Belongings

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shirts

Maybe it was going to the James Rosenquist retrospective at the Guggenheim but I’ve been feeling sort of sick of materialism. Everything we encounter, it seems, is in some insidious way aimed at making us burn to buy something, anything (and, yes, I’ve spent twenty years in the belly of the advertising beast, stoking that flame). Even at the Rosenquist show, where the art is all about the decadence of commercialism, the giftstore has all sorts of Rosenquist books and fridge magnets and coffee mugs.
Anyway, I feel like I own too much and appreciate it too little. So I am going to try to get more out of what I have and scale back, if possible. I even cut out my planned trip to the art store this afternoon. We’ll see how long this resolution sticks.
I like the idea of a journal diet. Draw everything you own. Everything. Every single book, every stick of butter and shoelace. Now that would be a humbling experience. Or just draw everything you eat for a week. You’ll be thinner, calmer and happier.
Speaking of calmness, I continue to wrestle with my new server, but the break at the Guggenheim was refreshing and inspiring.

Trust or Bust

dannygregory

jarrett

In 1975, Keith Jarrett recorded the best selling solo piano album ever, The Koln Concerts. What’s even more extraordinary is that the music is purely improvised. Jarrett had spent the day feeling jet lagged and under the weather, he had to sit down and start performing almost immediately after arriving at the concert hall with little chance to prepare himself, and the piano he was provided with slowly went out of tune.

Jarrett credits the quality of his performance to all these distractions. Before every performance, he tries to make himself blank. He doesn’t practice for a month beforehand. He doesn’t plan, he doesn’t have tricks to get over the hump; he just empties his mind, feels the silence completely, then wanders out on stage and sits down before the 88 keys. What balls.

“It’s far more interesting for me that for the audience even,” he said in a recent interview on WNYC. “If you don’t have total freedom, you will not make mistakes. With total freedom, you’ll make mistakes you would never have dreamed of and may end up hating yourself more than ever. I aim to be completely devoid of ideas. But I’m not going to tell the music what I should be doing.”

He is just a vehicle, an audience member, and his art has a life of its own.
Now, how do you get to that place? If I sat down in front of a concert hall full of Germans, we’d all thrill to 15 seconds of chopsticks and that would be that. But Jarrett has laid down a lot of foundation. He had years of lessons, then played in cocktail lounges and Pocono resorts for years and committed all the jazz standards to mind. He played with Miles Davis and others, learning, absorbing, filling himself up. But so far that’s ‘just’ technical preparation. Many other people have that.

But when Jarrett improvises he allows the performance to be a distillation of who he is and what he knows. He says you have to assume that what you are doing is meaningless, be willing to toss it away. You can’t think that what you are making will be recorded, sold, reviewed, even listened to. Just do it and see what happens.

The best moments, he says, “are when I am playing only in the present and not heading anywhere. I aspire to not know what I am doing.” This is mindfulness, living in the present.

In this week’s New Yorker, in a review of Savion Glover’s new show at the Joyce, there’s the following quote: “I try to keep my chops up,” Glover told Jane Goldberg, for Dance Magazine, “so I can just be.” Glover is the greatest tap dancer who ever lived, a breathtaking artist and his goal: to just be.

Don’t dismiss all this because these are incredibly accomplished craftspeople. Sure, you need enormous amounts of technical expertise to be the best in the world. But to accomplish mindfulness, you just need something you already have: the willingness to quiet down, clear the crap and trust yourself.

  • This piece was inspired by re-reading Keri Smith**’s new essay, Ode to Ross Mendes but I have tried to avoid reiterating what she has already written so eloquently. Nonetheless, I have come to a similar conclusion via a different path: “The answer is me.”

