Spring in my step.

dannygregory11 Comments

I just wanted to tell you that, though I have not been very active here of late, it’s mainly because Koosje and Morgan and I have been beavering away on several important projects we will soon reveal. I think they will please you. I sure hope so.

I also want to thank you so much for supporting the release of Art Before Breakfast. You have managed to thrill my publisher into wanting me to immediately do other exciting new things — which I will tell you more about as they gel.

Meanwhile, we are waiting for our container ship-full of freshly printed copies to be unloaded onto the Los Angeles docks (which just concluded a long and bad-for-books-and-other-goods strike) and soon the shortage of Arts B4 Breakfast will end (I myself have but a single dog-eared copy)

Also, you (but not my monkey) will be heartened to know that my manuscript for “Shut Your Monkey: How to control your inner critic and get more done” is in my (other) publisher’s hands and will be hitting the shelves this autumn. Thanks you everyone who sent me their monkey tales. They added delicious fodder to my book.

In sum, Spring is finally springing here in New York and many lovely new things are blooming. Details to follow.

Can you help me?

dannygregory44 Comments

I would love your help.

I am working on my next book. It is called ‘Shut Your Monkey‘ and is about the little voice in your head that criticizes and scolds and warns and limits you. It especially plagues creative people.

If you are familiar with this voice, would you mind sending me stories about how it has impacted you, how it may have stopped you from taking a particular path or interrupted your work.

I AM MOST INTERESTED IN SPECIFIC STORIES OF HOW THE MONKEY EFFECTED YOU, not just strategies for fighting it.

I would be most grateful to learn about your experiences and will protect your anonymity if you want me to.

Please email me your stories to danny@dannygregory.com.

Thanks!!

What rhymes with “Danny’s drawings?”

dannygregory11 Comments

I am so honored.

The poet Isabelle Barry invited a group of her colleagues at dVerse to write poems based on my drawings.  She also interviewed me to give some context for my work.

The interview is here.

Links to the poems are here.

Enjoy them — I did!

Vincent & the Monkey

dannygregory21 Comments

Long after his death, Vincent van Gogh has been diagnosed with everything from schizophrenia to syphilis. He may have been bipolar or epileptic, eaten too much paint or drunk too much absinthe. Did van Gogh hear the voice of the inner critic, that toxic monkey endlessly jabbering in his head? Certainly. He had plenty of problems and one or more of them led to the events of 27th of July, 1890, when he shot himself, in the chest, in a wheat field. He hung around for another day and a half, said, “The sadness will last forever” and died.

Van Gogh was 37 and he had been painting for just ten years. In that time he accomplished so much, producing hundreds of beautiful works of art that have influenced artists ever since. His life, short though it was, left ripples.

But what if he hadn’t cut his life so short? What if he had lived to 86 like Monet? Or 84 like Matisse? Or 91 like Picasso? What might he have accomplished if he’d lived a full and complete life? What paintings might now hang in museums? What directions might he have taken the art world? How might we all see differently than we do? Try to imagine all he never had the chance to imagine.

So much beautiful art has been made through the course of human history. But there is so much beautiful art that never was made, never sketched or painted or framed or hung. The monkey voice does the job of that pistol in Auvers-sur-Oise every day, cutting creative careers short, stifling ideas, throwing up roadblocks to new horizons. Every time the monkey forces a creative person to give up, the world is robbed of ideas that could lead to more ideas that could lead to answers and inspiration and gasps of delight.

The fact is, you can’t know what impact your work could have on the world. Don’t let the monkey decide for you.

My favorite ad campaign.

dannygregory30 Comments

I spent several decades marketing other people’s products. Banks, cars, soft drinks, hamburgers, shoes, jet engines. I got briefed by clients, came up with ideas to communicate their messages, then helped spend billions of their dollars to share these ideas on TV, magazines, the Internet, etc. I made commercials for the Super Bowl. I helped win “Ad Agency of the Year” twice. It was a great experience and I learned a lot, working with so many smart and talented people.

