My recent post to the EDM group

dannygregoryLeave a comment

Art making is not a competitive sport. Being intimidated by what others do, by the clarity of their vision, the steadiness of their line, means thwarting the very thing that will get you to where you want to be. If you don’t draw because others, who have done it longer and more often, do it ‘better’ you are robbing yourself.

Give yourself analogies. Should you stop jogging because some people finish marathons in a a couple of hours? Should you stop cooking your family dinner because you love the food great chefs prepare in four star restaurants? Should you stop writing emails because of Shakespeare’s poetry? Should you stop contributing to your favorite charity because of Mother Teresa’s example?
There are always going to be people who are doing work you admire. Celebrate them. Buy reproductions of their work (or better yet, originals) . Study what they do, how they learned. Study their teachers and heroes to to learn where they came from. Absorb as much as you can. Then lay your influences aside, take a deep breath and plunge in. Get in touch with yourself, the unique you, the only one of your kind. Express that uniqueness. Do it again and again, getting ever closer to the truth.
If you must be self-critical, make it constructive and specific. How can you accomplish what you want? Are you clear on what that is? And bear in mind that by committing to your art, you are becoming a hero to some other novice. As you look at those ahead of you, be aware of those who are following your example.
And, most importantly, as you proceed down the path to your goals, enjoy the view. Never lose your sense of pleasure in each drawing you make, even if it’s not ‘good enough’. The pleasure is in the making.

Your pal,
Danny

TCL: Supplementary Material, I: Roz

dannygregory

Despite the hundreds of drawings and essays and exercises and blood and sweat and tears, many readers have said that they wish they could get more of The Creative License.

We’re not ready for a box set or a deluxe edition (The Da Vinci Code), it ain’t), but I am going to release some supplemental stuff that didn’t make it into the book.
When I started out, I planned to have a significant section that would include in-depth profiles of various people who were living various types of creative lives. I thought I’d explore various issues with them such as: what is it like to be a successful fine artist, or conversely what is it like to be fully committed to making art regardless of the financial impositions it takes, what is it like to become an an artist after living a different sort of life, and so on.
I traveled half way round the worldvisiting and interviewing people for this part of the book but in the end felt like this material was dragging the book in a different direction than I wanted to go. Instead of it being an intimate dialogue between me and you the reader, it became more of a spectator event.
Nonetheless, I learned a lot from my artists friends, and much of this accumulated wisdom found its way into the book in other forms.
Recently, I was rereading a lot of the interviews and photos I took on the trip and decided that they would probably be worth sharing. Over the next week or two, I’ll be presenting a series on our chats here on dannygregory.com. Stay tuned.

Image

Roz Stendahl is a designer and teacher and bookbinder and dog trainer in Minneapolis, Minnesota who has been a great inspiration to me and to many people on the EDM group. There are several of her journal pages in the book and they are beautiful and detailed. We talked about many things during my visit and I left with a bunch of tips and expanding ideas. Here’s some of what she said about drawing in public during the several days I was lucky to spend at her house.

Image

ROZ: I’m pretty used to writing and drawing in public and do it all the time. In fact some would say it is the only way I function. OK, let’s just say, I can’t help myself. My journal is pretty much attached permanently to my arm, until of course I need to start a new journal.

You get used to drawing in public and the advice I would give is borrowed from Nike, “Just Do It.” Over time you’ll be glad you did even if a particular session doesn’t go well. My philosophy is that if every fifth page of my visual journal isn’t a complete mess than I am not trying and the whole point of my journal for me is to capture my life, the way my brain functions, the things that I observe, the projects I want to do, the painting ideas, story ideas, whatever, that occur to me, and whatever happens to be right in front of me, and to practice, practice, practice.

It’s all practice. I can always use more practice. (I’ll be practicing until I die.) Those really bad drawings and messed up pages, I learn the most from them.

If you aren’t used to drawing in public you might want to hang out with people who are used to it. Being in a group sort of dilutes any curious attention paid individually to you. (People focus instead on the paranoid aspects of, “gee, they are all drawing, maybe I should be drawing,” and leave to get a sketchbook, or just leave.)

There is also the very funny thing that happens when you’re out with a group of friends sketching and someone comes up and asks what you’re doing and you all say something bland like, “just drawing.” The person asking questions is just convinced that there must be something you are all noticing that he needs to notice. He’ll repeat the question. It’s pretty funny.

We just don’t look in our culture (U.S.). I was at the San Diego Zoo a couple years ago and a woman, man, and two kids in tow came whipping by me at the bat display. I was standing there sketching and they pushed right in front of me, which is no big deal for me because, hey, I know I’ll be there long after they are gone.

Click, click, click, went the man with the camera, “Got them, let’s go,” he said. The kids hadn’t even up to the enclosure. I don’t think they ever did see the bats. I have a feeling the photos didn’t turn out.

