Anatomy of anatomy

dannygregory

anatomyI have been doing life drawing at a studio down on Spring Street. Generally the sessions are open and you can do what you like. Some people paint or draw. One guy draws entirely on his PowerBook (and fabulously, creating something that looked breathtakingly like a chalk & pastel drawing). Yesterday I went to a three hour anatomy lesson; we studied the innards of the bottom of the foot. Fascinating and baffling.
Drawing the human body is hard. Tackling a nude is the hardest of all. Foreshorten the body with its unfamiliar shapes and angles, all symbols distorted beyond recognition makes the degree of difficulty quite numbingly high.
It’s not just that a body has so many angles and curves. It’s how loaded it is with expectations and meaning. Humans know the human body intuitively and yet not consciously. We are able to spot our species from afar, to judge a fellow man from another among thousands. Have you ever scanned a huge crowd, at a football game or in a train station, and been able to find a familiar face though all you have to go on are tiny differences, the cant of a nose, the miniscule difference in eye size or the relationship between ear and cheekbones? Cut a person’s hair, give them a beard, makeup, a hat, or glasses and, often, we will still manage to pick them out from across a crowded stadium. It’s a life saving skill, finding your mother in a herd, and yet it’s a lobster trap of sorts. We can spot Mom and yet we probably can’t describe her accurately to a police officer with an Indentikit. We can’t recall or reproduce those features which we can so accurately judge.
When drawing the human body, unclothed — a sight we actually behold quite rarely in the flesh (and yet think about several times an hour) — we have to ditch all our baggage and try to see clearly without judgment, breaking it down into components, lines, shadows, angles and curves. And yet the inaccuracies we might get away with when drawing an apple or a car or a building are completely unacceptable when drawing a person. The tiniest miscalculation in the angle of a nose turns Mary into Sue or possibly Bob. On the other hand, if we slow down too much, become too accurate, too calculated, we will never capture Mary’s balance and weight, she will be a two dimensional cut-out instead of a body with mass and volume, with no sense of the bone, muscle, and fat that lie beneath the skin. And most challenging of all, we will fail to capture her humanity, her personality and character, her spark of life. She will be just a body, a slab of flesh, an animal, a cadaver, and not Mary.
Seeing humans is extraordinarily hard because it requires the usual cool, calm, objective sight that lets us draw still lifes and landscapes and yet a much healthier dollop of subjectivity. We can read Bridgman and learn all the tricks that make joints turn and proportions accurate, but we will end up with comic books heroes or mannequins. To be Degas or Rodin, we must work and work to internalize these principles so they become unconscious, second nature, so that we can suffuse them with feeling and response to the actual person before us, not a faceless hulk but a living breathing person whom we can lust for or pity, love or disdain. Investing that human feeling is at the core of all successful art, even when it’s not depicting human anatomy. To draw a peach or a beach or a leach, and make the viewer feel something real about it, we must transcend technique and approach the truth about how we feel about peaches and leaches, about the world, about ourselves, a truth that is simultaneously intensely personal and completely universal.
Practice makes perfect. By mastering technique, anatomy, light, color, materials, we push them into the background and let our selves take the helm — honest, open, caring, judgmental, flawed, true. Drawing humans is incredibly hard because to do it really well, we must let ourselves be a little naked too.

anatomy2

The Old Bamboo

dannygregory

guys-danny

My passion for my Rotring rapidoliner deepens. Unlike any other technical pen I’ve used, it is always on the ready, never clogs or sticks or leaks and I’ve never even had to shake it one time to force ink to the nib. The ink itself is deep black, fairly quickly drying and water proof. The drawings I do with this pen are detailed and full of crosshatching. Occasionally, I catch glimmers of the sort of line that r.crumb coaxes out of his Rapidographs and those are very exciting occasions to me.
Still the pen tends to make me draw and see in a particular way — I find myself looking for immensely detailed things to draw, elaborate building facades, the interiors of overflowing closets, or else to do lots of postage stamp pictures crammed on the same page. To shake things up, I switch hit with the crudest, most blunt drawing instrument of all, a bamboo pen.

