Applying myself

dannygregory9 Comments

For the last year or so, Jack has been applying to college. And so have I. Not literally (I wish) but I have agonized vicariously through every step of the way with him. I am proud of my boy and confident in his abilities but it is nerve-wracking nonetheless.

I described it to a friend recently: “It’s like hailing a cab to the airport for an important flight. As I settle into the back seat, I quickly realize that the driver is a recent immigrant who doesn’t know New York, has limited driving skills and not only doesn’t really know where the airport is but refuses to ask for directions. I can’t make him pull over and let me get in the driver’s seat and so can only sit on the edge of the back seat, hurling suggestions through the little window in the divider. Hopefully we’ll arrive before I miss my flight.”

Anyway, the basement of my building got mildly flooded a few months ago and my super has been urging me to go to the storage room and check on my stuff which may have gotten wet. As we were getting ready to set up our first Christmas tree since Patti left us, Jack and I finally went down there yesterday to look for all the decorations she’d stored and to pull all the rest of our stuff out. One box was a bit moldy but most of them were fine but, as the thought of all those things down in the basement has haunted my sleep for a while, we hauled them all up to our apartment. For a day or two, our Christmas tree is surrounded by cardboard boxes and plastic storage bins.

Rooting through the boxes, I came upon a folder containing the essays I’d written for my own college essays a million years ago, including my various letters of acceptance and rejection.   One essay seems apropos to share with you, so I reproduce it here, without all the XXXed out sections and marginalia (how the hell did we write on typewriters back in the day?). Bear in mind, this was written by a 17 year-old me, and yet it seems to foreshadow where I am today, 34 years later.

I find those activities that interest me the most deal with self-expression in one way or another.  In the past year or two, the fine arts have intrigued me as a form of self-expression and the bulk of my time is spent improving my drawing skills.

This summer I went to the pre-college program of the Rhode Island School of Design and there began a transition. My painting instructor revealed to me the great amount of literature on painters, their works and their environments, and I slowly realized, unconsciously at first, but eventually with greater clarity and understanding, that I was, in fact, getting a great deal more satisfaction from reading about the paintings than from looking at them. I believe it is easier for me to appreciate that which is more obvious in a form of expression and presented with the full awareness by the creator.

As an artist, I created things that had very little value other than an aesthetic one, for I did not understand much about the presentation of ideas in painting and the power of certain combinations of color, form, shapes, texture, and other techniques and dimensions. I found that in producing a meaningful piece of art, one had first to feel the force of the idea, then transcribe that force into another form, even another language, that of the colors and shapes that appear on the canvas.

 

On the other hand, the writer, I thought, does not go through that step, but simply records his ideas on paper in a one-to-one reproduction. He must be more specific than the painter, and his ideas more clear, so the writer appears to blatantly present the same message to every reader. The painter leaves his work to individual interpretation. This became a stumbling block. But as I began to read more, I realized that the written word too, has many levels of understanding, and a good writer must be able to be clear and unclear the same time, so his words evoke images which are purely personal for the reader.

The idea of being able to work on these many levels, to create work that makes the reader stop and wonder, outweighed the satisfaction of creating a painting that people could simply pass by. For when one reads, one ignores one’s immediate surroundings and enters a world of the author’s creation. It takes a certain commitment to read a book, a commitment to give that author a chance to persuade or entertain you. A painting, on the other hand, is hung among hundreds of others and does not have the same chance to grab the viewer and whisk them off into the creator’s world. One may go to a museum and look at all the paintings in one day, as so many people do, but who would consider reading all the books in a library one Sunday afternoon?

Thus I have begun to devote myself more to the creation of colorful words than of colorful colors, although I still return occasionally to my paints. I look forward to the day when I shall be able to find a proper balance to allow equal expression in words and paint.

Interesting that I have continued to slide back and forth across from expressing myself in words and pictures through all these subsequent years, finding as I have at last a happy meeting point in the art of the illustrated journal.

RISD will announce its decision on Jack’s application on the 15th of December. Till then, we wait with bated breath.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Update on our film

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Just got this mail from the Red Hook Film Festival:

Hi Danny – Just a quick update – we are planning to open the Red Hook Film Festival with your film! (Red Hook-A portrait of Tommy Kane). It will screen on Saturday October 15th at 1pm in our opening block.

The schedule is up at our myspace page right now, and will be on the website tomorrow.