I digress. Seriously, going out with a veteran public journaler (is that a word?) is great for another reason. I tend to be anti social and going out with those more gracious than I am has allowed me to painlessly learn ways to deflect the curious without generating any bad karma. I find that if you look intently at your drawing and drawing subject someone might come over and say something, but if you give monosyllabic responses in a polite tone and keep focusing on your drawing people leave you along. And it’s very easy, if you’re in the middle of THE DRAWING OF YOUR LIFE, to simply say, “thanks” to any compliment the observer might give, while you keep drawing.

Alternately you can begin to write down everything the interloper says. They tend to read over your shoulder and see that you are writing about them and bug out pretty quickly. I call that “found dialog,” some people (back me up here Bonnie from Minnesota) call this part of “Minnesota Nice,” and clinically I think it’s called “passive aggressive.” Whatever you want to call it, it’s effective. (I don’t think the karmic cost is high, but I’m not an expert on karma.)

My best journaling in public story: I had a class of nature journaling students (adults) at the Minnesota Zoo. They all spread out to work. I was standing alone drawing a small miniature deer from Southeast Asia, being available if any student had a question or problem (or started having a panic attack from trying to draw in public). A small child, a boy, about 7 or 8, squeezed in front of me, walking along the fence line. I kept drawing. He squeezed in again in the opposite direction.
I was holding my watercolor set and painting so I pretty much had my hands full, but the third time he went by he stopped right in front of me and paused and I thought, maybe I should step away, nah, too much stuff to move (my coat was at my feet with my back pack). So I kept drawing. His mom called him from stage right, and back he went again, past me. I caught him looking at me smiling, when our faces were even, because his passing coincided with my looking up at the subject. He had a wonderful smile.

I finished my drawing and bent down to pack up my painting kit. There was a small pile of M&Ms (plain not peanut, thank you very much!) on my back pack which he had placed there on his third fly-by as a gift to me.

New Year's Resolution

dannygregoryLeave a comment


“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”.- Gandhi
New Year’s Day. It’s a good time for stock-taking, for self-appraisal. With each change one makes in oneself, one see more changes yet to be made. of PITT artists’ pens.
I am still trying to figure out how exactly this will work but I was thinking how cool it would be

Not to self-flagellate but in the spirit of creative expansion. To be alive is to grow and adapt and to spend one’s days awake and aware.
In 2005, I took on several new creative challenges.
We completed The Creative License, my largest design, illustration and writing project. We launched the new advertising campaign for Chase: a dozen or more commercials and a hundred or so ads. This website was relaunched, thanks to my friends Tricia and Jacob. I made a lot of new friends and connections through the Everyday Matters group and developed the social aspects of my art making. And I discovered Rome, deeply immersing myself in a city and its art I’d never known well before.
At home, Patti and I got to spend more and better time together, deepening our love as it enters its twentieth year. My relationship with Jack changed a lot this year too and I am prouder than ever of him as he took on the challenges of entering a new school and a new community.

I’m pretty happy with much of what happened this year. But I have a new and different plan for 2006.

While it has been really rewarding letting drawing and journaling transform my life, I feel a deeper and stronger need to do more. I don’t just want to sell books and checking accounts. I want to promote awareness. In the coming year, I want to see how to use art to make a difference for others. Not just to unleash their own creativity but to create a new awareness of the world and to forge a community that can make it a better place. I want to try to help people rediscover their love of drawing and then bring them together to help others. To raise awareness, to raise funds, to help make the world a more beautiful place. I began drawing because of a trauma. When Patti had her accident, drawing helped me to gain a fresh perspective, the strength and vision to persevere and also to improve. I have not done enough to spread that power to others. I think that drawing and journaling could help people with spinal cord injuries and other disabilities, with life threatening illnesses, with addiction and depression. I would like to talk to health care professionals to see how I can share what I have experienced. I know that a lot of people in the Everyday Matters community have used their art to cope with physical limitations, with mental and spiritual challenges, and I would like to find a way to share those experiences and use them to help mobilize something. I would also like to reach out to people who help others to learn — librarians and teachers — and see how we can encourage creativity, drawing and journaling among their students too, to help develop what could be a life long creative habit. I would also like to use communal drawing experiences like Sketchcrawls in a new way. As we raise awareness by drawing together, I would like to focus the community to help others. I think that group drawing can be a valuable fund raising tool to help people in need. Just as walkathons and marathons raise money through individual pledges, I think we can use drawing as a way to motivate people to give. For now, Patti and I have been calling it “Drawn Together” (though I think there’s a cartoon show by that name).