bamboo

This pen is just a stick carved into a point on either end. I dip it in Higgins waterproof ink. The line is surprisingly smooth and responsive to my pressure, delivering lines of different thickness.It makes me draw far more gesturally and to switch my vision to a different focal length, taking off the microscope of the Rapidograph and seeing in sweeping outlines, forsaking the miniscule details I could never render with the bamboo.
I am drawing from one of my favorite sources, the 1955 yearbook of Spalding Institute of Peoria, Illinois, full of hundreds of well groomed Catholic faces. I have a shelf full of yearbooks, picked up a for a dollar or two at flea markets, and they give me a great range of faces to study, all similarly composed, sharp and clear, covering the 1930s through the 1970s.

Electron Fast

dannygregory

simpleflowersI have not posted or visited this site for a week. I have been on an “electron fast”, forsaking all activity on the computer and television (except for those things absolutely essential to my business). The rest has been liberating. I have enjoyed several additional hours in each day, time which I have spent reading, drawing my city, listening to music, writing, thinking, playing board games, strolling, and whatever else took my fancy.
Reviewing my emails, I see that only a couple of people wrote to me to ask why I had stopped my daily postings, to inquire after my situation, so I guess it was okay to be gone from the virtual world for longer than usual. Clearly, I had been taking the burden of regular, committed writings more seriously than anyone else. The discussion group seems to be firing on all cylinders and traffic to this site has ground down even further than it did when the group began. My suspicion that people needed other creative folks to talk with has been confirmed and my own role can easily be assumed by many others.
To add to my humility, I have also decided it’s time to start learning from other teachers besides experience, intuition, and books. A good and generous friend has begun to instruct me in color theory and I am staggered to see the depths of my ignorance when it comes to watercolors and how they truly work. It’s a lot more than just whipping together colors on my palette and slapping them on the paper as I have been for years. There’s an enormous amount to learn about chemistry, physics, manufacturing, aesthetic theory, and the wisdom of the ages.
I have also begun attending life drawing session at a nearby atelier, and am humbled once again by how much I need to learn about anatomy. The data passing through my eyeballs is insufficient to draw people accurately; I need to ‘see’ beneath the skin, to comprehend the body as a whole, to practice from scratch again.
Every time I feel I can relax on my laurels, feel competent and proficient, I see how much of a beginner I am. My grandfather is still alive and fifty years older than I, so hopefully I still have much time left in which to study.
Hubris is a terrible vice for a creative person. The arrogance of accomplishment is as bad as the fear of beginning; they both prevent one from taking risks and jumping ahead.
Over the months that I have been keeping this log, I have assumed a role to which I have no real right. I am not an artist and yet I have been judgmental and critical about so many artistic matters and have pretended to provide advice to people who were probably far further down the road than I. I have placed myself along practicing, professional artists, have bemoaned the plight of those who are starving, maligned and ignored. And yet, who am I, but an ad guy with pretensions, a well-fed, Sunday painter, a guy who’s gotten more breaks than he no doubt deserves.
I have written cheerleading, rallying cries, encouraging others to draw around the clock, and yet when I look at my own output for the last month, too much of it was created for those who will, or may, pay me for what I produce, rather than for the sheer love of it.
And as for my electronic asceticism, maybe it was just an attempt to shirk my responsibilities, or worse, to see if an echo would rebound through the silence.
I believe in Art. It is my religion. I study it, I practice it, I seek comfort and guidance in it. And yet I am flawed and hypocritical and human. Art deserves better.
Obviously, I’ve spent some time soul searching. And I’ve spent time feeding my soul too. It has been a sweet feast and only the appetizers have been served; there’s still a lot I intend to do to discipline myself more, to elevate myself more, to deepen myself more. Ultimately, I would like to come a little closer to that thing I have merely pretended to be. An artist.