Our MySpace page:

This year’s festival will take place on October 15th and 16th, 2011 at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition (BWAC) screening room, which is located at 499 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, 11231. That’s at the very end of Van Brunt Street, across from the Fairway Supermarket.

Jack and I invite everyone who can make it to Brooklyn to the Festival. It should be a blast!

To El and Back: a film about Butch Belair

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We just completed the next sketchbook film —it’s about Butch, my pal who’s a famous photographer, then became a 3-D illustrator and then, a couple of years ago, took up watercoloring in a small book. He excels in every medium. You can see more of his work. here and here.

Tommy Kane and I have gone on a few sketchcrawls with Butch. I generally finish up my drawing in half an hour, Tom keeps crosshatching for an hour, but Butch can just sit, hunched over his books for a solid day and then come back the next day to keep going. He’s a monster.


You may remember Butch from my last book, An Illustrated Life. When I interviewed him he said:

“I usually draw alone in my car. Very few people know I am doing it. I think I may be hiding somewhat, in the car. Having people watch while I do it would be a bit of a buzz-kill. Don’t tread on my zen, man.

Sometimes I will drive to a place that has caught my attention in the past. But usually, I just get in my car and try to get lost. When I see something that has a story to tell, I stop. I try to record what it is that I see, and somehow fuse the feeling of being there in my memory.

I tend to view these places as stage sets, just after the Play has been performed. In science, there are certain phenomena that cannot be seen or directly recorded (black holes for example). Scientists only know they exist by observing their effect on the objects that can be seen. For me, people are one of these phenomena. Actors that have left the stage. I may be attracted to the evidence in the details of buildings, or an arrangement of structures that would suggest the people or generations of people, that have passed through and made their mark.

Finding a place to park is also very important in selecting a site.

And the light. Light is also very important to me. Representing the quality of the light in a scene is something I struggle with. It is probably a big part of what attracts me to a place, so learning how to achieve this would be very satisfying. Learning to do it quickly would be a huge conquest for me. Even when I feel I am onto something, more often than not, it takes me so long to do one of these sketches that the light has changed drastically by the time I’ve finished.”

Butch is usually a man of few words and his paintings remind me of Edward Hopper, so we tried to make the film feel like it was made a long time ago, a hard-bitten time when New York city was strung with elevated trains like this one in Brooklyn.

Tom and I planned this film out for a couple of weeks, discussing the look of the film, lenses (we ended up using a 14, a 50, and the old trusty 100 macro), locations, and the best way in which we’d capture and condense Butch’s marathon sketching sessions. The weather toyed with us a lot too, but we were blessed with a perfect morning and managed to get the film in the can by early afternoon of the first day of shooting.

Here’s the final product. Amazing.

Here are our shooting boards. We deviated from them a fair bit but they were a really helpful road map:

Unfortunately, Jack, my boy and usual collaborator, could only consult from afar. He had to take the SATs on the morning we shot. He was very helpful through post-production, as was Tom and my friend JJ. They all helped curb my tendency to make things fancy and we ended up with a taut little film I really like.

I hope you enjoy it too.

Red Hook in the Red Hook Film Festival

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We were just invited to submit our last film tor the Red Hook Film festival. Next stop … Cannes!

Our next sketchbook film, “To El and Back” should be debuting here and on Vimeo in the next few days. It’s the best one yet. Stay tuned!

A new drawing film: Red Hook

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(This film was shot, and is best viewed, in full-screen HD. If there’s  a problem, you can go to it directly on Vimeo here.)

A few months ago I decided I wanted to make a series of films about illustrated journaling. Not a how-to, step-by-step sort of thing but films that capture the adventure of drawing, the discovery, the spirit, the fun. I hope they will inspire you to make drawings (and films, if you want) and to keep an illustrated journal as a regular part of your everyday lives.

My son, Jack Tea, has joined me in this project and together we have worked through lots of technical obstacles to make films that look as good as we can make them on no budget. Our inspiration comes from the Cooking Channel, from Etsy’s vlog, and from too many decades of loving movies.

We shoot on our Canon 7D, rent different lenses each weekend (in this case we relied heavily on the 100/2.8 L IS Macro), use Jack’s skateboard as a dolly, and rope our friends in for help and opinions.

Here’s the newest film in the series, a portrait of my great friend, Tommy Kane, as he rides around his neighborhood in search of something new to draw. Tom is a great traveller — he regularly posts sumptuous journal pages made on his vacations and business trips. His favorite home-away-from-home is Korea and he has made many amazing drawings on its streets and in its markets.