Here’s one thing we could all do together:

We are going to put together a drawing outing at the Rubin Museum of Art, the only museum devoted to Himalayan Art. On Friday evening, February 3rd, any one who wants to can join us and draw some of the amazing treasures there. We’ll get to socialize, share our journals and our love of drawing. But this time we will have a cause too.
As I’m sure you know, the people of Northern Pakistan and Kashmir, people of the Himalayan region, have been devastated by the recent earthquake and now with the onset of winter are in terrible peril. We can make a difference by raising money to buy them blankets. A dollar will buy a blanket that could provide much-needed comfort and protection. Five dollars will provide all a family needs to weather the bitter winter. Five bucks. The price of a couple if people could arrange sponsors who would pledge to give say, a dollar for each drawing their sponsored draw-er did on the sketchcrawl. Do ten drawings and ten people get blankets. I think I may also be able to get the museum to pledge our admission prices to the fund too.
At the end of the day, we will have a wonderful experience: we’ll see great art, we’ll make our own art, we’ll hang out with other like-minded people, and we’ll help folks in real need. Maybe it would be possible to set up a parallel effort in other cities. The LA County Museum of Art has a South Asian art collection. So does the Art Institute of Chicago. Or maybe people could just gather at an Indian restaurant and share lunch and draw. Or order in some curry and sit at home and draw from photos from a digital collection like this one.
I am not by nature a particularly generous or philanthropic person. I am just a New York ad guy, let’s face it. But somehow, after Katrina and Iraq and Pakistan and Karl Rove and all that has happened this past year, I am feeling this need to do something bigger than my little selfish life well up inside me. I expect that I won’t be particularly good at it at first and that my ego and my usual tendencies will muddy the waters, but it feels like a resolution I can stick with longer than a low carb diet or a gym regime or a pledge to stop biting my nails. We’ll see.
Stay tuned.

From my Father

dannygregoryLeave a comment

keir1.jpg
My stepmother just sent me recent work from my dad in Leicestershire. It seems he has moved beyond self-portraits.

keir2.jpg
keir3.jpg

Dibujo en Mexico*

dannygregoryLeave a comment

We are back after an all too brief trip to Mexico. It’s a country that I have always liked so much but never spent time in before. I would love to do a long cross country sketchcrawl sometime.

We stayed in Puerto Vallarta which is a touristy place with a huge Walmart and we spent a fair amount of our vacation sunbathing and reading trashy novels and eating from buffets and avoiding the horrors of New York in December and the transit strike.

I spent a grim evening at the bullfights watching four innocent creatures being tortured to death in front of several hundred tourists fresh off the big cruise ships., I went in the spirit of seeking out new adventures when possible but left feeling nauseated and vegetarian.

From a drawing perspective, this trip certainly didn’t have the immersive qualities of trips I’ve taken to Rome or Jerusalem or Paris. However I think that even a daytrip to Dayton is made richer by drawing and writing about one’s travels and so I thought I’d set down some things I’ve discovered about travel journaling:

I like to travel fairly light. I carry a smallish shoulder bag with my journal, pens, watercolors. I like NiJi waterbrushes because you can load them with water in the morning and they will carry you through the whole day without needing to carry water jars that could spill. I recommend some sort of folding stool. You can buy them light and inexpensively at camping stores and they let you set up where you want to without having to worry about being in the way or finding an empty bench.

Be prepared but not overly so. Make sure you have enough of your favorite pens but if you pass a local art supply store, always check it out. You may make some wonderful new discoveries. Don’t shlep more than would be comfortable. Improvise. I sometimes rub local soil and leaves onto my drawings for color. I’ve used pasta sauce as paint in Tuscany.

Don’t just draw postcards. It’s fine to sketch monuments and tourist spots but also try to capture local color and everyday life. Draw your meals, travel on public transportation, use art to immerse yourself in a different way of life.

Be bold. I’ve great characters in Roman catacombs, Death Valley bordellos, San Franciscan homeless shelters, and Yorkshire flea markets, all through drawing. Talk to people and don;t be embarrassed to show your work. Most people are impressed that you are even doing it and won’t judge your art as harshly as you do.

Let your art be your tour guide. Every minute you’re lying in your hotel bed could be spent drawing. The more pages you fill, the richer your memories will be. I still remember the sights and sounds of street corners from years ago just because I spent twenty minutes drawing somewhere. The memories are so much more intense than if I’d just been seeing the sights through a tour bus window.

Jot down notes as you draw, not just recording the where and when but conversations you overhear, thoughts and associations you make, smells and sounds specific to the place. Show how travel broadens your mind.
—–
*Translated by Google. Apologies if it’s garbled.

Danny's Not Got a Brand New Bag

dannygregory1 Comment

bag.jpg
Thursday, 8:10 a.m. Getting ready to leave the house and start the frigid, two-and-a-half-mile walk to my office, I suddenly realize I don’t have the bag I use to tote my pens, paints, and my journal. I feel my heart actually move in my chest and my eyes tear up.

A shot of adrenaline sizzles up my neck. It’s not by my desk or next to the couch or hanging on the coat rack. I don’t even look ’cause I know where it is.

Flashback

Wednesday 7:30 p.m. The annual MorningNews.Org holiday party is being held at Thady Con’s Bar in Midtown. I strip off my coat, throw it on a pile on a bar stool and accept my first Dewars’ and water. I sling my bag on to the floor, next to the bar rail, and then retrieve it to pull out gifts: copies of my new book, The Creative License, for my editors, Rosecrans and Andrew. As the crowd converges around the pristine copies of my book and the Highland’s finest blended scotch courses down my gullet, my bag sinks back down into the dark on the floor.