Pigeonholes

dannygregory

pigeonholesMan, the name-giving animal, is in rare form these days. We’re just stalking the planet, hell-bent on slapping labels on others, stuffing them into compartments, and spewing vast generalities about things we don’t understand well enough.
Religion is dividing the world and our country like it hasn’t since the Dark Ages. The promise of immigration on which America is founded has become an evil tangle of anxiety and finger pointing as broad swaths of our neighbors are labeled and fingerprinted, then shown the door or locked up without due process. The media pundits have been wrong time and again throughout this presidential election, as they have tried to adhere dusty nameplates and bankrupt maxims on phase after phase of the campaign. Instead of observing wisely, they insist on prognosticating and tripping over their mike cables.
For a while it seemed like the forces of globalization would push down the walls that subdivide the planet, providing a global culture of inclusion, one huge Benetton ad. Instead, we’ve been given too many McDonalds outlets, too many Nike logos. Instead of religions and nation states, the folks in Davos wanted to give us all SKUs, compartmentalizing everything to fit neatly into Walmart’s inventory.
The Internet was another beacon of hope, connecting us all, one to one, allowing us to found and find our own communities of interest. We’d have labels but at least we got to put them on ourselves by signing up for this chat group or the other. But the anonymity and lack of accountability that rules the ether has made it hard for people to translate their keystrokes into action. Howard Dean showed us that. We can connect and agree, slapping each other on the back and exchanging wild emoticons, but the results are amorphous and hard to turn into anything concrete and enduring.
Among creative people we find similar divides and so many of them are self imposed. Aesthetics are ruled by professionalism. Be an actor but you can’t then be a writer too. You can act on TV but not in movies. You can write comedy but can’t paint murals. You can be a rocker but don’t expect to be taken seriously as a composer.
Sure, some people climb over a wall here or there, the Sean Jean/P Diddys, the Will Smith/ Fresh Princes, the Carrie Fishers, the J-Los.
But we much prefer to know which section of the bookstore to find our favorite authors and the more they repeat themselves – the John Grishams, the Tom Clancys, the James Pattersons – the more we will reward them. The same goes for bands and movie stars and fashion designers and chefs. ” Be consistent. Let people know what to expect. Be a brand”
And how we draw those barriers through our own lives too, imposing restrictions often through sheer inertia. “I don’t eat Indian food. I don’t read mysteries. I hate French wine. I’m not into documentaries. I don’t look good in red. I hate history. I never go to the opera. Blah, blah, blah.”
And then, deeper still, we carve labels on our very Selves: “I’m not talented. I’m an amateur. I can’t draw. I’ve got two left feet. I’ll never make it. I don’t have a degree. My whole family is tone deaf. I never read. I’m a woman. I’m too old. I have to make a living. I never finish things. Blah, blah, blech.”
Spare me.
Can’t we all be a litter more subtle, a little more aware, a little more creative, and start seeing the world in all its shades of grey, and all the hues of the spectrum?
We don’t live in a box. We live on a ball, always revolving, always changing, moving ahead, never in the same place for more than a moment. That’s the nature of the universe. That’s the true nature of man. And that, my label hungry friends, is what Art is all about.

Early inspiration

dannygregory

sinkI woke up at 5:15 this morning for no good reason and yet felt quite rested. Poking around for something quiet to start my day off on the right footing, I sat down with the last few postings on Wild Yorkshire.
Richard’s view from the Cafe Casbah with all those layered earth tones made me look around for my watercolors (they were by the couch, under Jack’s new Calvin and Hobbes book). His drawing of a Swede, a sort of rutabaga thing, so loose and yet so accurate, and the way he gives depth with those extra dark lines around the edges of the shape, sent me padding back in the bedroom, where I had to turn on a light and wake Patti up as I searched for my new Rotring Rapidoliner in the drawer in my bedside table where I’d emptied my pockets. But it was his drawing of lower Petergate, so intricate and evocative, that really got me going. I love his observation: “drawing a subject like this is a bit like doing a jigsaw.” I know that feeling so well, filling in each section of the page, tonguing and grooving until the picture is complete. That’s how I wanted to open my day.
It was still dark. The view out the window was just starting to pick up the first fingers of dawn reaching down deserted East 3rd Street. I filled the kettle, put it on the hob. As I did, I saw my subject. None of the picturesque charm of York perhaps, but here was a lot to explore in the reflections on chrome, the nubbly brittleness of the sponges, the translucent soap bottle.

