Mortified.

dannygregory36 Comments

Look, I’m going to tell you some thing pretty embarrassing. I need to get it off my chest so I’m just telling you, but please don’t let it get around.

A couple of weeks ago, I realized I was horribly, horribly out of shape. I’ve been pretty busy this summer and haven’t had a lot of time for much, but this is no excuse. I know better but frankly, I had just plain let myself go.

jenny-shoesOne afternoon, I sat down, brushed the dust off my sketchbook,  uncapped my pen and began to draw Jenny’s shoes.

I couldn’t believe what came out. It was awful. And even worse, the act of drawing was awkward and crabbed, like I had three left hands and they each had sprained wrists and five thumbs. I tried slathering on some gouache to cover my mistake but that just made matters worse. The prognosis was clear and so was the cause.

I had forgotten how to draw.

I felt humiliated. I mean, I have been so busy all summer writing books, giving talks, blogging, making stuff for Sketchbook Skool that I had become that archetype: he who can’t, teaches. I felt really awful. And I wasn’t sure how to fix it. Well, I sort of was but I wasn’t sure it would work.

I had three left hands and they each had sprained wrists and five thumbs.

My first impulse was to get down all my old favorite, sure-fire drawing instruction books. Sketchbook for the Artist. Work small, Learn big! Creative Ink Drawing. then all the artists who’s inspired me. Crumb. Searle. Gentleman. Hogarth. Kane. Ware. Jean. They remind me how to do it. But my mentors just made me feel more inept and hopeless and lost.

Next, I decided I’d better go to the art supply store. Maybe, I just need some thicker pens. And  a new type of sketchbook. I bought a painfully expensive one that claims that ink never bleed through its page. Cool, I could finally draw with Sharpies. I’d seen Jonny Twingley doing that to great effect. And the Basquiat notebook show at the Brooklyn Museum was full of big bold lines and flat colors that seemed just the ticket. I came home with an armful.

That was another mistake. Thinking that switching everything up would provide instantly good results. Not only had I forgotten to draw, I was now setting out to learn how to use a bunch of new materials and simultaneously ape someone else’s style and POV to boot.

The first few pages in the book continued down the disastrous path. I kept thinking and thinking about how to reduce things into shapes, struggled with how to add tone, drew far too fast, and then, to cap things off,  the cap came off one of my fat new pens while it was in my pocket, scrawling a tattoo of india ink down my leg, my pants and even my good salmon Lacoste shirt.

nude-drawing-comic
Early one sweltering morning, I sat in my boxer shorts and made a self-diagnostic comic. Time to get to work.

parkThe weekend arrived and Jenny and the dogs and I went to the park. While my family dozed on a picnic blanket, I drew people. Fat, tall, crazy, slow-moving, sleeping, texting, skateboarding people filled my pages. Even the slowest were too unpredictable for me to do a lot of strategizing. I just drew and, if they got up off the bench, I started drawing the next person who sat down. The shadows grew longer, people got sweatier, Jenny and the dogs when back to the air-conditioning, while I kept going.

fightThe next day, I started my morning in the window of the Lafayette bakery, drawing a couple seated at a sidewalk table and having a long argument. Over and over I drew them both, as they gesticulated, accused, sobbed, then paused to shovel down almond croissants. Then I went to church and drew the choir and the congregants, page after page of earnest reverent faces.

tennisI spent the rest of the day watching the U.S. Open on TV. I drew the players, the  commentators, the actors in the commercials. Occasionally, I would hit the pause button and to freeze and study a gesture.

As Federer rejected half the balls the linesmen lobbed him, squeezing, bouncing, assessing, until he found the right one to serve, I grabbed new pens from the pile, testing out different weights until I found my way back to an old favorite, a Stabilo pigment liner, but a fatter one than I’d ever used before, a 0.7.  I was feeling my old line start to flow again and it had picked up a bit of weight from the influence of Jonny and Jean-Michel.

walter
“I am the one who knocks!”

Monday, Jenny went to work and I began to binge. Summer rains had rolled in, and I started to rewatch Breaking Bad on Netflix. Episode after episode, season after season, I drew bald heads and grimaces and dramatic lighting.