Wednesday 9:30p.m. I yank my coat off the pile, wish everyone a good year, and, warmed by the conviviality of my colleagues and a reasonable amount of good cheer, sail out into the night and plunk myself in a cab. Obliviously bagless.

Flash forward

Thursday 9:30 a.m. A call to Rosecrans confirms my fears. The rest of the gang also left the bar last night without my bag.

9:32 a.m. I call Thady Con’s. The bar opens at 11 but a man with a thick accent picks up the phone. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to understand my question and asks me to call back at 10.

9:34 a.m I reminisce to myself about my bag and its contents. It’s made of olive canvas, with many pockets and a shoulder strap. Inside, there are about a dozen pens. Most of them are brown Faber-Castells, some Fs, some Ms, some Ss. There’s even a B. A few, though I’m not sure which, I bought last summer at a pen store near Mussolini’s former headquarters in Rome. There’s a small bottle of brown ink with a wax stopper that my pal, Kane, brought me from Venice. It’s in a snack sized Ziploc bag along with a pen holder and my favorite nib and a waterbrush filled with sepia Dr.Martin’s transparent watercolor.
In the inner pocket, there’s a mitten I found on the street a few weeks ago. It has a special flap that folds back to expose my fingers and then Velcros back into position, ideal for drawing outside in cold weather. The mitten was dirty and lying on the sidewalk but after a good wash it proved to be white and very comfy. There’s also a copy of the 51st issue of Dan Price’s Moonlight Chronicles, dog-eared from its third consecutive reading.
The most valuable object in the bag, at least to me, is my journal, Volume 46. I lost one earlier volume, I think it was #7, when it slid between the cushion and the arm rest of a window seat of an United flight to Chicago and for some reason didn’t deplane with me. I’d neglected to write my name and number in it and we never saw each other again.
Volume 46 has been a good friend to me. I decided to do the whole thing only in shades of brown and black. It begins with a record of Chelsea art shows I’ve enjoyed, followed by several pages of drawings of dogs and tools. Then I began preparing pages before I drew on them, soaking and spattering them in Dr.Martin’s colors, generally yellows, oranges and browns. There are drawings of my office, of a trip to a radio performance of King Kong, of a breakfast with my friend Steve, an egg sandwich, last weekend’s Sketchcrawl, my visit to the Beerhorsts’, some flowers I got from Julie and Bill, and various other things. I had not scanned any of the pages except for the few I posted here last week.

I have thought, and said, and written that what matters is not the product of art, but the process of making it. I’ve said that one might as well toss away every drawing you make, wipe your arse with it, give it to a stranger, as hang on to it like some sort of cherished totem. That what matters is the slow careful study of reality, the meditative calm that comes with drawing, the counting of one’s blessings as one learns to appreciate the world around. And yet, here I am with thundering heart and sour stomach worrying about a little Canson watercolor book as if it were my second (or 46th) born. I love my journals, the rows of them on their shelves, flipping back through past ones, soothing their pages, brushing their hair.
What hypocrisy! Oh, shut up, I’m grieving.

10:01 am. I call the bar again and speak to Graham, He puts me on hold, roots around a bit, finally returning to tell me, in a lilting brogue, that he indeed has my bag. I tell him I’ll drop by at lunch time to get it.

10:02 a.m. I ask myself,” Should I bother to post this? Or should I get back to work?”

Addendum: Exciting conclusion

11:30 a.m. I duck out of the office and take the E train to Lexington Avenue. I walk down the street with my iPod blasting and up to the door of the bar. Suddenly, over the screech of MC5 I hear people yelling at me, “Don’t go in!”. I look around and saw that there were firemen and fire engines swarming up and down the block. One was stretching out a yellow line of tape. Someone else yells “The building could fall down at any minute.!” I back up and huddle with the Irish barmen and waitstaff, explaining that my bag is inside. They tell me that they were getting ready to open when someone noticed a huge crack running across the kitchen floor. Some construction workers around the corner, excavating a hole for a new building, had accidentally damaged the foundations of the old bar. Firemen run around turning off the gas and electricity, worried that the building could blow up.
Then a fireman comes out of the bar carrying two axes and my drawing bag and hands it to me.
I’m not sure if the bar will survive. But at least Volume 46 is safe

Having faith in Brooklyn

dannygregory

sock-monster

Yesterday Jack and I took the never-before taken Q train, deep into Brooklyn. We were off to visit Rick and Brenda and the rest of the Beerhorst clan in the apartment they recently relocated to from Michigan. It was brave and giant leap they took –– a couple of self employed artists, moving with six small children, all of them home schooled, into the belly of the Big City.