"But I don't have time to draw"

dannygregory

gallery
Draw lunch as you eat it : 1 drawing
Draw the news as you watch it: 4 drawings
Skip 1 sitcom: 3 drawings
Skip 1 basketball game: 11 drawings
Overtime: 2 drawings
Draw in the locker room at the gym: 2 drawings
Draw the coffeemaker while you wait for the coffee to perk: 1 drawing
Draw in line at the supermarket: 1 drawing
Stay up an extra 10 minutes: 1 drawing
Get up 10 minutes early: 1 drawing
Draw during commercials: 6 drawings per hour
Draw every time you smoke a cigarette: 1 drawing
Draw every time you smoke crack: 4 drawings
Draw till the waiter brings dessert: 1 drawing
Draw in the tub: 1-2 (waterproof) drawings
Draw on the phone: 2 drawings
Draw during a pedicure: 2 drawings
Draw in the doctor’s/ dentist’s/ therapist’s waiting room: 1 drawing
Draw at the red light: 1 drawing
Get to work early, stay in the car: 1 drawing
Take the bus: 2 drawings
Draw while waiting for spouse to get ready: 2 drawings
Draw what you’re cooking while it cooks: 1 drawing
Draw on the john: 1 drawing
Draw instead of reading this blog: ? drawings

“It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.” — Camille Pissarro.

The Open Book

dannygregory

openbook

I am a member of a wonderful community called “Artist Journals 2” which is currently conducting a discussion on whether or not one should share the contents of one’s illustrated journals with others.
I had to chime in:
I’m a journal keeper who feels okay about sharing (most of) his journals with other people. In reading other posts I get the sense that there are two key reasons why people are reluctant to share what they make in private: a) violating their sense of privacy and b) embarrassment at their more humble efforts.
My own journals have never struck me as terribly private. True, I talk about the daily aspects of my life but frankly they are no more intimate than the things I share in small talk with the people with which I work. For me, my journal is not a confessional but an historian in the best sense of the word, someone who not only records the facts but develops themes and meaning that weave them together, explicating my life and showing me what’s important, lending deeper value to the things too easy to take for granted. Generally, I find that these themes and lessons are universal and by sharing them I get a chance for a sounding board.
I am a reserved and private person by nature so perhaps my journals are a way to let it out. But I am always amazed at how much people will share with others. Even in the posts on this group among a group of relative strangers, we have little hesitation to talk about our health, our relationships, our fears and anxieties. This is a group in which we have all been granted (albeit loosely) a membership so perhaps that’s why we feel we have this freedom. Still, I feel the same sense of connection with the people with whom I share my journals. Granted, that membership now extends pretty broadly because my journals have been published, but I still assume a certain kinship among the people who bother to read it, a kinship of the soul.
As to embarrassment at my experimentations —I’d rather not share lame drawings, failed experiments and inattention but that doesn’t prevent me from sharing my unedited pages. I find that by having a sense that what I am making will be seen by someone, sometime, I am actually driven to take more care with what I am doing, to polish my words and drawings and make sure my observations ring true. As to really experimental things, pen wipes, color combinations, etc. well, I usually do those on a piece of scrap paper and chuck em out. They would be meaningless to me in a few hours anyway. The one really solid reason to not share your journal is because, frankly, most people don’t care. They’re not interested in what you had for breakfast, whether it’s raining, how the cat is, whether your hair’s turning gray. Most people are interested only in themselves. Even if you cram your book with intimate revelations, chances are most readers will flip through, say, “Very nice” and hand it back to you, None of us is that important! But I find sharing is an enriching experience. It connects me to others and makes me see how universal my concerns and experiences are. It drives me to make my pages less sloppy, my writing more terse. It is a gift of myself which often leads to wonderful conversations and gifts of all sorts on return.
Diaries with locks on them are things of girlhood. Open your life, I say. Be brave and share yourself.