I didn’t try to draw accurate portraits, I just let my pen slide over their heads to take me to new inventions. I didn’t write clever quips, didn’t compose my page, didn’t add color, didn’t judge. I didn’t think. Just drew the scene, turned the page, and moved on.

Fortunately there are five seasons of Breaking Bad and there are still some empty pages left in my expensive sketchbook. After a week of intensive workout, drawing has started to become second nature again. The lines flow. I’m  still not thinking but I can just plunk down the pen on the page and it starts to move. And generally in the right direction. For better or worse, the drawings look like mine. And best of all, I love it again. I can’t wait to keep going.

I’m back.

Kid energy.

dannygregory7 Comments

The VR thing is a little hokey but I love the way Keane talks about drawing and creativity. He’s like a big kid with a cool new toy.

Hungry Tim and other news

dannygregory9 Comments

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.

open-monkey-books
Coming in late fall.

• 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.

 

inside-abbworkbook
Coming next year!

• 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.

TobleroneI 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.

Jack draws in rome
A younger, beardless Jack Tea draws the Colliseum.

• 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!

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

dannygregory19 Comments

This is annoying as hell. My dogs, Tim and Joe, are obsessed with the trash chute in our vestibule. Whenever I drop a bag of garbage down the chute, they go nuts, growling and barking and trying to leap up and into the chute in pursuit of the disappearing bag. This has been going on for years. In fact, it’s so obsessive that whenever we open the garbage can in the kitchen or even the dishwasher next to it, they go scrambling to the chute, waiting for something that’s just. Not. Going. To happen. It’s a habit, a pure, Pavlovian habit.

Habits can be a pain, like biting your cuticles or forgetting to floss, but they can also be a real boon to a creative person. They are a little subroutine we can plug into to our neck-top computers to make sure we draw or write or play the dulcimer on a regular basis, a basis that will make us more skilled, more expressive and happier with our work.

Habits have three basic parts. First, there’s what I call ‘the Spark’. That’s the event that triggers the habit. In my dogs’ case, it’s anything to do with throwing out garbage. Garbage in, the madness begins.

Next, there’s the habitual behavior. In this case, running like a lunatic across the apartment and gnashing your teeth at a small steel door in the wall.

Third, is the reward. Tim and Joe never actually get the reward which must be diving down the garbage’s burrow to throttle it deep in the ground (they are dachshunds after all, bred to kill badgers in their lairs). Or maybe it’s just the thrill of the chase.

In any case, think of those three steps in setting up whatever brain program you want to write. Let’s say you want to find time to draw on a regular basis but the monkey voice in your head tells you to watch TV instead. So let’s create a habit. 1. Put your sketchbook on the coffee table next to the remote. When a commercial comes, (spark), grab the remote, mute the TV, pick up your sketchbook and draw whatever’s in front of you (your feet, your coffee table, your slumbering Rottweiler, scenes from the commercial on the screen)  (habit) until you fill you up your sketchbook with awesome drawings (reward).

Think of other sparks you could link to habits. Every time you make a pot of coffee (spark), draw the view out the kitchen window (habit). Every time you sit on the toilet (spark), draw on a sheet of toilet paper (habit). Every time Donald Trump says “Mexican”(spark), draw your neighbor’s Chihuahua (habit).

Or, subscribe to my blog (sign up in the column on the right) and get an email three times a week when I post (spark), and do a drawing based on my featured image (habit). That will be rewarding for us both.

Greasing the daily grind.

dannygregory16 Comments

 

I’ve always found it exciting and a bit chilling to read about the typical day on the life of an artist I admire. They invariably go something like this:

“I spring out of bed at 5 a.m., throw some Ethiopian into the french press, and swim in the Atlantic for 45 minutes with my Rhodesian Ridgeback, Horace. Then, still wet, I sit down at my 1928 Smith Corona and write for four hours or 4,000 words, whichever comes first. I pause to eat 200 ml. of fresh sheep yogurt, steel-cut oats and Lebanese dates. Then, 100 push ups.