For the last year, I have been working on marketing a new product. But this time, it’s a product I helped invent and it has the ability to change lives, all around the world.

The product is a special kind of art school unlike anything else that existed. A place where different artists can share their experiences, their techniques, and their sketchbooks with students worldwide — using state-of-the-art technology, beautiful videos, and the vast reach of the internet.

We call it “Sketchbook Skool.” A name that’s not too serious and a little bit, well, unusual.

We don’t have millions of marketing dollars. And it turns out we don’t need them. Instead we have a really good product and a really good network. Loads of friends who believe, as we do, in the core idea behind the product: art for all. To encourage creative freedom. To help people everywhere to conquer old fears. To be supportive. To make the world a more beautiful place because we are all drawing and painting and sharing together.

“Art for all.” It’s not just a slick advertising slogan. It’s a dream, shared by thousands. And they help us share the word about this dream with the people they care about. That’s how we’ve ‘marketed.’

After our first year, Sketchbook Skool has exceeded our wildest imaginings. We have been joined by nearly two dozen teaching artists and thousands of students from every corner of the world. We have filmed klasses on four continents, from Stockholm to Sydney, Barcelona to Brooklyn. And together, we have started a movement that does much more than share drawings — we share our lives.

beer-canIf you are reading this, you are already part of the Sketchbook Skool family. Whether you are in one of our klasses, on our Facebook group, reading this blog or just taking the leap by starting to believe you can be more creative, you are with us.

Our next big dream is to truly spread “art for all” and grow the Skool beyond just this community of our immediate friends. Starting today, we are going to expand our marketing efforts in lots of interesting ways. We’re going to invite the whole world to join us through conversations, online, radio, tv, magazines, blogs, you name it.

And we invite you to spread the word and to lend your voice to our story. To share the simple joy of putting a pen to paper and the way it can change how you see everything around you. It’s all beautiful and you helped make it so.

Thanks again for making me look like a marketing genius.

Baby steps

dannygregory18 Comments

When I started working with Keith, I was not in great shape.  I had pains in my lower back, carpal tunnel syndrome, and chronic headaches. But I just grinned and bore these maladies. As far as I was concerned, these were just part of being me, aches and pains that I’d developed since I’d first started pounding on a computer all day, decades before — my imperfections, unfixable.

As for going to a trainer, well, that was all very well, paying someone to hold my hand while I walked around the gym, counting off reps, giving me encouragement, helping me build my biceps or lose a few pounds. Eventually, there were some meager results so I could take it or leave it.

Keith taught me otherwise. He showed the point of exercise is not six-pack abs or marathon times. It’s about making the most of the equipment we have for living out the rest of our days and that making certain little changes could make huge differences to my body and to my life.

We worked on tiny muscles hidden deep along my spine and  between my shoulder blades. We focussed on the exact angle of my tailbone when I crouched, correcting and re-correcting. We looked at the angle of my pelvis in the mirror. We rolled the fascia alongside my left thigh with rubber logs and built up strength in my right quadriceps.

After a few months, standing and moving in a balanced way became second nature. The unnatural way I had held my shoulders, my neck, my stance, were replaced with alignment.  Now if I hunched my shoulders or sat in a cramped and twisted way, my body told me something was wrong and I adjusted.

My headaches vanished. My hands no longer tingled. My feet, which had always splayed out like Charlie Chaplin lined up toe to heel. My carriage grew more and more erect. Jenny noticed that I was getting taller, soon by a couple of inches. I felt better all the time. And happier too.

For the first time, my relationship with my body changed because I saw what truly is. Not just a couple hundred pounds of annoying meat but an amazing machine that just needs to be tuned and maintained.

I discovered that my body is a miraculous system of complex interconnected processes that can be adjusted, honed, perfected. The way I was didn’t have to be the way I’d be. The unhealthy adaptations I’d made to certain chairs, desks, sidewalks, stresses, ways of standing, sitting, sleeping, were not carved in stone. And my assumptions about my physical being, that it was some sort of curse to be endured, an uphill battle that would always let me down, was nonsense. Being out of whack, behaving in ways that hurt me, limiting my ability, assuming that there was no solution — all these behaviors and thought patterns were replaced by balance and a better way of being.