** Keri is a wonderful illustrator and writer and a very good soul —if you’ve not done so already, please examine her inspiring new book Living Out Loud

Pen Pals

dannygregoryLeave a comment

dpaI am really lucky to have a friend who has taught me an awful lot about journaling. D.Price is the author of a wonderful zine called
Moonlight Chronicles (subscribe and you will be very happy) and he and I have been sharing our work for years. We copy the pages from our journals and send them to each other and, whenever possible, we get together for journaling trips in different parts of the country.
dpb
It’s a great experience to sit down and create a page in your journal, chronicling your current experience and then share it with a trusted friend who is doing the same thing at the same moment. Sometimes, when we share the same vantage point, the same size Moleskines and and the same paint box, Dan and I discover our pages are very similar.
dpc
But when we really take our times, we see things quite differently. I tend to see light and shade, whereas Dan tends to focus on shapes. I can get quite lost in a muddy mess of paints or crosshatching and his colors are bright and sharp. Our writing is quite different too. I’m the City Mouse, he’s the Country Mouse and we are impressed by very different stuff.
When we are done, we swap books and discuss why we did what we did. It’s a great way to learn and grow.

Drawing bread

dannygregory

breadDrawing is seeing. If you can see, you can draw. But can you see?

Let’s see.

Looking is a language. Look: a dog, a tree, a car, a man. We apply labels — to things in order to understand and process them. In Genesis, God has Adam name the animals. Labels makes abstract thinking possible. But because we over do it, looking replaces seeing and we soon stop seeing things for what they truly are. We say ‘tree’ and stop saying ‘elm’, stop saying ‘thirty year old elm, with silvery bark missing in fist sized circles on the eastern half of its trunk, 37 foot 8 inch elm with 37,437 leaves, some mustard colored, others sap green”, and we completely miss going to the next level where language fails us all together, where things are so specific they can have no name, where they are absolutely real.

This is where drawing comes from. When you can look at something slowly and carefully and refuse to see it for anything but what it is – at this very moment – in this light – from this angle. And as you begin to see, you cease to be the many things that limit you. You drop judgments, cultural biases, history, and baggage. Time slows, and then disappears. All you feel is the pen on the paper, the slow cutting drag of the nib against the grain till even that sensation fades away too. You don’t think about art or what people will say or whether you are inept or ugly or stupid or self indulgent. You stop thinking about bills and aches and grievances and chores. You, your pen, your paper, your subject, you just are.

You sink deeper and deeper as you see more and more. You draw the edges and then the textures, the shadows, the textures and shadows within textures and shadows. The orange, the tree, the body you are drawing is just a landscape your eyes traverse. Your line takes you through adventures and surprises, over hill and down valley, into light and through shade. And eventually your journey brings you home again and you feel your pen thud back against the dock, the door step, and the world slowly cranks back up again like the merry-go-round it is and you come back to all your senses, sharpened, refreshed, renewed.

On your paper, there’s a map of your trip, a souvenir, only as accurate as the clarity of your vision. Keep it if you want, frame it, sell it, but it won’t matter – every twist and turn of the trip itself will be seared into your mind.

Are you ready to give it a try?

Making book

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A few people have asked me what sort of books I make my journals in, so here’s the short answer:
vols1
I bound all the books in this group. It’s not as hard as I first thought and let me choose the paper, size and shape I wanted They are not terribly long so I can have the thrill of a new volume and the book itself won’t get too dinged up from being toted around everywhere. #1 is in linen with a slipcase, #6 has a foil stamp I did with a die I designed, #7 was a travel journal for a trip to Death Valley.
vols2
After I left a journal on a plane and never got it back, I lost the heart to bind books #8 & 10 but I will some day. #11 is an old boy’s adventure novel that I refilled with watercolor paper and is a big fat journal with no writing in it at all, just drawings and watercolors. #12 is full of drawings of New York I did for #13 which was an edition (1/1) of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince I did for Patti’s birthday. #14 is another rebound book.
vols3
These are all Moleskines, the small kind with drawing paper. #20 has an inlaid initial made of multicolored chicken shells that my friend Quentin Webb made for me. I dedicated it entirely to self portraits.
vols4
I had gone away from drawings for a while and did a lot of digital photos and mini-polaroids so I made this all black#22. #23 is a larger Moleskine I kept on a retreat from NY after 9/11. The books I favor these days are very rough and simple and bound for me by my sister, Miranda, who is a printer. #25 is my greatest hits album and with a few mouse clicks and just $10.47 can be on your own shelf in days.
vols5
These are various and sundry books. #28 was the journal I kept when Patti was pregnant and which is the basis for a new book I wrote last summer, #29 is the travel journal we kept on our New York vacation, #30 is from a trip to Bermuda and #31 is a pile of the books I use just for writing in and are far more self-indulgent and whiney than even the things you’ve seen so far on this site.

