Rethinking my story.

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Earlier this year, I got a lovely invitation to come out to Phoenix to talk about what I do. Jenny was born and raised there so we travel to Arizona at all times of the year to see her family and I have come to quite like the city and the desert. Besides, it was mid-winter and the idea of the desert in August had a powerful appeal.

The climate was not the only allure. Some of my pals like Jane LaFazio and Seth Apter will be there too. But most of all, it was as an opportunity to turn to a fresh page. I decided to use the invitation as an incentive to think of a whole new approach to talking to groups of people about creativity. I often present my ideas on creative blocks and the struggles we have with drawing as adults but, over the past couple of years, I have wanted to think about illustrated journaling from a different vantage point.

As part of this fresh start, I went back through every page of my illustrated journals in chronological order. From my first tentative collages and chicken scratching, through the books I bound myself, through my trips around the world, my experimentation with media, my growing confidence, Patti’s death, Jack’s departure for college, the move Jenny and I took to LA and so much more. I paged through almost twenty years of life and it was exhilarating and sobering, emotional and revelatory.

Now I have managed to turn all those pages into a brand-new story that I am really excited to present.

My presentation is open to all and the folks in Phoenix have set up a lovely evening with wine and desert and such — but reservations are filling up fast.  If you’d like to come, meet some other great creative people and see what I have concocted, I’d love to see you there.

The evening begins at 7:00pm on Saturday, August 8 MT.  To find out more and register, click here.  There’s also a Facebook event.

I hope to see you there!

El niño dibuja cada día

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My French, Latin, Urdu and Hebrew are rusty and dim but I kinda have an itch to learn a new language. So I downloaded a free app called Duolingo.

Each day it emails me to remind me to do my lesson. The email has a picture of a little green owl who says, “Hi Danny, keep the owl happy! Learning a language requires practice every day.”

I diligently open my app and spend a few minutes going through my lessons. I might be waiting for the kettle to boil, waiting for the F train, waiting for the elevator, and I fill the pause by repeating “naranja, naranja“. When I am done, the app goes bing-bong and rewards me with some pointless points. It’s painless and fun and soon I am sure I will be able to order a burrito from the food truck on the corner.

Now we just need a genius to come up with a drawing app that’ll do the same thing. Bing-bong! Time to draw a bagel. Ding-dong! Sketch your shoe. Ting-tong! Get out your gouache. Five or ten minutes a day of gentle prodding to keep me in tiptop drawing shape.

Any coders out there?¡vámonos!

Rusty beans and dusty gold.

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One evening, you go to a friend’s house and she has rented a movie. She paid for it, but you get to watch it for free.

You notice a bestseller on the table and ask if you can borrow it. Your friend waves it away and tells you how disappointing it was. Instead, she urges another book on you that you never knew about. That book changes your life.

You have coffee with a friend who offers to introduce you to a colleague with professional experience that dovetails perfectly with yours.

You are on your phone, about to jaywalk. A bicyclist zooms past you and through a red light, almost getting clipped by a taxi. Your heart spasms with adrenaline as you step back on the curb and swallow hard.

You read a memoir of a man who went against the herd to start a business in an industry others had long since abandoned. He struggles, backslides, struggles some more, but by using certain surprising skills, he reverses the trend and creates a successful, beloved business. His book is full of specific descriptions that you can use to pursue your own dream.

You read a review on Amazon for a product you have been considering for a while. The review points out three unusual criteria you had never considered which make you act immediately.

Your mother-in-law smokes like a chimney. At sixty, she is dead of lung cancer. You used to have an occasional cigarette with your second martini. No longer.

You had a parent who withheld affection to the point of abuse.  When you have your own children, you use his behavior as a yardstick, a warning of things never to do.

Distracted, you say something unthinking to your spouse — who gasps aloud. You look up, suddenly aware of what you’ve said, and grow shocked at your own insensitivity.

Your grandfather survived the Great Depression. For the next sixty years, he counts every penny, then dies alone in a shabby house, its basement full of rusting canned goods and thirty pounds of gold bullion.

Every day life offers you a lesson you may or may not notice. What did you learn today? What did you teach someone else?

(Can’t think of anything? Well, that’s why there’s this.)

Reading me.

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I don’t usually read my books for a long time after I write them. I’ll have some occasion to look back and read what I wrote and the experience will be quite odd. Sometimes it will seem familiar, and very much me. At other times, I’ll think, “Did I really say that?”, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with dismay.

Often I am possessed by some other version of me when I write, a version that is a co-creation of the book itself, the inexorable march of ideas and words that surge forward as I write at length, ideas taking on their own voice, connections stopping out of the shadows. That’s one of the prime pleasure of writing, how the process takes over. When I wrote a novel a few years ago, I was constantly surprised at things the characters said, at the way bits of plot came full circle to tie up ends, at the life the story had quite beyond me. I sometimes think back on the characters, wondering how they are now, as if they lived on even though I stepped away from the keyboard.

I can have the same feelings when I draw. I begin with an impulse of what sort of drawing I want to make but invariably where I end up is pretty different. Making a drawing, like writing, is an exploration, an adventure. The destination is subject to change. My mission is to discover myself. And sometimes what I find may be pretty unfamiliar and surprising.

