http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fdannygregory%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F430708&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf
Art-alternatives.com sent me the biggest sketchbook I have ever seen. It is almost 700 pp. long, weighs 8 lbs, and is quite spectacular. We made a little film to show you what an effect it had on my family.
By the end of the week, the book will be available online from Artist & Display or by calling 1 800-722-7450. It will also be sold through art stores — for the nearest one, look at the dealer locater on the site.
—–
Not giant enough? Check out this one!
School for Evil – exploratory
Toward the end of Fall semester of my sophomore year, I found a small reading room deep within the bowels of my college library. It was called “The Somebody or Other Memorial Hunting and Fishing Library” and was almost always unoccupied. Its walls were lined with glass cases of leather bound editions of Izak Walton on angling and assorted dusty memoirs of African safaris and was furnished with a few oak table and soft-bottomed leather wing chairs It was a hidden treasure, my very own study, and the perfect place to while away the winter evenings. Like much of the school, the Hunting and Fishing library was criminally overheated and, after a day of lectures and an evening of French irregular verbs, I would often nod out against the comfortable soap-oiled embrace of the armchair.
One afternoon I awoke from a sweaty dream to discover that my sanctum sanctorum had been invaded; several other students had crept in while I was dozing. Embarrassed at being discovered in oblivion with my head thrown back and my mouth open and drooling, I pretended to have been lost in thought not the arms of Morpheus, grabbed my notebook and began to write the first thing that came to my pen.
This proved to be a story called “Under the Awning,” a funnyish and appropriately surreal tale of a man and a girl sheltering from the rain. Ten or so pages tumbled out of me in a flash and was published, unedited in the school literary magazine. Rereading it now, I am surprised by the unfamiliar voice of my deep unconscious and the carefree turns of phrase and plot it took.
Early this June, while walking up Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, an idea whacked my brain with the same sort of thunder bolt immediacy. It was a title of a novel, The School for Evil” and the essential elements of its plot. The whole thing struck me as from the clear blue — I haven’t written much fiction since I was in my twenties and the the idea was so developed already that I decided to pursue it. Over the next nine weeks or so, I wrote a couple of drafts of this 200 page novel, polishing it off by Labor Day.
Part of the idea was to write short chapters — fifty of them in all — and to illustrate each one with an ink painting. I drew the first ten or so and showed them to some friends. At the time, I thought the book was for children, probably ones a little younger than Jack, and wanted it to be a little shocking, a little brutal (think Edward Gorey, Lemony Snickety, Roald Dahl), and as funny and absurd as I could make it. I showed the drawings around to friends and the first ones were judged to be a bit scary — some people thought that was a fine thing, others felt they were too edgy for pre-teens. I took a second pass at the drawings and this time made them cartoony and a bit silly. I went on to make a couple dozen in this style.
While I rather doubt the book will ever be published, the process was very interesting and informative. Working from my imagination rather than just my experience was a refreshing change; writing fiction and then drawing made-up scenes was so far from the documentary journaling and non-fiction work I usually do and it opened new hidden doors in my head.
Brush Twice a Day
Maybe I’m my own worst enemy. Or maybe I just love being a novice. Or maybe I’m bored too easily. But if I gaze back on the course of my passage across the infinite drawing landscape, I look like a veering drunkard, swerving between POVs, pens, paper, subjects, experimenting like Dr. Hyde. When I talk to people I know who are successful professional illustrators, they seemed to have done all this experimentation back in art school and then settled on a style, a technique and a set of tools long ago, so their work is predictable and knowable — that’s what make it commercially viable. When it comes to tools and techniques, I tend to be a serial monogamist. For a while I was madly in love with drawing with grey markers and white pencils on butcher paper. Then I was passionate about using the teeniest possible Rapidograph point on watercolor paper in the smallest size Moleskine, colored with water colors. I went through a period of just doing comic strips in pencil and shades of grey ink. I have always liked the effect of rough, indifferent or spidery marks, splattered with ink, grubby, and wild. In part, that’s a necessity because I am impatient and incapable of neatness. But I like it in others too, from Ronald Searle to Francis Bacon.