God — looking at them all arrayed like this instead of shoved in their cupboards makes me seem enormously self-involved, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic and horrible.

Helluva Town

dannygregory

nyjournal1A few years ago, we decided to take a vacation in New York. Yes, we live in New York but we’ve never been tourists here. So we went to the Whitney biennial and the Cooper Hewitt triennial, the Museum of Natural History, a Woody Guthrie show at the Museum of NYC, the Queens museum, the Hall of Science, the Bronx Zoo. We went to the top of the Empire State building and the Easter parade and heard music and ate in touristy restaurants.

What made it really special is that we kept a family travel journal. We recorded everywhere we went and how we felt about it. We took pictures and did drawings, we drew maps and made collages of souvenir stuff. The most avid journal-keeper was Jack and he was just five.
I’d like to write some more about travel journals in the future because I think they not only record your journey, they help to define it as you’re doing it.
nyjournal2
nyjournal3

Drawing – Jackass style

dannygregory

lie
WARNING: the following drawing exercise may lead to death and dismemberment.

I first tried this with d.price as we were driving due east from the Rockies across Kansas. The land was so flat we could see all 360 degrees of horizon; the road was an isosceles triangle that ran from our radiator to where the sky kissed the ground. Our rented Ford Navigator was the only vehicle on the road, the only object higher than the emerging stalks of spring wheat. A hundred miles rolled under our jacked up tires and the scenery never changed and the radio never got good.

"Let’s draw," Dan suggested, clamping the wheel between his bony knees and pulling his Moleskine out of his hip pocket. We uncapped our pens and drew the view, thrilling at the occasional barn or silo that broke up the monotony.

All I Really Need To Know I Learned From Drawing:

dannygregory

spy
Always carry a pen.
The best way is to be still.
Everyone can do it, except those who say they can’t.
Forget your eraser. There are no mistakes. Only lessons.
Don’t do it for fame. Do it for you.
Don’t seek beauty. See it.
Everyone’s perfect pen is different.
Learn from others. But don’t be an imitation.
No books, no teachers, no system, can teach you as much as practice.
If you don’t like a drawing, turn the page and do another.
Study how kids do it.
A forest is just a lot of trees. A tree is just a lot of leaves. And you know how to draw a leaf.
Value everything you make.
Give your drawings away.
If you can do it perfectly, it’s boring.
It’s all about the Now. That’s why it’s called a drawing, not a drawn.
Know when to stop.

Jonesing for a 000

dannygregory

mumsbirthdayMy mum’s house sits nestled in the middle of several acres of wild forest and is full of stuff to draw, including her cat, Fred, and the family collection of stone Buddhas, many of which my grandfather acquired in Pakistan years ago. As we all sat around and she unwrapped a basketful of birthday gifts, I drew anything within eyeball reach with an old/new pen.

Old, because I used to love its fine, sharp line and hard-as-a-hypodermic nib until I decided it was bad for me and gave it up years ago. New, because I was craving it again and bought a fresh one last week (Grumbacher “Artists Pen” very hard to come by).

Why ‘bad‘ for me?