This time, we decided he should travel through his own neck of the woods, see it anew like a visiting stranger and capture a mundane little corner and fill it with his particular brand of magic. Normally Tom works mainly on site, dragging out all of his materials onto the pavement around his little folding stool but instead we decided to expand the scene and show you some of Tom’s home and studio and incidentally some of the wonderful big paintings he’s done on canvas. (He took the unusual step of using a reference photo he shot of the scene to jog his memory once back at his studio).

When journaling, he works in Uniball, watercolor and pencil, sometime in books, sometimes on loose sheets of bond or watercolor paper. He is a meticulous crosshatcher and spend hours on some of his drawings.  When we draw together, I invariably start to chafe at the bit and beg him to finish at home as I am tired of sitting in his shadow, my own drawing long finished and yellowing on the page, glazing over as he crosshatches more and more details.

We shot the film in two days — on the streets of Brooklyn and in Tom’s home where his lovely wife, Yun, made us lunch and watched our obsessiveness with a bemused smile.  It was the height of a baking summer and storm crowds rolled in and out, marring our continuity.

We shot an extravagant amount and it took a month to wade through it all and pare it down. The first cut was twice as long as what you’ll see today, but we resharpened our blades and ruthlessly trimmed back to the bare essentials. We tried to retain the essence of how Tom works, the way he layers media and adds detail. It’s fascinating to see how his drawing builds and builds — when you see the final result, it’s often hard to figure out how he got there. With this film, please share in how the journey unfolds.

Jack Tea in Europe

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Here are some pages from Jack’s recent travel sketchbook. He drew them with  Uniball and Sharpie with occasional hits of watercolor in a big Moleskine. He also enjoys the use of salty language and occasional nudity. Oh, and he had a broken arm.


From the Eye of Irene

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It’s 7 a.m. Everything is very, very quiet except for the pitter patter of rain and occasional whooshes of wind. The city still seems to be alive though. Saw two guys walking happily down the street (umbrellaless), one taxicab (available), one cop car.
Woke up to minor leaking under the french doors, quickly cleaned up with a towel. We have lots of batteries, bottles of water, and cold cuts in the fridge. Other than that, our fears of “Katrina II – N.Y. edition” are fading, though the TV keeps yammering that even worse conditions will hit us in the next two hours.
Yesterday, I heard a guy say into his cell phone, “No, I am getting ready. I’m going to fill up all the glasses in my apartment with water.”
Plan to spend the rest of the morning drawing, drinking tea and eating cold cuts.

Paris and Rome

dannygregory43 Comments

My boy Jack and I had a fantastic time in Paris and Rome. We saw every inch of both towns and took a night train in between. Eight days of croissants, pasta, art, sunshine, laughter, and lots of drawings:


I didn’t really think before I left and just took my book and a fountain pen. Fortunately, Jack remembered to pack my old Windsor Newton watercolor set. I haven’t used these paints in ages and seeing them on the page made me feel like I had stepped back a decade. My colors look faded and dull after a couple of years under the care of Dr. Martin and his wee bottles of transparent technicolor magic. I pushed them and the Niji waterbrushes as hard as I could but they don’t have that gem-like pizzazz I yearn for.

Anyway, it  was still loads of fun and Jack was an awesome travel companion and even more fervent a devotee of the travel sketchbook than his old man. You can read all of my ramblings on the pages below — just click the thumbnails and they’ll spring into big images.

I’ll post some scans of Jack’s pages soon.

Welcome to Paris 
Notre Dame in the rain
Touristas Eiffel
Parisian critters
Aphrodite
Blind Contours
Louvre courtyard
Sleeping boy
Last day in Paris
Mes Pieds
Train to Rome
Piazza Navona
Domes of Rome

Some drawing instruction

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John Ruskin set down the principles of drawing and they are captured in this website. There’s also a set of rather dry classes on video here. I haven’t delved fully into them but they seem sort of interesting.

New stuff

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– We finished filming our second drawing movie. This one was a bit more ambitious and may take some time to edit.
– The first draft of my next book is almost done. We’ve had some back and forth on the size of it which has meant redesigning the pages but I am happy with where it has ended up. Though sad in places, it is my favorite book so far and I hope you like it too.
– Jack and I are going on a brief European tour soon. Packing has begun.