“Next, I allocate 43 minutes to email  my editor, manager, publicist, agent, mistresses, and fans. When the tibetan sand clock that the Dalai Lama gave me gongs at noon, I walk down to an exclusive boîte on the main street of my quaint, artisanal town to eat lunch at my regular table with one or two of my equally famous artist friends.

Then I stroll home and have a two-hour nap, a massage, a high colonic, sex, two Bolivian chocolates, and return to my studio…

“Then I stroll home and have a two-hour nap, a massage, a high colonic, sex, two Bolivian chocolates, and return to my studio where I write until my housekeeper serves dinner which I eat with twenty of my closest friends and several cases of wine bottled by some aristocratic boyhood pal, then a few lashings of espresso and off to bed where I read some Keats, wash down a handful of Lunesta, adjust my satin eye shade, and dream about tomorrow’s work.”

Making art takes work. For some of us, it is our work. Work without a boss, or a quota, or a time clock. And that kind of job can be very hard to keep up. That’s why artists establish routines, to get them off their duffs and into the studio. We need to be motivated by something to put down the remote or the opium pipe and saddle up.

The only one who will make us do what we do — is us.  Sure, editors can give us deadlines in return for advances and gallerists can schedule gallery openings but we know deep down that we can always buy more time if we whine. No one can fire us.

For the last few months, I have pledged to myself that I would post something here three times every week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 7 am. I have written several zillion posts here over the years but this is a bit more structured. I made this pledge because a deadline of some kind would keep me more productive than just waiting for inspiration, desire, and schedule to converge. I haven’t been utterly slavish about this pledge as you may have noticed but it has kept me reasonably committed.

The key has been to establish a proper routine about it, besides this slightly guilty feeling in the back of my head that I should sit down and write something. I like to do it early, before the press of the day has begun, when the streets are quiet, Jenny and the hounds are still in bed, and I have yet to read any emails or NY Times editorials  that could clutter or influence the flow. I awake with a vague notion, then make a few false starts, and soon the mechanism clicks in and the sentences spool out.

If you stay up until all hours kicking the gong and chasing chorus girls around Montparnasse, it’s a lot harder to rise with the dawn…

Starting one’s days productively takes structure. If you stay up until all hours kicking the gong and chasing chorus girls around Montparnasse, it’s a lot harder to rise with the dawn, so it’s helpful to be a little disciplined about what you do all day long, even when you aren’t creating. Eat protein, read actual books, don’t watch the Tonight Show. Repeat.

And just because my body is sleeping, my brain doesn’t get to punch out. If I mull for a minute or two about what I want to write in those minutes before sleep, it’s much more likely that I will wake up with the first sentence sticking out of my brain like the beginning of a roll of Scotch tape.

The art-making process can be mysterious but it can also be somewhat controlled. You can set a wakeup call for the muse if you give yourself a predictable program, an armature to build your work on.

I’ll write more about this next time. Which reminds me of another tip: never leave your work 100% completed at the end of the day. Park on the top of the hill, leaving half a sentence or a partially drawn face, so the You of Tomorrow can pick up the work in progress rather than wrestling with a cold start.

To wit: I will always remember what Andy Warhol said to me one evening in The Odeon, “Danny, old boy, never mix chickens, ball bearings, and…”

 

Some thoughts while blowing out candles.

dannygregory38 Comments

Today is my birthday. I’ve had quite a lot of them. I hope to have more.

A few years ago, I worked on an advertising campaign for Viagra. Our insight was that the men most likely to have erectile dysfunction were the age I have just become, what we called in AdSpeak “the age of male mastery,” a time when we are have achieved competence in most aspects of our life.

We know how to do our jobs well, we are as good as we’ll probably get at understanding women, we have raised children to adulthood, we have shed the gloss of youthful fumbling and incompetence. We are mellow but still alive.

We used this insight to say to men: look, you know how to do most things well so, rather than hiding and avoiding your wiener’s unfortunate behavior, be a mensch, talk to your doctor and get a prescription for these blue pills. You know how to solve most problems and you know how to solve this one too, so get on with it and get it on.