For the first time, my relationship with my body changed because I saw what truly is. Not just a couple hundred pounds of annoying meat but an amazing machine that just needs to be tuned and maintained. Not for vanity but because of how it helps me live better and get the most out of each day. A few small adjustments in my body led to a change in my entire being. In my life.

Similarly, when I began to draw, I had no idea what seismic shifts this small change would cause in my life. Many of friends tell me that picking up a pen and opening up a sketchbook ultimately led them to change careers, travel the world, publish books, make new friends, new priorities, new plans for their remaining days.

Why? Why does this simple habit make such a difference? When you start to draw, you set things in motion. You start to see what is. Perhaps you’ll see beauty where you overlooked it. Perhaps you will fill books with stories about your life, an ordinary life, and suddenly see it is actually quite rich and wonderful. And perhaps the power of seeing so clearly will make you want to go and see more. And that desire will cause you, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows or Bilbo Baggins, to lock the door of your cozy little life and wander out into the wide world.

Maybe seeing clearly will show you that you have been hiding your true self from yourself, have been leading a life that wasn’t really what you wanted, that you could do more, that you could be more. That your childhood dreams are still valid, that your parents, your banker, your boss, your children can’t call all your shots. And that time is running out.

When you make art, you slowly brush the cobwebs from your inner life and sunlight starts to stream in. Who knows what it might reveal?

Maybe you will see that drawing is a thing that you actually can do even though the monkey has too long told you that you can’t, because you suck, because you have no talent or time. And, when you discover this power, you may come to wonder what else you have overlooked or deceived yourself about, what else you can do and be. Maybe you could paint or play the piano or visit Rome or hang-glide or open a store or be a clown or run for Prime Minister.  Or hire a trainer and get rid of your headaches.

This can be scary, feeling the first winds of freedom and change sweeping through the open door of your golden cage. But if you don’t face this fear from some angle, how can you ever see your life for what is and can be?

When you make art, you slowly brush the cobwebs from your inner life and sunlight starts to stream in. Who knows what it might reveal? Who knows what journey you are about to embark upon once you uncap that pen and take that first little step? Don’t you want to see?

Moonlighting before breakfast

dannygregory5 Comments

I just write an essay and made a little video for one of my publishers, Chronicle Books. Check it out!

My new book trailer!

dannygregory29 Comments

The awesome new trailer for my awesome new book! (Thank you, Manny!)
You can see even more cool stuff about my book on

Preorder yours today from your favorite bookseller:

And please feel free to share news of my new book with

  • friends
  • relatives
  • librarians
  • and the harried and time-pressed everywhere!
    #artb4bkfst

Smoky memories of setting myself on fire

dannygregory9 Comments

edw1. In this morning’s paper, I read Edward Herriman’s obit which mentioned that he had appeared in a play called Moonchildren by Michael Weller. That sounded familiar to me but I wasn’t sure why. Something to do with high school?

2. I googled “Moonchildren” and the initials of my high school. An article appeared from our school paper about the controversy around the school production because the play used obscene language. Listed among the cast: my name.

3. I found a copy of the play online, read through the characters and one of them stood out like a beacon. Norman, a character who declares he is going to set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War. I realized I still knew most of Norman’s lines by heart. I had played him at 1 5.

4. My high school paper also had a review of another play I was apparently in, Impromptu by Tad Mosel. I remembered this one vaguely. I played an idealistic and brave young man who tried to overcome the cynicism of the other characters.

5. Next to the review was an editorial I had written, excoriating the school’s administration for making students do janitorial work, especially when the unemployment rate was over 10%. Around that time, I had established a Marx-Engels study circle and was adamant about workers’ rights, particularly if violating them forced me to sweep the stairs with an uncomfortably short-handled broom.

Unexpectedly, Edward Herriman’s death had some unexpected repercussions on me as I contemplated the new year from my snug bed. The main one is a new vision of myself as an adolescent.

