Danny Gregory

My snazzy new camera arrived yesterday and when I got home from work, I went to the park and made this little film — watch it in HD for maximum pleasure!

I have a lot to learn about using this camera but it’s an amazing creative tool.

I’m kind of excited today because my new camera is supposed to be delivered tomorrow. It’s a pretty fancy one and acquiring it has entailed a long struggle with my internal demons. First of all, as one of my voice loudly declaims on a regular basis. I don’t really need a fancy camera. I have a smallish camera that I was very excited to get a couple of years ago and which takes perfectly good pictures.

But the real reason I’m getting this new supercamera is to make videos. And, yes, I have a couple of smallish video cameras that are perfectly capable of capturing a moving image and getting it onto YouTube, but I have a dream. The dream is of making videos about drawing, capturing what is beautiful in the world and how I and my friends get that beauty down on paper.  But I want to go way beyond the instructional films I’ve seen around, not just step-by-step, “this is how to paint a fruit bowl” sort of things but videos that are as beautiful as the process they record. After decades of making commercials for other people, I want to apply all of that experience to filming what I love really well. We’ll see how that turns out.

Anyway, so I have most of me convinced that this is a legitimate endeavor and use of my savings, but as I say it took a fair amount of self-doubt to get there. I don’t know about you, but when I find a new passion, I tend to spend a disproportionate amount of time researching what other people think and do with the same interest before I allow myself to make a commitment. And I can also do a lot of shopping for accessories and supplies and doodads before I actually get to work doing what I had originally set out to do.

I mean, it’s so much easier to shop for art supplies than to use them.

I think that’s why, when I first started drawing fifteen years or so ago, I imposed a lot of restrictions on myself, like only drawing with a Uniball in a not very fancy book. Then gradually, as a reward for my commitment, I let myself get a few grey brush markers, and then a few others, then some colored pens, then a better quality sketchbook and then a Rapidograph. That point took a couple of years to reach. I think if I had indulged my urge to shop any further I would have gotten into way more than I could handle. Instead of forcing myself to learn each medium well, I would have started to wrestle with complexities I didn’t understand and would have just gotten so bogged down and frustrated that I would have lost my will to go on.

Eventually, after allowing for gradual expansion and experimentation, I settled on the materials that work best for me and the way I choose to express myself right now. I know them well and know how they work, how they misbehave, were the pitfalls lie, how to make them sing fairly in tune.

Now, a new fancy camera with lots of knobs and buttons may prove frustrating or distracting. I can easily imagine that I could get sidetracked by the gizmo itself, spend lots of time reading its manual. working my way through all its menus, consulting with others, etc. But because I have  a goal in mind and am going to learn how to make the thing in my head rather than become a professional photographer who can handle any technical situation, I will be able to create something that will give me confirmation rather than frustration.

I think that’s so key in developing a new skill. Not endlessly playing scales or drawing perfect lines and circles, but getting right in there and expressing something that matters to you. That’s why illustrated journaling had kept my interest for so long, not because I am just studying drawing but because I am using drawing as a tool to learn about the world around me,  capturing the beauty of every day, discovering how I feel about the treasures that surround me.

So, hopefully, I will learn how to get this camera to make the images I see in my head, in a clearer deeper way than I ever have before. I will capture the emotions I feel in drawing, what makes the process beautiful and magical, will create scenes that will help inspire others too.

Failing that, well, I’ll hang onto the receipt.

Let’s face it, one of the most important parts of making things lies beyond our ability to control — other people’s reactions to our work. Right?
“Hey, mom, look what I made.” That’s wonderful, let’s hang it on the fridge.”
Or “What is it now? Can’t you see I’m on the phone?”
It’s one of the most difficult parts of being a creative person. Not the fun, satisfying, unfurling of an idea, but the cold crickets that confront it or the “yes, but” of the professional critic or the form rejection letter or worse the anticipation of rejection that stops the egg from ever even popping into the nest.
We may not make it for others but a work is not fully realized until it bounces off another’s eyeballs, vibrates their eardrums or rearranges some of the cells deep within their corpus callosum.
And praise can be as insufficient as a shrug. We don’t just want a pat on the head; we want connection, reaction, insight, something that makes us see what we made in a newer light or on a deeper plain. Knowing we moved someone else, revealed truth to them, reminded them of something we didn’t even know corresponded, that makes us love our work all the more. Love it and wonder at it, at the fact that we were the conduit for it, that something passed through us and then passed through another heart. It dissolves the loneliness of existence.
Ideally, our art is the truest manifestation of our conclusions about the nature of things and when someone else sees it and validates it and shares it, the power of that truth is reflected back on itself like an endlessly repeating mirror.
That’s why rejection hurts, because, yes, we feel our efforts are wasted, and, yes, that we don’t matter and, yes, we didn’t make a ripple on the surface of the earth, all true. But mainly because we wonder whether the magic we found is really magic, whether the revelation we thought so profound was just a single serving glimmer of something too puny and insufficient to be shared, a whistle in the dark, not a full-blown hallelujah chorus with kindred spirits chiming in.
The true value of acknowledgment isn’t registered in the ego; it’s the opposite, a breaking down of the barriers between creator and audience so that we can unite in a shared appreciation of something that lends beauty and meaning to the grinding metronome of the day. We see a glimpse of the heavens together, a view that appeared to one of us first but is now a canopy over us all.
It’s even true of a joke, a shared laugh, the quick bark of recognition that our minds thought alike, we saw the other’s insight, and we were able to escape together from the smooth ivory prison of our skulls for a moment.
When I hear from people who like my work, or more importantly found something in my work that made their day a little brighter, I like my work more too. And when a reader has an insight or can tell me of a particular sentence that strummed their strings, I have insight into where to go next, into what matters in what I’ve done.
And conversely, of course, if my work pulls up lame and doesn’t find much of an audience, I wonder where I went wrong or why I thought something was worth my time but proved not to be worth anyone else’s.
So to all of you who have read my books or thought about my work and then have had something either nice or, even better, something honest to say about it, thanks very much and please know that it’s those sticks and carrots that are the kindling for works ahead.