I do know how to do a lot of things. But I’m not particularly interested in those things I have mastered, in sitting back on my laurels. Instead I am aware of how many things I still need to get better at. I want to read new books, hear new music, go to unvisited lands, embrace new ideas, technologies, and improve myself each day. Tackling new things is what keeps one young.

Not that I need to be young. In fact, when I was young, I wanted to be old.  When I was ten, I read adult books. When I was thirteen, I tried to grow a mustache. When I was fourteen, I bought my first record album: “Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.” In college, I wore thrift-store suits and smoked a pipe. My friends joked, “Danny’s grandfather said he’d pay his tuition if he wore his grandpa’s clothes.”

I can feel the old man in me and I don’t like a lot of things about him. I am ready for bed at ten. I wake up at five. I have three pairs of reading glasses. I drink half-caff.

I still go to the gym a few times a week, not to be rippling and bulging but to make it easier to tie my shoes and carry groceries. My body is like a car from the early ‘Eighties — still running, but a bit bulkier and noisier than necessary. It needs its oil changed more frequently, it pulls more slowly away from the light, and I have to watch for rust. Girls ignore it.

I see a tendency in myself and my old friends to want to talk about the past in a rueful way, to lament the closing of a long-time business, to bend young ‘uns ears with stories of the good old days before we were all glued to our phones and tattoos were for sailors, truckers and convicts. I assume I am boring my friends in their lush beards and man buns when I talk about seeing the Talking Heads at the Mudd Club down on White Street, about outlaw parties in burned-out buildings on the Lower East Side in the early ’80’s, of going to Studio 54 when I was in high school. Now the rebel anthems of my youth have become Muzak. Joe Strummer’s long dead and they play “Lost in the Supermarket” in my supermarket.

I have pretty good DNA. Both of my parents are alive and fine. My grandparents all lived into their eighties. My paternal grandfather died in his sleep at 98. So I live each day assuming it probably won’t be my last.

My birthday means a lot less to me each year. I often have to do a little math to remember how old I actually am. I don’t especially like the reminder. Or the attention. There’s nothing I want or need as a present besides the love of my family, the warmth of my friends, the hope that this one won’t be the last.

But today, I will be celebrating me, this older, and, in many ways, better me. I will indulge myself all day long and do some things I like. And I will look through my real presents, the many things I have to look forward to.

I am excited about my various new jobs, about my son’s adventures in Rome, and lucky to be in love with my beautiful, wise girlfriend. I have new books being printed, new ideas percolating in my head, new art I want to make. I am about to go to Basel, Prague, Doha, Hanoi, and Reykjavik to meet new people and to spread my love of drawing. I just shot a new klass for Sketchbook Skool yesterday. In so many ways, the year ahead will be the best one ever with loads to be grateful for.

So screw the wrinkles. Let’s have cake.

The right time to start.

dannygregory10 Comments

I’ll start when the summer’s over.
I’ll start when the kids go back to school.
I’ll start when I have time to get to the art supply store.
I’ll start when everything calms down at work.
I’ll start when I retire.
I’ll start when I lose some weight.
I’ll start when I can find a class to take.
I’ll start when Danny’s new book comes out.
I’ll start when I feel better.
I’ll start when I have a week to myself.
I’ll start when someone makes me.
I’ll start when I finish this blog post.

Jack hits the road.

dannygregory11 Comments

Yesterday my son left home.

He forgot his comb.

Jack flew to Rome

in a tube of chrome

To drink cappuccino with foam

And grow his beard like a gnome.

Across Europe he’ll roam.

He’ll visit Place Vendome

And read the Mysterium Magnum of Jacob Boehm.

(Quite a tome.)

He’ll hike across Italian loam

To draw a thicket of ancient brome

Then pause to chant Om

on some verdant Tuscan holm.

And then he’ll return from St. Peter’s dome

to New York, cold as Nome,

and say, “Hey, Papa, Shalom!

What’s for dinner?”

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

dannygregory9 Comments

Don’t embrace the myth of the lone genius, toiling in solitude in his garret, undiscovered. Don’t turn “I’ll show you when it’s good enough” into a day that never comes. Don’t dismiss the contributions of other people to making your art better.