My newest journal is big, about 8″ x 12″. Normally I would never use such a large journal because it’s too big for my scanner. Now I’ve decided not to care. Its paper is pretty crummy, too, just ordinary stuff you’d cram into a Xerox machine– the ink easily bleeds through it. And I am not using a pen — just a plastic brush which I dip in a bottle of sumi-ink. It’s a waterbrush but it’s too clogged for the reservoir handle to work properly so I dip it in a puddle of drinking water which I pour on the pavement in front of me. And instead of writing careful, ornate captions with my dip pen I just write some sort of crappy looking note with the brush on the opposite page.
As I describe all this, I wonder is it a matter of some sort of artistic self hatred that’s making me work in this slovenly way? Or am I bored? But no, I really like the feeling of freedom I get from slashing at the page in this way. The drawings have yet to reach any sort of aesthetic that I am completely pleased with but I feel nice and loose and unfettered. I don’t care if the pages are perfect ( I had been becoming so anal in my last book that I was drawing less and less, rarely having the time or mood to be so deliberate) and I like how they are warped and winkled. This may be a summer fling but it’s already forming sweet memories.
Unpacking the Impressionists
Last night I woke up way too early, at 5 a.m. and ended up watching TV. PBS was broadcasting a program that dramatized the lives of the impressionists. It was like the O.C. except about 19th century French painters. Cezanne was a miserable wretch who never sold any paintings and had impregnated his peasant model and had a son whom he kept secret from his father who was forever badgering him about getting a real job.
Cezanne: But, Papa, I am redefining the relationship between color and form! Papa: Zut! Does it pay well?
Monet was embroiled in an affair with a married woman who refused to divorce her husband for Catholic reasons. Manet was dying of something throughout the episode and finally croaked. The most outstanding aspect of the show was the various artists’ looks and cool facial hair. The young Monet had a long, wild goatee and then grew and enormous bushy white beard. Renoir had John Lennon- style round dark glassses; Cezanne had a Gen-X scruffy beard and wore wild hats and berets.
Oh, and there were a few paintings tossed in for good measure.
——
P.S. Apparently it’s for sale on DVD here.
Comic 'Cavation
April 16, 2007
My approach to drawing these is a little unorthdox. I whack the page into shapes I find interesting and then just draw one thing sitting in frontof me after another. Sometimes I write down what people are saying, sometimes I make it up. Sometimes I only come up with an idea days after I’ve done the drawings, generally because the blank speech balloons are annoying the hell out of me. 
I was also a little inspired by the master, Hergé, whose Tintin comics have been tantalizing me since I was a wee one. Oh, and I drew these in a bigger watercolor moleskine. Sume ink, blah, blah, blah.Making Today Matter
I drew this comic and then, without thinking, filled in the balloons. Somehow it seems right to me but it may just be crap. Whatever.
I am far away from home and have been for ten days. I am also working on a project that is loaded with stress; it is very important to my client and to my agency and I am working with people I haven’t worked with before. It also involves a lot of thorny technical issues, an obscenely large budget, and despite our tests and research, we are none of us sure exactly how it will turn out.
So much of what I am doing is tied up with the issue of trust, with how I perceive how my colleagues are doing their jobs. As we all proceed on something that none of us has ever exactly done before, this group of strangers, charged with something that, reportedly, could cause many people to lose their jobs if it fails, we are all a little tense.
A lot of the time, I worry I am falling apart. I thought I had congested lungs at one point and bought an expectorant. I thought I might have a sinus infection but the pain and stiffiness kept moving around my skull. I have had a burning stomach, sleeplesness, a sore ankle, a sore knee, a pimple, and a two day headache that keeps clenching the left side of my neck and the back of my skull.
My hypochondria has been pretty much in remission for the past six months or so, but in the last week it has given me a heart attack, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, mellanoma, an ulcer, and a knee replacement.
One of the people I am working with told me, “I have a copy of your book and I can’t get past page two. Every time I pick it up I say, ‘Who is this person who wrote this book? He bears no resemblance to the person I am working with’.”