Though I often think back to those days, they are  a little hazy. I had just come to the USA a couple of years before, after several years speaking just Hebrew, before that go to a number of schools in Pakistan and Australia. I have always assumed that I was probably a hopelessly awkward dork lurking on the edges of the crowd. The fact that I had plum roles in four or five school plays and was usually chosen to play a naive, idealistic youth suggests something quite different about how I was viewed by the students and teachers. I am now starting to see that I was actually a part of a circle of artists, actors, and writers, a political idealist and a bit of a firebrand.

My point in starting off the new year with this story is not just to stroll down memory lane. To me, it’s about the importance of art-making, risk-taking, and preserving our cultural past. My little example shows us how art can crystallize who we are and how important it is to preserve that for the future, not just so we can create memoir, but so we can have a clearer sense of the inks between us, of the unreliability of memory, and that we never know when one insight will connect with another to create and reveal something new.

It is so important to allow our creative expression to go where it will, not to control it and lock it into the compartments and definitions we think suit it today. What I thought about art-making in general or particular at fifteen and what is think about decades later is one thing or another, but the art itself, as the Romans pointed out, is long while life is increasingly short.

Top 16 moments of 2014

dannygregory33 Comments

This has been a wild and unpredictable year that has taken me around the world and home again.   I sat down this morning with my calendar and recalled the best moments.