Class 5H

dannygregory

5hDear Class 5H, Hazelwood Junior School, London, UK:
I am so very happy to hear that you enjoyed my book, Everyday Matters, and that you are now keeping journals of your own. I was blown away to see how good your drawings and writing have gotten already.
I can only imagine how happy I would be if I had been writing and drawing in a book ever since I was your age! Your drawings are excellent and you seem to be taking your time and really studying what you are drawing. That’s the key: take your time, relax, enjoy yourself and don’t worry too much about how it all comes out. Keep doing that on a regular basis and you will become great artists (not that you aren’t already).
Now to your questions:

What do you like about your drawings?
I like the act of drawing itself, the calm careful way I can sit and empty my mind and let my eyes drift over an object and my pen glide over the page until I am done and then I look and am surprised to see what I have made.
I like having drawings I’ve made to look back at, to remind me of another time and place. Sometimes I walk down the street and say, “hey, I know that building, I drew it three years ago, it was sunny afternoon, I was on my way home from the store, I hadn’t eaten lunch yet, and I was going to go see a movie with my family right afterwards.” It’s like running into an old friend.
I like drawing really complicated things like engines or detailed buildings or dogs with lots of hair.

How old were you when you started your sketchbook?
I guess I was about 39 or so. Now I’m 43. Really, really old. I have some of my hair, all of my teeth, and am still able to hold a pen without shaking much.

Do you enjoy living in New York?
I really do. I was born in London (Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill Gate) then I lived in Pakistan and Australia and Israel and I came here when I was thirteen). It’s a very interesting city, full of life and things to draw. There are great parks and museums and shops and we are near the ocean and something is always going on. We have thought of living in other places but we’ve never found a place as perfect for us.

Was it hard to become an artist?
I worked hard at drawing until it came easier. I try to find new ways to draw, study what other people do, play around with new kinds of art materials, draw new sorts of things.
It was hard to think of myself as an artist. I had to wait until other people started calling me one. When I was little I thought it would be really hard to be successful at it and so I decided not to go to art school. I wish I had started earlier in life but I really enjoy making things.

How do you draw objects and people that are moving?
It’s a little hard. The trick is to keep your eye on the thing that’s moving you’re your pen on the paper. It’s like climbing a mountain. Trust yourself and don’t look down a lot. Sometimes I just watch for a while and draw little snips and details. Then I use my imagination to fill in. If the conditions are really horrible and I must draw this thing for some reason, I take a bunch of pictures with my digital camera and use them as reference.

Do you practice drawing an object before you draw it in your sketchbook?
No. My journal is just a record of what I’m doing, so everything goes into it, warts and all. I rarely can be bothered to draw the same thing twice and I think I would lose spontaneity and fun if I did a practice sketch. If it’s ugly, well, too bad.

Does your son want to become an artist too?
Right now he wants to be a drummer. I am trying to raise him with the idea that it’s okay to be an artist but he is also a good writer and handsome. Maybe he’ll be a supermodel. Or a professional video game player.

What kimd of objects do you find easier to draw:
Eggs. Nails. Naked ladies.

Do you find it hard to add to your sketch book every day?
Sure. Sometimes I do many drawings in a day. Sometimes I don’t draw at all. At one point, I didn’t draw in my sketchbook for a couple of years (sad years). I find it’s like going to the gym. Once I start doing it again I wonder why I stopped but sometimes I’m just not in the mood. There are periods when I force myself to do it and my drawings tend to be sort of crappy at first but then they get better and then I forget that I was forcing myself to do it. I think the trick is to find reasons to keep it interesting. Draw weird collections of things. Go to interesting places. Show your stuff to other people who will tell you it’s great and encourage you to do more. Stay disciplined but don’t be mean to yourself about it. And try not to write in your journal how bad you think a drawing is. It makes the drawings feel bad.

Well, class, it’s been fun chatting with you. Keep drawing. Remember that in the time you play one level of Nintendo or watch one cartoon or pick one nostril, you could do one drawing. And soon you will all be in the Journal making Hall of Fame, be world famous, get stopped by people in the street for your autograph, have a line of pens named after you, and live a richer, happier life (well, at least the last one).