Rick works in several media: he is mainly a painter and a wonderful one at that – his realist work is part Alice Neel , part Grant Wood, depicting his children, his household, and his faith. He also makes bold woodcuts and has just recorded a CD of his original songs and he is a devoted sketchbooker. (All of this work is available through their website ). Brenda is a rug maker and her paintings are abstract, colorful patterns that remind me of Paul Klee (sorry for all these references – the Beerhorsts are actually quite unique) and I liked it very much. As Rick says of her work:”It is the way trees speak to us when we wrap our arms around them. It is way the ocean speaks to us when we walk along its shore letting our sneakers get wet.”

Back in Michigan, twice a year, they would cover their walls with the art they’d made — the children’s drawings, Rick’s painting, Brenda’s weaving, and Rose’s sock monsters. Then they would open their home and sell their work to anyone who wandered in. The question this weekend was: could this same thing work in a Brooklyn apartment building? When Jack and I arrived, it seemed like it could — there were all sorts of people from the neighborhood sifting through woodcuts, admiring sketchbooks, picking through a basket of monsters, and then opening their wallets.

Rick and Brenda seem to be living the life that most of us only dream of, and, of course, I wondered how they manage. They make their art, sell it, and educate their kids themselves, all in a city a thousand miles from what’s familiar. And they’ve apparently always lived this way.

Recently, I asked Rick to tell us more about how they live and how they manage and his answers reflected their deep religious faith:

“As to “irons in the fire”, keeping the money coming in, bills paid and a life still fertile for creativity that remains quite a mystery. I think it is up to each person to find the path that is theirs. I think for us at the bottom is a kind of old fashioned belief that God really does exist and has his eye on us. His realm seems to be both the physical and the spiritual at the same time, whereas we tend to be mostly just bound by the material world and its concerns (the neighbor who is mad about our bath tub overflowing and ruining his ceiling for the 4th time). We think God is watching out for us and has actually called us into a life of art-making that has a particular design to it that often may seem like foolishness to much of the general public. “Having so many children, (“don’t you know about birth control?”) is one of those things that seems like it could really get in the way of a “successful career” and yet our children have made our life so much richer and have given it depth which is in the long run great for making art with depth and uniqueness. But we don’t want to get up on a soapbox and preach lots of children as the answer. Which brings me back to the mystery part of living. The question always seems to come back to each person to ask, “what is in my heart?” and then to begin to pursue that. “We have written and received art making grants including the NEA and the Pollock/Kranser Grants and others. We have worked with art galleries around the country; Chicago, Seattle, Nashville, and now NYC. We have also had family art show where we invite friends into our home where Brenda and I as well as the children have put our works on display. These home art shows continued to grow and bring in more people and revenue over the past 10 years up until we moved here this summer. “We are missionaries with a mission organization out side of Nashville called ACT, Artists in Christian Testimony International. They work with artists and see them as an important part of the way the church needs to grow to stay relevant in a world culture that is increasingly image based. We are basically doing what we can to help our artist friends stay healthy and encouraged because we feel that the culture we live in is often toxic and about destroying artistic people rather than nurturing them. I had a friend die of an over dose about 5 years ago and it kind of lit a fire under me to want to do something to put an arm around the artists population that really needs a friend that is just there to take. “We have known poverty and lived with in it but try to keep the “spirit of poverty” out of our hearts. We have received the benefits of the WIC program. We have gone to church food pantries to volunteer as well as to receive free or nearly free groceries. We have often found our selves at the end of our physical resources and sought God’s deliverance in simple prayers and then experienced some incredible breakthroughs. “I will give you one such story: “In the spring of ’04, I was coming back from my gallery in Chicago with my two older daughters and their friend in our old Chevy van filled with paintings that the gallery wanted out of their storage room that hadn’t sold (the old maids I call them). We were about an hour away from home when the engine blew on the highway. We got a tow in to town and got the kids to bed really late. The van was bad news because we had no money to replace it and now real prospects except our little spring family art show coming up. “Brenda was pregnant with Rain, our sixth child, at the time. We decided to go without a car for a while which is a lot tougher in the Midwest where every thing is dependent on everyone having their own vehicle. It was the day of our family art show and Brenda started going into labor when she wasn’t supposed to be due for another two weeks. We were in the dilemma of what to do, call off the art show or just press on with it? “We decided after talking with our midwife to go ahead and let people come and if things got out of hand shut the show down. We ended up selling over a thousand dollars of art the first night and closed the door at 8:00pm. Brenda had the baby upstairs in our bedroom at 8:30pm, a beautiful little girl. The next afternoon we began again at 1:00 pm and in the first two hours, Betty DeVos came over who is a personal friend of President Bush. She and her husband own the AmWay corporation with another family. She is mind bogglingly wealthy. She bought enough paintings to make us $8,000 richer that day. (I had met her son in a filmmakers’ group a few months before). Needless to say we were able to buy a car to get around again. We kind of walked around in a daze for a while wondering how this had all happened. It felt like a miracle to us. “The pattern of our lives seems to be we are frequently hang from that little branch on the edge of a cliff and rescued just before our grip gives out. Living like this is a pain in the ass but it keeps us awake, attentive and appreciative. We feel like the life we live is an impossibility that God makes work as we press into him for his help and favor. In New York, we are living off the money we made when we sold our house back in Michigan. Our savings are dribbling away as I type and we feel again that scary feeling of a free fall. We are taking this day-to-day, just trying to do the best we can with what we got.”I am very grateful that Jack and I had a chance to visit with the Beerhorsts and they taught me some very valuable lessons. Lessons I seem to have to learn over and over:

Choose your path.
Believe in yourself.
Improvise.
Count your blessings.
Trust in the power of love.
What can you learn from their example about your own life?