  1. Jan 4, Manhattan.  I screened footage I’d shot with my old pal, Tommy Kane. The week before, I’d slogged over to Tommy’s house in Brooklyn to shoot his klass videos for Sketchbook Skool.  It was a long and wonderful day, marred only by the rain hammering on the windows.  Filming this klass was the culmination of the years of videos I’d made with Tommy and Jack.  And the idea that I was working on this huge new project with old friends like Tom, Roz and Prashant, made me really happy, working with family on something I really loved.
  2. Jan 10, Downtown LA. In a moment of wonderful recklessness, I signed up for Clown School and spent several days with a group of complete strangers, revealing myself to them and to me.  It was an intense and transformative experience, breaking down my barriers and showing me I was capable of surprising things.
  3. Jan 15, San Francisco. I hopped on a plane north for the day to see David Hockney’s A Bigger Exhibition. Room after room of huge works by the master, colors, and risk taking that left me humbled.  I never tire of Hockney and he teaches me so much each time. I hope I am a quarter as creative and energetic at 80.
  4. Jan 19, Scottsdale. Jenny and I drove down to stay at the Arizona Biltmore to visit her family and give a talk at a conference.  That night we sat by a fire pit, sipped a beer, and watched the skies and I thought — how lucky I am. Being in this warm and wonderful place with my girl, getting new  people excited about drawing, this is what I want to be doing with my days.
  5. March 5, Los Angeles. I unfolded the boxes we had uses to ship our stuff from New York, set up a chair on the sidewalk, and drew the street I now live, whipping a big black Sharpie across the giant, battered sheets of cardboard.  Then I went back to my garage/studio and started an eleven-foot painting of my neighborhood, the first piece I’d ever done outside of my sketchbook since I’d started drawing again, many years ago.  I felt a new freedom and energy, using bright colors, big shapes, moving my brush with my whole painting.  Later that painting would decorate the walls of Jenny’s Venice office, and for the first time I felt like an artist,  expressing how I felt about my life for the world to see.
  6. April 4, the World. The first klass of Sketchbook Skool opened to maximum capacity. Two thousand students from around the world watched our first videos and started to upload their drawings. This was it!
  7. April 5, New York City. I taught a drawing workshop at the Open Center. It was sold out and many of the attendees had also just started at Sketchbook Skool the day before.  I hadn’t led the sort of workshop since the summer before in Rowe, Massachusetts, and it was so nice to be with people who wanted to learn, to create together, and to show them what I had learned. The cumulative affect of all these folks starting at SBS plus these great students here in person in the classroom was almost disorientingly wonderful.
  8. May 8, Fullerton, CA.  Tommy Kane was staying with us in LA and joined me for trip down to a college near San Diego. The school had a surprisingly great illustration program and loads of enthusiastic students and they asked me to come down and talk about my work. In the audience I also discovered a bunch of my other friends, Jane LaFazio and Brenda Swenson and many students from SBS.  Once again, I had this great cocktail of friends all together, real and virtual, old and new, all celebrating drawing together.
  9. May 12, Boston. Despite feeling like a fraud and an imposter, I gave two back-to-back presentations to thousands of people at the HOW Design conference about my ideas about the Inner critic. Amazingly, Shut Your Monkey was a hit and, immediately after, my editor came up to tell me we just have to turn the Monkey into book. I had a great time at the conference once the ordeal of the presentation was over, hanging with Stefan Sagmeister, and meeting Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell. The monkey’s fond of name dropping.
  10. Aug 4, Marfa, TX. Jenny and I realized a long-held dream, driving cross-country from LA to NYC. We stopped midway in this little farm town, which Donald Judd has turned into an art mecca. Sipping long-neck beers, watching the mysterious lights of Marfa, meeting new friends and listening to the train’s whistle, we made memories of a place I’d never known existed two days and at thousand miles before.
  11. Aug 24, NYC.  To celebrate the end of the official three-day Jenny’s Birthday weekend, Jack and I took her on a sunset cruise down the East River on a floating restaurant called the Water Table. As we ate lobster and watch the sunset over Manhattan, I felt a great wave of relief. Despite the wonderful adventures we’d had on the West Coast, it was so calming to be home again with my favorite girl and my tall boy floating past the greatest city of earth,
  12. Sep 21, Bejing.  There were so many wonderful and memorable days during my weeks in China, amazing meals, incredible art, and wild adventures.  I’ll pick one: drawing with a roomful of 8th graders, many mawkish and giggling, sweeping me back to my own days in junior high school when I started to lose my love of art-making for the first time,  as I  began to submerge under the pressure of adolescence. To revive the fun of drawing in these Chinese kids made me feel like my life had a real purpose and I felt incredibly fulfilled, so far from home.
  13. Oct 25, NYC. My partner Koosje and our dean of students, Morgan, came to stay with us in NY to talk about all things SBS.  We ended the visit with a massive drawing meet-up with students followed by a fakulty dinner at our house.  Once again I was struck by all we have done this year, the changes we’ve made to our lives, and the power of art to make us wiser and happier. It might have been the free-flowing bottles of of wine but I welled up at with awe and love for this community and my enormous good fortune at being a party of it.
  14. October 29, NYC. The first advance copies of my new book, Art Before Breakfast, arrives in the mail.  It looks amazing and more than I’d hoped.  It’s filled with art I’ve made over the past year in LA so for me it will always be a powerful memento of a wonderful time of change in my life.
  15. Nov 24, NYC. We asked the students of SBS to make videos describing their experience at the Skool.  I sat down to edit them together and was just so excited by what they’d made and said.That people would take the time and express such honest enthusiasm is more than I’d dreamt would happen when Koosje and I first talked about the Skool a year ago.  There have been ups and downs and loads of work and sacrifice  in this process but seeing these videos brought home to me why leaving my last job to focus on drawing and talking about art was probably not such a bad idea.
  16. Dec 4, Kutztown PA.  I have given lot of presentations about my work over the years but this time was really special.  We’d been invited by our old friend Ann who teaches at Kutztown and it was a crisp autumn day in a lovely town. Ann had put us up in a cozy B&B  and, after the long drive and lulled by the roaring fire place in our bedroom Jenny and I napped for an hour.  Then we popped up, headed to the campus, gave the talk to an enthusiastic room full of folks and went out to dinner. I felt loose, personable, myself — everything flowed. Maybe it was the lingering effects of clown school, or the kid energy in Beijing, or the expanding impact of the Grand Canyon or a sense of well-being that came from having a new book out and another on the way, or maybe it was being in a big room with friends and the girl I love, but it all came together and as I stoodd by the podium, I felt free and strong and right. And a strange feeling I realized was happiness.