Your pal,
Danny Gregory

How are you?

dannygregory

hypochondriaToday my hypochondria is in remission but I never know quite when it will flair up. I was a little light headed yesterday and assumed I had internal bleeding, a cerebral aneurism, a tumor. Today, I feel fine but I’ve gone through this so often. Mild symptoms metastasize in my mind into full blown and incurable diseases. A tickle, an ache, a twinge and I am polishing my obituary.
In one of the surprisingly few books on the subject, I read that hypochondria is called “woeful imaginings” and I wonder to what extent it is a function of the strength of one’s imagination. I like to think I am a particularly sensitive person, more likely than most to zero in on the normal changes my body undergoes. That sensitivity, bolstered with sketchy medical knowledge, blooms into obsession as I check and recheck my self, comparing my observations with the old wives’ tales and half read articles in my cerebral database.
Maybe it’s hereditary. When I was a kid and the evening news would run a preview, threatening us with a story on the latest cure for pancreatic cancer or a mysterious new epidemic in Central Africa, my Mum would grab for the remote and zap whatever might infect our imaginations with fresh material to obsess over. It must have worked –she’s in perfect health and her father is still alive and well and 94.
Or maybe it’s just a subconscious excuse to fill idle time with self-indulgence, narcissism, and other attractive traits I already know I possess.
A lot of hypochondriacs run to the doctor with every symptom. But I have a different form of the disease which causes me to avoid doctors altogether, fearing that if they just catch a sight of me they’ll immediately identify a half dozen fatal end stage diseases. Ironic, considering how much time I’ve spent in hospitals with Patti.
A year ago, I summoned enough courage to have a physical. It was terrifying but I experienced near orgasmic release when I received a complete clean bill of health. Since, I actually managed to take a severe case of melanoma in for the doctor’s opinion. He diagnosed it as poison ivy and released me to my fate.
Hypochondria is pathetic, a joke. For doctors, it’s just a waste of their time and energy. People who don’t suffer from it have no clue how tenacious and debilitating it can be. Medically, it is essentially an unstudied malady and the only current treatment is a healthy dose of antidepressants. The only permanent cure, it is said, is far worse than the disease: to actually contract something real and deadly serious that will replace the writhing of one’s imaginations. It’s just a variation on the old joke about the hypochondriac’s epitaph: “See I told you there was something wrong with me.”
But, I’m fine.
Really, I am.
Why? Don’t I look fine?

Unplugged

dannygregoryLeave a comment

2housesI got my first mouse in 1983. It was attached to an Apple IIC, the grooviest PC to come along, a 9″ monitor, a carrying handle, white like the current Apple design standard. There was a program called Macpaint which let you make pixelated drawings but the only input device was the big clumsy mouse ( I’m not sure if scanners even existed), like drawing with mittens on*.
Things have come tremendously far since then but I have the same reservations I had twenty years ago.
Whenever I make a picture on the computer, it is a completely different experience from working with paper and pens and far less satisfying. This could be a function of skill but I doubt it. It certainly not due to any lack of variety on the part of the folks at Adobe; they give you enough tools and filters to fill a dozen art bins. And my computer can’t blamed; it’s wicked fast and I never feel constrained as I did in the old days waiting for things to render.
The problem comes down to how easily human error can be fixed on a computer. I can adjust and readjust, move things up and down, tweak this way and that, and burn hours and hours in repetitive, tedious monkeying around. If I don’t like it, I can immediately zap it.
And for me, that’s where the Art gets trashed.
There’s so many protective barriers between my humanity and the page. I can’t puddle my water, handmix my greens, rub a spot with my coat sleeve. I probably could get the accidental sprays of ink that come off my steel nib but it would take hours to do and the impulse would be gone. There’s no chance for serendipity, no forks in the road that force me to deal with my mistakes, no messes to clean up, far fewer lessons to learn.
It simply isn’t enough like Life.
———-
*I’m sure I have some of these historical facts wrong but, all you technohistory buffs out there, please don’t feel compelled to correct me.