Back from Beantown

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Jack and I took a brief break from New York with 75 hours or so in Boston. Neither of us had ever spent time there before —though with the torrential Nor’Easter dumping all over New England, I’m not sure we saw it at its best. We trained up there, stayed in Cambridge and managed to see Harvard (infinitely inferior to my alma mater, of course), its art and natural history museums, then visited the Institue of Contemporary Art and the Science Museum. We saw some movies, had some nice meals, played cards,talked, and drew in our journals. I broke out my watercolors for the first time in ages, and Jack bore down on his dip pen.

It was a refreshing break after a very sad week, giving us some distance and perspective, as well as a chance to start our lives as a smaller family. Drawing was a relief to both of us, a feeling that we were making something out of the nothingness, and seeing a new place with fresh eyes. Our journal pages will be a landmark for us, the first fresh pages we are turning over, with many blank ones ahead to fill.

One thing I hadn’t anticipated: Patti was always the first person to read my journal pages after I finished them. Somewhere in Boston, it occurred to me that I write for her to read and that she  wouldn’t read them, ever again. But then I realized I will always write for her, she will always be my favorite reader.

Patti’s passion

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Dear Friends:

As you have heard, my wife Patti passed away last week.

She was a lovely, creative person who gave me strength, inspiration, ideas and love. She was always extraordinarily positive — despite what the pathetic initial media reports may have told tell you.

A couple of days ago, our friends put together a lovely tribute to her memory. Hundreds of people jammed the place, singing songs, sharing stories, crying, laughing, and celebrating her life and approach to it. There was a huge crowd out on the street  waiting their turn to get in to share the festivities. She touched so many, and the spheres of her influences all came together on Wednesday nigh:  school friends, librarians, fashionistas, moms, dads, kids, chefs, florists, all celebrating the bright perspectives and willingness to take risk with which she infected them all. There were many people who were professionally creative— artists, musicians, photographers, authors, directors, ad folk — but also lawyers, doctors, accountants and stay-at-home moms whose creative juices were stirred by Patti’s inspiration  I was never prouder of her.

Everyday Matters was the fruit of our family’s mission to celebrate our daily gifts in the face of the random crap life throws at us. That mission grew from Patti’s heart. The fact that she has gone does not diminish the importance of this mission to me and to all of us. Life is wonderful. Its riches don’t lie in bank accounts or career success, power or fame. We just need to look around us, at the beauty of a wrinkled orange skin, the ray of sunshine across a wooden table, the curve of a napping pet, an abandoned shoe, a building against the sky. To reap those riches, I use a pen and a small book. I meditate on what I see, and transcribe that reflection in my book.  The lines I make, sometimes sure and sharp, sometimes wobbly and vague, are the deposit I make in my account, the way I capture life’s true rewards and value.

In the days following Patti’s death, I lost my appetite, my ability to sleep, my concentration, my will. I hesitated to pick up a pen. Nothing seemed to matter, let alone the everyday. But then, after some time spent staring into space, I began again to draw. And I must and will continue. Drawing brings me meaning. To abandon it would betray Patti’s memory and myself.  I hope that if you are hesitating to draw, beating yourself up because you’re not good enough, telling yourself you have no time to spare, feeling distracted and down,  remember that, though life can be plucked from us at any moment, it is  full of wonder and beauty. Keeping an illustrated journal is the perfect way to capture and treasure the gems that lie all around us.  A few minutes a day make it all worth while.

Patti  made things all the time, knitting, sewing, singing, making collages, gifts, drawings, paintings, flower arrangements, photos, and more. Creativity was her passion and she loved people who loved to create. I hope you will help to keep her love and spirit alive.

Your pal,

Danny

Posted in Art

A night I'll never forget

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Last night we had the most extraordinary memorial tribute to Patti. There were over 200 people attending and people had to wait outside to get in. There was singing and story telling and orchids and roses and the most love I have felt in my life.

My joke with the many friends who helped to plan the evening was that we should have a party so fantastic that Patti would be really mad she wasn’t there. The evening was that and much more … and Patti did attend — her spirit was very much alive all night.
Jack and I talked when we’d come home and both felt the same thing: that the horrible void we’ve had since last Thursday has been replaced by a peaceful knowledge that we are going to be alright because so many, many people loved Patti and us and will always be there for us, making sure we don’t go off the rails.
Thank you everyone who was there and to the many others who sent us messages of peace and support. We are very fortunate.

Patti

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Thank you all for your wonderful messages of support. You can share more on this special tribute page on Facebook.

Old Mad Men

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Tom Kane and I started working together in 1984 (!). We were junior ad men at a now-defunct New York  agency. Decades later, we are drawing-buddies, not colleagues; when we hang out, we occasionally reminisce about our careers and how things have changed over the years. Last weekend, we set up a couple of cameras while we sat around and recorded our chat about bygone days. If you remember stat machines or sending out for type or hand-drawn layouts  anything about design and production before everything went digital, you might enjoy this conversation. We did.

Old Mad Men. Part 1.

Old Mad Men. Part 2.

Old Mad Men. Part 3.