This is the picture of a person who has done one drawing, a small one of a video camera, in the past ten days. Instead of my usual five mile walk, I haven’t had the time to walk more than a block on my own. The primary moments of brightness I have each day are when I call home and speak to my wife and son. Otherwise, it is a seven-day-a-week ordeal, usually a dozen or more hours a day and then room service and bed.
I’m sure by now you are sickened and repelled by this vision of me. Why am I sharing it with you? Why am I painting this extreme and unattractive portait of myself?
Perception is not reality.
I’m not sure what is. I can see myself in this way –tense, lonely, mortal –and as I contemplate it, it manifests more and more. Everything is seen through this aperture, everything is about extremes and burden.
But I can also take a bath, some Extra Strength Tylenol, a Heineken, some La Boheme, and the knots uncoil, and I luxuriate in the moment. I am not lonely but alone, master of my own schedule and more importantly, my own perception. The air outside is warm, the night is still, the beer is cold, my headache has been replaced with a calm buzzing as my neck grows smooth and limber. The pain is past, the tension not even a memory.
My mind is so powerful.
It colors my world, sometimes blue or black, sometimes yellow or rosy pink. It sees what it chooses to see. It can reduce a day to a battle field or reveal the lifelines in a wilting lettuce leaf. My mind is my spiritual guide and my most savage persecutor.
When I draw, my mind sits at my elbow. It wants to comment on every line and angle, pointing out the flaw, expressing skepticism about how the whole will come together. It can tell me how much worse my work is than that of anyone I admire or how far it falls short of the goals I set.
But with a certain stoicism, born of experience, I can muzzle my mind. I can grow deaf to its judgments about the line I’m watching my pen make. I can postpone any verdict, until I have capped my pen or until the ink is dry, or until I’ve seen it again the next morning, or in a month, or never at all.
My ego is vast.
It is rippling with muscle and micro-controlling. It helps me pass verdict on the work I am doing and those who are working for me. It is being paid to be here, or so it tells me. It has been given the responsibility for keeping my project on the rails. That judgment is so critical, it tells me. There is no time for laughter or frivolity or any sort of looseness –so much hangs in the balance.
And yet, despite its good intentions, my judgment is flawed because it is so unyielding. There are no absolutes, there is no reality, there’s no such a thing as great commercial, a great drawing, perfection, just moments in which this judgment prevails, moments which can pass and be replaced by other opinions, no more absolute, no more perfect.
What matters is Now, not what we imagine will be.
Do I want a Now that is gripped with tension, with fear of failure, with crippling judgment? Or can I just enjoy the sensation of being Me, of being Here, of doing Right, of being Alive?
This is reality. And now it’s passed, replaced with another. I can only live here, despite what my mind, my ego, my fears may tell me. I can only be here, now. It’s a small, achievable ambition.
And now my headache is gone.
Written and not re-read under the influence of a Heineken and a California moon.
Jack Ckomicks
My comic drawing style is still developing. I’ve given myself three handicaps: I’m drawing small, with a brush, and from my imagination. Despite my reservations about my drawings, I do like the look of these wee moleskine pages filled with greys.
I have also set myself another task. Every day, Jack tells me some story from his day and I try to turn it into a comic. I am working to develop a Jack-like character that I can repeat frame after frames, story after story.
How to avoid having your Creative License revoked.
In the EDM group, a member recently posted the following:
” … I recently read, I forgot where, that gimmicky [drawing] methods, e.g. left hand work, blind contours, upside down, etc, is a not legitimate way to produce a finished, repeat finished, work. Meaning, I can understand
It is a great practice skill sharpener. And yet I would probably be willing to agree that unusual limiting techniques are a bit gimmicky for finished art. But yet, some of the great pieces of history appear exactly as though one were altering his or her usual perceptions and ability. So how do you do produce unusual art? Without gimmicks?”