Pens of the Moment

dannygregoryLeave a comment

pens-05.jpg
These days, I have quite a nice little arsenal of pens (here each presents a self-portrait), and they are influencing how and what I draw more and more.
First off is (1) my trusty nib holder. It’s a General’s #204B with a cork finger grip area, now deeply dyed with a couple of years of various inks. Despite my collection of nibs, this one is permanently in my holder: aHunt Ex-Fine Ball Pointed (my sight is beginning to go and Jack had to read the tiny letters off the nib) with a nice big reservoir hole. It’s a squishy nib that can draw very fine lines or big fat ones.
(2) came from Venice with my Friend, Tom. The holder is champagne colored Murano glass with steel hardware and it’s a lot more solid and weighty than everyday pen. I like the weight but am nervous to carry it away from my desk. It came with this nib that looks like a steak knife which lays down sharp lines, a little less flexible that the Hunt. In my current journal I am only drawing in browns, blacks and yellows � my main inks are Doc Martins’ radiant concentrated Sepia and Golden Brown and Daler-Rowney’s FW Acrylic Artist Ink. The former is a little more transparent that I always want, the latter is thicker, almost like paint and takes a while to dry.
(3) I’ve mentioned my bamboo pen before. I use it with any ink but most often Sum-i ink in a heavy stone inkwell. It draws all sorts of line depending on how hard I press and feels lovely and organic.
(4) is a Faber Castell PITT pen, brown ink, preferably, S or F, and usually in my pocket. The ink is permanent so I can watercolor over it right away and depending on the age of the pen it can be smooth and creamy or scratchy and textured. I can draw very little broken lines with it or bear down and make dark ones. It’s less alive than dip pens but the best marker I’ve found.
(5) After years of searching, I found a fountain pen I really like. I got it in Italy: a Columbus Maxima and it’s very heavy and silver and cost about 80 Euros. I use disposable cartridges with non-waterproof ink which I can smear with a wet fingertip. At first, I thought the tip was too stiff but I carry it with me everywhere and it had become a good friend.
These pens tell me quite a lot about my drawing at this stage. I like dip pens because they slow me down — I take my time with open bottles of ink and the small load of ink they can sustain. It also makes me feel connected to centuries of artists who worked in just this way. My love of technical pens like the Rapidoliner has ben replaced by a desire for variable lines that give drawings more interest and life.
It’s also interesting to see how my pen choices have changed. Here’s the inventory I did a year and a half ago. The entire original cast has changed.

Childish things

dannygregoryLeave a comment

Frog

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child;
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Corinthians 13:11

I’m not a child psychologist. Nor do I have a terribly accurate or comprehensive memory of my own childhood. So I am struggling a little to get to the roots of what happens to children in adolescence that makes most of us stray from the art-making that is the hallmark of every childhood. When and why do we abandon crayons and coloring books and singing and dressing up?

My adolescence was somewhat unusual. I came to America three weeks before my 13th birthday and I didn’t fit in. I had spent the previous three years in an Israeli public school, speaking only Hebrew. Right before that I had been in an American school in Pakistan. And my elementary school was a Presbyterian boarding school in Australia.

I don’t have any distinct memory of drawing much at that age. I know I read a lot and I wrote stories. But I don’t think I’d lost the pleasure of drawing. However, a couple of years later I’m pretty sure I was thinking of myself as ‘artistic’. I had friends who were ‘artsy’ too; my school didn’t have a distinct jock set but those of us who were interested in art were a clique of a sort, albeit with blurred edges. By sixteen, I’d begun to act in school productions, to write and draw for the school paper and by seventeen, I was selling buttons I made out of little drawings and was then asked to teach a class on ‘Portable Art’ for other students. So by junior year, my self-image was certainly associated with, if not 100% tied to, making things and being creative.

I think what was going on in those years had a lot more to do with other people than with my own sense of myself. When I was a kid, I just made things, drew things, painted things, sang in the bath, made story books, but all for me. It was just stuff I did, like playing. I would no more have thought of myself as an artist than I thought of myself as a Lego engineer or a cowboy. If anything, I wanted to be a veterinarian.

I was pretty clueless in my strange new surroundings; I had no cultural history and was pretty insecure and awkward and shy (not to mention ashamed of the unwelcome hairs and pimples that seemed to be sprouting all over me). So being ‘artistic’ was a way of providing a label for myself –it beat the label of ‘fag’ that my nemesis Tim O’Brien gave me in 8th grade and ‘wimp’ (9th grade) and ‘nerd’ (10th grade). In 11th grade, in a production of Tad Mosel’s Impromptu, I got to kiss the prettiest girl in the senior class in front of the entire student body. Tim O’Brien was the ticket-taker.