Art, like all living things, doesn’t thrive in a vacuum. It needs something to push against, something to react to, the grain of sand in the oyster.

It could be a community of people with whom you collaborate. It could be an audience who shares your work and reflects new perspectives and energy. It could be colleagues who help you polish your creations and see it anew. It could be the long procession of great artists who preceded you and whose work can inspire yours in a thousand ways.

Be brave. Step out. Invite response. Share your gifts.

Art is a conversation. Make sure you’re not just talking to yourself.

My heroin addiction.

dannygregory18 Comments

When I was thirteen, they showed a movie in morning assembly that fucked me up. We had moved to America less than a year before and I was clueless about virtually everything that wasn’t to be found on the shelves of my grandfather’s library in Lahore. I knew about hunting ocelots, excising neck tumors, and the pretenders to the Romanian throne, but nothing about rock ‘n’ roll, heroin or afro picks. This movie taught me about all three.

It was a black and white 16 mm, faux documentary about a young Puerto Rican boy’s short and tragic life. The movie opened in an alley as Chico and his homies squatted on an abandoned car, passing a joint. In the next scene, this gateway led Chico to a party where he and older pals sniffed white powder while a portable record player blasted a screeching guitar solo. Soon Chico was snorting, skin popping, then mainlining junk, dope, smack, skag, and horse. Various other madcap adventures ensued, leading to the final scene in which Chico ODs in a shower. The film closed with a slow iris down centering on Chico’s lifeless eyeball.

“What?!” he said and pushed me up against the wall. “Where are you getting the stuff? Give me names!”

That night I knocked on the door of my mother’s bedroom. My second stepfather opened it, looking bleary and irritated. I told him I couldn’t sleep because I was afraid I was a heroin addict.

junky1
Before.

“What?!” he said and pushed me up against the wall. “Where are you getting the stuff? Give me names!” My mother joined us and my stepfather told her I was a dope fiend. “Names!” he hissed again. “Who’s your dealer?!”

“I don’t know,” I whined. “I don’t know where I get it. I don’t remember anything.” I told them about the movie and how insidious heroin addiction could be. “I think I’m such a junky I can’t remember anything about it. It’s like I must be leading a parallel life or something. Seriously.”

They looked at each other, eyes rolling. “Jesus! Go back to bed,” my stepfather groaned and turned on his heel. The door slammed.

The film had a long-term effect on me. A) It was very effective in deterring me from being a heroin addict. Forty years later, I am still clean.

B) It also left me with a life-time aversion to wailing guitar solos. Unlike all my normal friends who would air guitar to Zeppelin, who loved heavy metal, hair metal, death metal, Metallica, Megadeath, Motorhead, Maiden, Sabbath and Priest — metal freaks me out. That first whining shriek still seizes my bowels like Malcolm McDowell, making me anxious and tense and waiting for hell to break loose. It’s the thin edge of the wedge, man — a couple of Motley Crue tracks and next thing ya know, it’s mainlining and toe-injecting and selling my butt in the street.

junky2
After.

I have no particular aesthetic reason not to like heavy metal. I love punk, after all, which is far more nihilistic and loud. I like abstraction. I like the blues. I even like spandex on men.

I can only attribute this aversion to a Pavlovian response wired into me back in the dark of the assembly hall in ’73, a reprogramming of my limbic system that still holds sway.

I have other long-seated childhood aversions that I still trip over. Sweet and sour pork. Shredded wet paper towels. Bitter-sweet chocolate. Trigonometry. Cilantro.

In my never-ending quest for mild self-improvement, I have begun to question these knee-jerk repulsions and am working on reprogramming myself. I refuse any longer to be haunted by these ancient specters, especially the one whose origins I know, origins that are absurd to be enslaved by when you are a man of my age and dwindling hair. So I am watching Dianne Wiest movies, eating Filets-o-Fish, even drawing with a soft pencil. And blasting Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” ’round the clock.

I am stronger than my weaknesses — and I shall prevail.