Glasses

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When I was little, it seemed everyone had glasses.
My mother. My grandparents. My relatives. My friends.
I thought they made people look cool or more grownup. So if I wanted to become one or the other or both, I had to get my own glasses.
When I was fourteen, I told my mother I was getting headaches and thought I needed glasses. She took me to the doctor. As he looked into my eyes with a gizmo, I crossed them slightly.
“Amblyopia,” the doctor told my  mum. “Strabismus. Heterotropia. Something like that. His eyes are slightly crossed. He needs glasses.”
I spent a long time picking out frames. When my glasses finally arrived, I put them on excitedly.
A week later, my mum asked me where they were. “Why aren’t you wearing your glasses? They were expensive.”
I didn’t want to tell her they gave me a headache and so, conveniently, I’d lost them.
A decade later, I married a girl with glasses. I got in-laws with glasses. Then I had a son. He got glasses too.
In my mid-forties, I started getting headaches again. I could only read in bed with the lamp on. I had a tough time with restaurant menus. My friends called it “short arm syndrome.” Someone lent me a pair of drugstore glasses. I was amazed at how much better I could see. It had been so gradual but it was beyond denying. Presbyopia.  A gradual thickening and loss of flexibility of the lens inside my eyes that makes it tough to focus on things that are near.
I like my glasses for what they do for me. I am less thrilled about what they say about me. Welcome to middle age.
So far, I don’t wear my glasses when I draw. I can see what I’m drawing without them, and not being able to see the page clearly is fine. I know what I’m making. And there’s the added pleasure of putting on my glasses when I’m done, to examine the lines on the page as they really look.
My eyes have brought me a lot of pleasure. I count on them to make a living, to make art, to watch my wife brush her teeth. And I’ll need them for a while to come. I hope.  But nonetheless, they are changing. A reminder that every day, so am I.  And so is everything I see.

Oblique Strategies

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A couple of days ago, Jack and I went to hang out with a friend of ours while he works on his latest album. He was spending a week or two in a giant recording studio on the West Side. It was Saturday but he had a bunch of engineers huddled in the booth while he sat alone in this gigantic space and laid down bass tracks. During a break, he explained that it was one of the last of the great studios, built in the ’70s, an enormous space with warm acoustics, where lots of classic albums had been recorded.

It seemed a unusual place to find my friend, who is famous for cutting edge electronic music and dance tunes. I’ve usually experienced his works in progress as MP3 files that arrive in my email box, songs that are reworked and morphed over the years. He generally works alone and surrounded by computers. But here he is in this creaky wooden yurt of a room that looks like a sauna and feels like the end of an era.

He told us that he was trying to record an album using no electronic instruments, no effects, a string section, and even the electric bass he was laying down would ultimately be replaced by a standup. He asked if I’d ever heard of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. I nodded but then admitted I hadn’t. He said that Eno had a made up a deck of cards each of which had some instruction or limitation which you’d follow to turn your work in a new direction. It had inspired him to try something completely different. It reminded me of a film called the 5 Obstructions in which Lars Van Trier has Jorgen Leth make and remake a film according to various rules he’d give him. It was one of the things that inspired me to think of ways to shock my own system when I draw, to challenge myself to work in very particular ways or with various limbs tied behind my back. It’s the idea behind the Everyday Matters challenges, to provoke you into a direction you’d never considered, trying something that may be uncomfortable but which opens a door.

Creativity is all about fresh perspectives, about finding the truth and seeing what’s really there. You have to break out of the box you’re in and get things moving — even if that means tricking yourself. Sometimes you have to draw with your eyes closed to see clearly. Sometimes that means standing on your head, or drawing with a Sharpie, or using your left hand — or turning off the computer and getting in a string section.

Hangin with nekkid folks

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Jack and I took up life drawing a couple of months ago. Virtually every Tuesday we go to a basement in Soho and spend two or three hours drawing a  model or two. When the weather is freezing and we are bored with drawing things in our apartment or in photo books, it’s nice to have something new and challenging to sketch. But there are all sorts of drawbacks too.

The process has forced me to break my habit of drawing only in ink in small books. I now have a huge sketch pad and boxes of graphite sticks and conte crayons and a new appreciation for erasable media.The whole process is very different form my usual process; sort of student-y and contrived and academic, with lots of negative associations about right and wrong ways to do things. Maybe it’s putting me back into a beginner’s mind, but the worse sort of self-conscious feelings of ineptitude rather than a fresh tabula rasa.

Drawing from life forces one to think about drawing quite differently. The human body is so familiar and so strange; one can detect any flaw in the proportions of  a drawing immediately and yet it is hard to know intuitively how to draw the curve of  a calf or the length of a forearm. There is no substitute for simple, intense observation.

The drawings end up having little value to me. They are not observations from life really and the subjects themselves have no meaning to me. I find much more emotion in my drawings of apples or chair legs in my home than in these studies.

Watch this video tour of some of my life drawings and you’ll sense the critical way in which I look at them. I dont know if we’ll keep doing this when the weather gets warmer, it’s really up to Jack who seems to enjoy the experience ( not surprising — he’s a fifteen year-old boy who gets to sit with his dad and stare at naked bodies all evening) but often ends up getting bored after a couple of hours and ends up drawing just details of bodies or staring into space. He is extremely good at drawing under these circumstance ; even though he’s the youngest person in the room by a mile, his drawings are usually among the best.

I’d also like to recommend Walt Taylor’s self-published book “Naked People and the people who draw them“which has been very inspirational and shown me how far I have yet to go. I urge you to check out the book, buy it, and support an extraordinary and unheralded artist.

Arkansas

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Photo on 2009-10-23 at 19.25I am on the plane home from a whirlwind trip to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) annual conference in Hot Springs. I was invited to speak about drawing to a group of several hundred brilliant creative people and the honor was all mine. Last year I addressed the conference in Nashville and it was so great to get people who design and build things for a living back in touch with drawing, the very skill that first inspired them to become architects but which so many have  neglected in favor of computers.

Unfortunately I was unable to play all of my videos for the folks in Hot Springs, most of which are posted here on my YouTube site. I am so grateful I was invited to this conference and hope to have the chance to talk to more architects (and doctors and teachers and just about anyone who needs to get back in touch with their creativity).

P.S. This is the first time I have made  a post while 15,000 feet in the air — hope it works!