So for me, this self-definition was a good thing. I drew and painted and acted more and more in order to solidify this image. (For my best friend, Julian, who was 6’3″ and captain of the basketball team, my image and my cynical, anti-authoritarian presence was a liability; the coach was constantly telling him to stay away from me and concentrate on his jump shot. Ironically, Julian’s mother is a successful artist.) While being a good student wasn’t exactly disparaged, it didn’t give one much social cachet. However, making buttons and painting on my shoes and donating huge canvases of feet to the library and doing snarky cartoons for the school paper was a way of being someone.

Senior year, things seem to have changed. Our school, being progressive and Quaker, didn’t give grades (this was in the late 1970’s) and so applying to college became an anxious affair. We had to do well on the SATs, as they were the main concrete bit of evaluation one had to go on. I. for some reason, became determined to go to Princeton, though I applied to other schools. Somehow under this whole academically intense period of scrutiny, I reinvented my notion of myself as a serious person, a writer, a scholar. Sure, I had diverse interests, but I dismissed all that painting and acting as folderol. I was going to be a typical creature of the 1980s –not quite willing to be an investment banker, perhaps but aware that conformity and Donald Trumpery were the hallmarks of the day. Within a year or two of college, I had more or less stopped painting and drawing and was majoring in Political Science.

I don’t know if my story is typical. However, there is no doubt that adolescence is a time of self-consciousness and identity molding. Added to that pressure is pour society’s deification of wealth and the sense that art = penury.

I worry about my boy –eleven and so in love with drawing and filmmaking and acting and singing and fantasy –will he be twisted away from these loves and become stifled and embarrassed by Art? Will he choose some identity that forbids an acknowledgment of the need we all have to make things? I hope not. And I think, having the sort of family he has, that this is less likely than for most.

But I get a lot of mail from people who have lost their long-ago urge to be creative and who feel very afraid and anxious and unsure about picking up the pieces again. Is there some sort of crossroads we all come to? And what can we do to make sure that we don’t suffer some irrevocable break with our creative selves. I believe very strongly that Art can be spelled with a small ‘a’, that one doesn’t need to be a professional, celebrated, wealthy creative person to be creative at all. I believe that creativity is like exercise or cooking, something that can and should be just a part of everyday life or everybody. Without it, we suffer individually and collectively. It took me two decades to regain my love of making things for its own sake and I mourn those lost years, the painting and photos and films and drawings and sculptures I might have made but didn’t. Now all I can do is make up for that lost time and vow not to lose my way again.

I will admit that my self-image is still tied up with making art. I am part of a community of creative people now – the readers of this blog and my books, my many new friends who make art – and that this community is part of what keeps me going … to an extent. I am working hard to loosen the grip of the ego and I am making progress. Honestly, even if I dwelt in complete obscurity and my internet connection was severed, I would draw just as much for that pure feeling that floods my skull when I concentrate and let the ink flow.

How about you?

The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be the Artist You Truly Are

dannygregory2 Comments

creative-license

My guide to discovering and increasing your creativity. It’s over two hundred pages of essays, ideas, and watercolors. Here’s a peek inside.

Buy Now From Amazon

I got the first note from someone who has bought my new book at Barnes and Noble today and I realized it is high time I shared some more details about the book with everyone. First of all, I have put together a crude little gallery with a few representative spreads from the book, generally one from each chapter.


Next I’d like to share some opinions from people who’ve gotten their hands on it. I hope to do this less in the spirit of self-congratulation (though I am quite proud of this book) and more to just let people know what the whole things is about and hope fully to inspire some readership.

Let me also say something quite important up front. I have written this book and kept this website going for years now for a simple reason. Re-awakening my creativity and sense of myself as an artist changed my life and helped me to deal with the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me: the day Patti was run over by a subway train and her resultant paraplegia. I am not exaggerating when I say that Art became much of the reason for me to carry on with my life.

I believe that we are all born creative and that, at some point in most people’s childhoods, they lose the urge, but not the ability, to make art. This is a tragic loss. Through the history of our species, ordinary people have always made paintings, sung songs, decorated their homes, expressed themselves in a hundred ways. Today, however, we are increasingly creatures who expect others to provide us with entertainment and culture. We take for granted that creativity is the domain of professionals. We are convinced that if we cannot be perfect, we should not try.

What a loss. I believe fervently in the spirit of amateurism. I know in my heart that it is far better to do an inaccurate, clumsy drawing than not do one at all. It is better to sing off-key than be mute. A scorched home cooked meal is far more nourishing for the soul than a frozen dinner. And I want to rekindle that spirit in whomever I can.

I make a decent living at my job. So I don’t do drawings and watercolors and write essays about creativity or even publish books in order to make money. I do it because I feel that it is important to encourage others (and simultaneously myself) to give oneself permission to be the artists that we all truly are.