I write my books. But I read them too. And I hope I’ll always get lost in their pages, lost so I can find something surprising and new.

Keeping the fun in fundamentals.

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Teaching yourself to make art is a lifelong endeavor. Books and courses will help but it’s up to you to keep the work interesting and relevant.

Look for creative ways to keep practicing the basics, like contour drawing, proportions, foreshortening, tone, shading, volume, etc.

Don’t make drills dull. Find ways to mix things up. Draw things that mean something to you.

Instead of setting up artificial subjects like bowls of fruit or vases of flowers, draw the contents of your fridge. Draw the roses you got for your birthday and write about how you feel getting a year older. Instead of drawing naked strangers in a life drawing class, draw your naked spouse, your cat, your boss. Rather than doing “Drapery studies,” draw the shapes your feet make under the covers on a Sunday morning.

Be inventive. Be fresh. Be personal. It’s an adventure, not a chore.

Monkey break

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I am taking off from my blog today — to work on illustrations for “Shut Your Monkey.”

See you on Saturday.

Working out the bad

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Recently I have been doing a lot of drawings that emerge for the womb of my mind with dents and lumps and stork bites all over. They look just ugly to me, five minutes in. I know this is a function of my being out of shape — I need to keep limbering up my powers of observation and forcing myself to slow down.

To deal with these lifeless pups, I turn to advice for my old pal, Tommy Kane. If you took “Beginning” at Sketchbook Skool you will remember his lecture exhorting us to keep working on bad drawings, massaging them until they cough, splutter and start to breathe.

I have been wondering why this works.

Is it like taking a wrong turn early in the journey and then continuing to drive, circling, perambulating until eventually you get back on track, slowing down, recalculating, finally getting oriented, our earlier mistakes now buried in many miles of tire tracks?

Or maybe you keep making mistakes, more and more inaccurate observations, until they all even out, balancing too long with too short, too left with too right. The mean is accurate.

Or does all the effort show, the layers, the thousands of strokes, the many decisions all evident on the page so they coalesce to exude an air of confidence that make the early mistakes seem intentional, now polished and upholstered in finger sweat?

Regardless, the act of concentration and dogged perseverance clear my mind, assuage the pain of earlier blunders to bring me a doodly peace.

Once again, drawing is like living. Perseverance will out.

My ever changing moods

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How do I explain who I am and what I do? Some people know me as a blogger, some as an author, others as an Olympic gold-medalling shot putter. To bring all my myriad facets into one place, I have just created a bulging new website, located appropriately enough at dannygregory.com.

If you are curious, satiate yourself here.

If you share my passion for Paul Weller, then your time will be better spent here instead.

I’m the best!

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Maybe I’m not the best writer.

Maybe I’m not the best artist.

Maybe I’m not the best thinker.

But I am supremely qualified to do at least one thing. Here’s my superpower:

I’m the best person to write what I think.

I’m the best person to draw the world through my eyes.

I’m the best person to express my point of view, my experiences, my mistakes, my shortcomings, my strengths.

When I compare myself with others and what they make, when I think, ‘Oh, I could never do that!’, it’s easy to forget my superpower.

And if I do, I won’t express myself — and no one else will.

And even if they were to try, they couldn’t to do it as well as I could. So, it’s up to me.

Learn from others, but don’t wish to be them. We all have unique ways of seeing the world. And we all have our own, priceless way to express what we are.

Have you used your superpower yet?

Five beautiful things I saw today.

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I looked up from my book and glimpsed the setting sun reflected in a window across West 3rd Street. It was enormous, an incredible, unnatural, cherry red. I rushed to the corner of the terrace to look at the actual sun but it was hidden behind a tangle of water towers and satellite dishes. I watched the last slivers disappear in the mirrors of my neighbors’ picture windows.

In the park, a woman in a black pinafore spun lime green hula hoops ’round her hips, her waist, and knees, and then suddenly convulsed and folded them all into a single shape, a globe with all its meridians demarcated by the buzzing hoops.

The fur on Tim’s back is curly as Persian lamb today. The air is still but he is knotted and wavy. His fur is a dusky rainbow: eggplant, auburn, battleship grey, matte black, all threaded with silver highlights.

I went to Jack’s room to put away some towels. On his top bookshelf, the albums of his drawings that we collected when he was just starting to draw, aged 2 to 4. On their spines, they’re labeled “The Art of Jack Tea Gregory, Vols 1-4.”  On the shelf below them, arranged, apparently in the last few weeks, a row of books of art notes Jack’s been making this year.  Each is labeled with a Brother P-Touch that I didn’t even know he had.  Those two rows of books encompass the last twenty years of his life. And of mine.

At least seven blocks away, there’s a railroad apartment. It has windows at the west end near me and at the far eastern side. A slice of sky is visible through that far window and, across that bright patch, the silhouette of a person passes back and forth. A single leaf on the crabapple tree across the street appears larger than that tiny silhouette yet somehow, I am connected, and know something about how that miniature person feels, pacing so many blocks away.