Well, the pen is so fine and hard it makes me draw in a very particular way that appeals to the most anal retentive part of me and I make these would-be photorealistic drawings that are so tight and rigid and tiny and, while that’s all well and fine in small doses, I ended up tossing the pen when I started wanting to do teeny tiny postage stamp drawings full of stippling and cross-hatching and little else.

But it was my mum’s birthday, so I gave myself a break.

Am I nuts?

P.S. I do quite like this page. Is it too small to read?

Dealing with turds

dannygregory

selfportraitsMarybethd sent me an email asking how she could go about finding her own voice. She also said she was reluctant to draw in her journal because “if I make a bad drawing, I am stuck with it…Forever!”
I wrote:
Isn’t it interesting that everybody has their own style of drawing and making visual things? It almost suggests that we actually see things differently. Perhaps each of us is looking through our own lens that has particular scratches and distortions that come from the years of accumulated experience. We may all be striving to capture the same reality in front of us and yet, despite skill and practice, end up with very different marks on the paper and the same sense of satisfaction that we have actually captured what was in front of us. Even if you change media and techniques or look at your work over a lifetime, it is still you.

What I find is that my own lines are usually recognizable to me right off, but only my more mature lines are recognizable to others. My’ style’, if you will, took time to emerge. I have a friend with whom I go on drawing trips so we plunk down and draw the same thing simultaneously. It’s wild to see how different we see things when we swap books, how we chose to draw different details, how we envy each other this observation or that.

Style is not just true of drawing but, if you let it, of the way you write, letter, design, etc. in your journal too.

The only real trick is to be yourself. That means letting go of fear and judgment, not worrying about being “stuck with a bad drawing … forever.” The fact is, a “bad drawing” is just a drawing you don’t feel captured the moment the way you’d intended. You didn’t reach the destination you thought you saw on the horizon. Maybe you were distracted, maybe you were hungry, maybe you were nervous that someone would look over your shoulder and snicker � maybe you just weren’t yourself.

I say, better to keep all those drawings, and keep them in your sketchbook where they can be lessons. Honestly, I learn far more from those ‘mistakes’ than anything else and even more from my inevitable attempts to ‘fix’ the ‘mistakes’. I slather on watercolor or go over the line with a heavier pen and get an even bigger mess but I learn something. My books are all numbered, carefully chosen, beautiful paper, often hand bound, and the idea of having a big turd in the middle of the book used to be very depressing. Now I flip back and remember how I went astray and am the wiser for it. If you commit to leaving everything in your book, you’ll find you do each drawing a little more carefully, knowing “you’ll be stuck with it.” And, if not, so what? It’s just a journal, right? Better to let it all hang out and be yourself than masquerade as some impeccable genius who always bats 1.000. That’s not you, is it? It sure ain’t me.
So, back to ‘finding your voice’. It’s like any sport: you’ve got to practice and stretch. Try drawing like someone else, go so far as to copy others’ drawings line by line. You won’t actually end up with a copy but your drawing of their drawing. Then make yourself draw the same thing over and again. Or draw something incredibly complicated, like your car’s engine or every hair on your arm — really detailed, highly accurate drawings. Then do something wild, draw with a fat brush, a sharpie marker on paper towel, whatever loosens you up. The same is true of writing. Try writing in verse, with no adjectives, incredibly tersely, whatever. Look at how magazines are laid out and let that inspire your journal. The New Yorker is very dense and then explodes with a big picture. The National Enquirer shouts in lots of display faces, USA Today uses interesting info graphics. Why not graph what you eat for lunch or how many miles you drive and where?

It’s all meant to be fun and expand the pleasure and appreciation you have for life. Anyone who looks at what you are doing will just be impressed by the fact that you are doing it at all. And if they don’t like it, well, it’s your journal, not theirs anyway. Your journal is your baby. Love it, feed it, give it variety, and no one else will tell you if it’s a little odd looking.

Sorry if this is a little rambling but I hope it’s helpful.

Your pal,
Danny