First off, know what it is you actually want. Then be willing to work hard, to take risks and most importantly, to listen only to the little voice in your head that first spoke the dream.
I hope Martha got a chance to listen to her voice as she weeded the prison grounds. Sadly. I have less faith in her than I have in Nancy. Or in you.
Danny Gregory 