–Michael, Boston, MA
To which I responded:
Dear Michael:
I believe that you are referring to the Artists and Illustrators Code that was recently revised in the MCLXII International Convocation of the Art and Creativity Authority (CACA) held in The Hague last November.
In Section 73B, article 14, it clearly states:
“…gimmicky methods, e.g. left hand work, blind contours, upside down, etc, is a not legitimate way to produce a finished, repeat finished, work…”
It goes on to stipulate:
“All drawings must be made in spiral bound books clearly labeled on the cover as “Drawing paper”. They may be made only with a lead pencil, not to exceed 3H, and erasures must be neatly and completely done.”
“Any person or persons working with art materials must work only with in the domains of their licensed class:
To wit:
Doodlers: may only draw with ballpoint pen on lined paper intended for class or meeting notes.
Incompetents: may not draw anything ever.
Sunday painter: may only work within the confines of authorized painting and drawing classes in a local junior college, community center or otherwise sanctioned facility and overseen by a bad-tempered and inattentive disillusioned Class 3 watercolorist.
Art School Graduate: Must have completed certificate and must then have spent a minimum of five years working in an art-unrelated field: video store, coffee shop, falafel stand, ad agency. Many not produce any art of any consequence ever again.
Genius: Must be represented by a major gallery, have been on the cover of Art Forum at least twice, and been interviewed by Morley Safer at least once. Must acknowledge and yet in some cute and non-threatening way challenge the current Art establishment. All works must sell for a minimum of five figures.
All works not adhering to these regulations may not be sold, framed or enjoyed in any way under penalty of law.”
I assume that all members of this group are aware of and operating within these international authorized rules. Failure to do so will mean immediate and humiliating expulsion from the community and confiscation of all art supplies.
Thanks for your continuing cooperation. These rules are made for the enjoyment of all.
Your favorite art authority,
Danny
Comic Experiment
(Enlarged image of comic here)
I have always enjoyed reading comics. I started when I was about 7 or 8, with Disney comics and Archie and Tintin and Beano then in puberty progressed on to underground comix by Crumb and Bodé and Hernandez Bros. etc. In the last few years I have been into Seth, Ben Katchor, Jason and Kochalka.
I have never particularly enjoyed super hero or fantasy comics. I like small stories that reflect reality in an interesting way.
I am often struck by how little does happen in these stories and I wonder to what extent this is a reflection of the enormous amount of work involved in making comics. If you have to learn to draw so well and then draw so much to tell a story, do you lose the opportunity to have a life? There are so many comix about guys who have no life, no girl, no clue and I wonder if that’s a reflection of their creators’ experience or lack thereof.
Anyway, I have decided that I will work in this form for a little while, just to strech myself. It is a difficult assignement as it violates so many of the rules I have set up for drawing over the past decade or so. It means drawing from my imagination rather than from observed reality, by and large. It is also takes a certain amount of forethought and planning. And you have to be reasonably neat, or at least a lot less loose than I am.
This first comic tells the the story of a recent incident in which, while walking up 6th Avenue with my family on a Sunday afternnoon, I got a huge gash in my head from a hockey puck.
As you can see, the comic is pretty awful. It’s so tiny ( I drew it in my teeny moleskine) and cramped and ill-planned and messy. Still, for me, it sort of captures the event in a way that ‘s more satisfying than my usual approach of just drawing a puck and then surrounding it with calligraphy.
I am starting to turn the members of my family into characters that can be drawn over and again in different poses and be recognizable from frame to frame. Again, this is so dffferent from how I normally work. I am drawing in sumi-ink and working very small. My lettering virges on the indicipherable for which I apologize. Write me with strenuous complaints.
I imagine that comics aren’t your cup of tea. Still, think about them and how they could effect your own journaling. They offer a good way to use drawing to tell a story and force you into some dfficult design and drawing problems that may teach you something.
Portraits
I’ve been working on this series for a while, all in one book. They are in watercolor, pen, brush and sumi-ink. They are all drawn upside down.
I made a couple of little time-lapse films of how I drew and painted some of these portraits.
Click To Play
Here’s another. Click here to play it.
Danny Gregory 