My book is called The Creative License but of course, I can’t issue such a license. I can’t give anyone permission to be themselves. All I can do is provide examples, suggestions, encouragement and hope that magic happens.

One of my first readers seems to be getting this. Tonight, after reading just a chapter she writes:

After only the first 11 pages, I feel like you are a voyeur in my life. You said it very well when you talked about people who just have to create. (When I see something beautiful, ugly, interesting–whatever, I don’t just want to look it–I want to get it down on paper and recreate it). But you really struck a nerve talking about those of us who put that creativity into a box and try to keep it there for whatever reason (Will my kids really want those journals that I fill when I’m gone?–yeah, they probably will.) “So with the very first chapter you have looked deep into the heart of people who know they are creative, but stifle it, and the people who are afraid to find out that they are creative. And that encompasses pretty much everyone! I realize that the title of the book is “…giving yourself permission…” but the “familiar” tone that you use to expose those thoughts about creativity almost make it feel like it’s OK for the permission to come from an outside source–the author–someone who has a grip on the understanding of the creative process. “

I hope her enthusiasm doesn’t wane and that the ensuing chapters continue to fuel her creativity and lead her to new places.

Finally, here is a very generous review from one of my favorite artists, my watercolor teacher and mentor, Roz Stendahl, one she recently posted to the Everyday Matters group:

“I was fortunate to be able to read the proofs of Danny’s new book, “Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be the Artist You Truly Are.” First a disclaimer for those of you on the list who don’t remember my name from my infrequent posts. Danny is a pal. We’ve corresponded, chatted on the phone, he’s visited, we have drawn together. You could stop reading this email right now because of that, expecting a bias.

But I also am a life long journaler and I teach visual journaling at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts so I read almost all the books that come out in this field. I want to provide up to date recommendations for my students.

I think these things put me in an interesting position to tell you something: reading this book is just like spending time with Danny. His sense of humor comes through. He is silly and playful, wry and sarcastic by turns, but always engaging. Something is always popping out of his brain. He’s gathered all this up and put it in a book. And he wants to encourage you to draw and tap into your creativity.

There are a lot of books on creativity on the market. Some of them try cheerleading and cajoling, some encourage you through psychology, and others practically shame you into picking up your art materials. Danny’s approach is different. Like the great pitch man he is, he creates an analogy (creative license is like a driving license) and then joyfully explains and expands until you want in. The nice thing about this approach is that you don’t end up with two dozen vegematics in your attic like Opus. You’ll end up with a visual journal that records what’s important to you and you’ll be more connected to your life.

Danny’s book is organized in such a manner that it can be read straight through or dipped into. There’s an introduction which establishes the groundwork for you to view yourself as a creative being. The driving license analogy is introduced here.

This is followed by nine chapters which deal with everything from how to draw (giving you instructions for exercises to get you up and running today) to shock (getting out of a rut), resistance (going on), and identity (self acceptance as an artist). (And lots more.)

Each chapter is further divided into smaller sections, often only a page spread or two, dealing with some aspect of the chapter topic. These sub sections read like brief meditations, parables, or pep talks.

I feel this type of organization is one of the best aspects of the book. It allows the reader to come back to the book for small tune ups so he can get back on the road (keeping with the driving metaphor).

Throughout the book Danny provides his readers with suggestion upon suggestion of things they might want to draw, examine, think about, or respond to. If you are new to drawing, visual journaling, or doing creative activities in your life, this book will help you realize how you’ve been a creative being all along. Now’s the time to reengage your life, dreams, and creative self. Danny’s book will give you enough gas to get you a fair ways down the road and the insight to be able to spot refilling stations.

If you already have a creative license and use it daily in your life, the book will still encourage you. Chances are your take on visual journals and creativity is skewed differently because you already understand your process. But a fresh view, another angle, can help you appreciate what you have and enable you to flex your creative muscles even more.

After reading the book I felt that the experience was like being swept up into a brainstorming meeting where there was a lot of laughter and enthusiasm but also serious, earnest work. I believe you’ll enjoy this book.
I’ve only seen a black and white proof, but I’ve seen many of these journal sketches in person. The book is going to be a colorful and visually entertaining book.
Danny can sell an idea and he does it clearly and with humor. I’ll be taking this book along to my journaling classes so that my students can benefit from the perspective Danny brings to the topic.
Danny didn’t ask me to write a review, but I felt compelled to because there are a lot of “creativity” books on the market and we talk about books on this list. Why buy this one? If you’ve enjoyed and found Danny’s insights on his blog helpful, if you like the supportive aspects of exchange that happen on this list, then you’ll enjoy this book which grows out of this seed. The book will speak to you in accessible ways that other creativity books might not.”

If you gotten this far, I hope you’ll check out the book. And if you do buy a copy and read it, I hope it’ll motivate you to expand your creativity. And finally, I hope you will evangelize, gently helping others to see their own creativity, helping make the world more present, more forgiving and more beautiful.Peace out. Commercial over.