Going to Van Gogh

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Inspired by van G, I have been drawing with a bamboo pen of late.

On Friday, Jack and I headed up to the Met to check out the van Gogh drawing show. It’s the first time that all the known drawings have been assembled in one place — they’re fragile and very sensitive to light — and, after Jack’s school conferences in the morning, I decided that visiting them was a better way to spend my afternoon than revising Chase checking ads. Hooky is good for the soul.
There are four or five rooms full of drawings and a half dozen paintings and they are arranged chronologically so you can get a sense of his progress. Right off, I was struck but how much better he was at the beginning than I’d thought. I have always disliked the Potato Eater period and thought that his early drawings would be hamfisted and ugly. In fact, they are quite accomplished; however, he had the beginner’s anxious tendency to overwork. Most of the drawings are thick with heavy-handed lines. It also seemed that he was so anxious to develop himself into a commercially-viable genre painter that he was unoriginal and struggling. He even spent a very brief period in art school; his academic nude is embarrassingly mawkish — he is clearly not working from instinct but trying hard to fit in. It was only after he’d left Paris and found himself in Arles that his drawings really took off.
I discovered that he was always a bit of an art supply freak — particularly in his first few years, he did drawings that used graphite, ink, watercolors, thinned-down oil, pastel, all in the same pictures. His most lovely works were done in just sepia ink and the variety came from his lines rather than his media. He had so many ways of making lines, swirls, hashes, dashes, circles, dots, capturing the rich textures of the countryside, the soft waving wheat, the dried, gnarled trees, the prickly cypress leaves, the delicate wildflowers… WIth just reed pen and ink, he could capture layers of mists sfumattoing off to the horizon. Most evocative was the way he rendered the harsh, ever-noon light of Southern France; the high contrast and deep shadows makes the heat wave off the page.
I was struck by things he does that I probably should do but don’t. He’d redraw good drawings and perfect them. Back at the studio he’d paint from drawings done in the field. He’d do drawings of paintings he’d done and send them off in letters to friends, relatives, potential patrons; I was interested in how in different drawings of the same painting he would emphasize different aspects of the composition —  making it more abstract, more colorful, more accessible, depending on what would appeal to the particular audience. I just never work my stuff through that way. I like to think of VvG as being very spontaneous and visceral but he was obviously a lot more thoughtful and deliberate than I am.
He gave a couple of the paintings a painted edge which the catalog explained as an attempt to make them special and more ready for sale. One even had a crude marbleized paper matte. SItting on one of the rare benches at the show, I wrote in my journal, “How could people at the time not have bought these? I want to take them all home.”

Art Class Memories

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Me-And-Pencil-Box

The earliest art class I can remember was at ten, in Lahore, Pakistan. The class was held under a line of tall trees along a dusty road. Willow trees or cypress (?) swayed overhead. It’s vague and improbable. Why along side a road? The only clear thing about it is a painting I made, a multicolored sunset over twisting black rocks. I painted it for my mother who I hadn’t seen in just over a year while I lived with my grandparents. I remember it clearly because I saw it a month ago; it hangs in the stairway down to her basement in Mattituck.
My next memory was two years later, in the Brenner School in Kfar Saba, Israel. Matatiahu, my art instructor also taught Wood-shop class. I was an enthusiastic but inept carpenter; I could never measure things attentively and my joints were always out of whack, my projects a mess of protruding nail heads and smeared glue. I was better at Art (or so I thought) — I had always liked to draw and paint — but Matatiahu didn’t like me. Maybe it’s because I was a foreigner, only recently fluent in Hebrew. Or maybe I’d established an unshakeable reputation with Matatiahu at the workbench. Or maybe I was just an obnoxious twerp.
One day, Matatiahu assigned us a project to do at home: a painting of birds. Determined to

redeem myself in his eyes, I worked long into the night. I collected reference pictures of dozens of species of birds and arranged them in a sprawling painting of an oasis at sunset. Flamingoes and storks posed along the water’s edge, sparrows and owls were arranged on tree branches, and hawks soared through the pink and purple clouds overhead. I felt like a young Audubon when I handed it in and, the following week, when Matatiahu handed back our work, I eagerly flipped it over to see his comments. In blue ballpoint, he had written, “F. The assignment was ‘birds’ not ‘landscape‘.

My mother and my stepfather, proud ’60’s anti-authoritarians, were majorly pissed. ”Who grades a child’s art work, for Chrissakes?“ my mother fumed. She stormed down to the school, lodged a protest, and my grade was changed. The following week, Matatiahu told us about a nationwide student competition for traffic safety posters. I painted a grisly scene of a corpse sprawled across the bloody hood of a smashed car. No doubt gritting his teeth through his congratulatory smile, Matatiahu picked my work to represent the school. I didn’t win the competition but fortunately my parents didn’ t fight this latest injustice.

As a teenager in Brooklyn, I attended a very progressive school. My art teacher, Paul, was an ardent Marxist and always encouraged us to be loose and experimental, not to worry about figurative bullshit — concept was king. I loved him but he taught me much more about class oppression, tofu, and joint rolling than how to draw.

On Sundays, I studied drawing at the Brooklyn Museum. The second week of the term, a large and loud girl took a liking to me and began to rip pages out of her sketchbook and pass lewd notes to me. I was a very skittish and self conscious kid and filled with horror when she made other students pass these notes to me. I took to sitting at the back near the door and escaped down into the Eastern Parkway subway station the minute the class broke. Occasionally, she caught me on the platform, complaining that she had to buy a special notebook for notes to me as she had emptied her large sketchbook. The fact that I never responded with anything but grimaces and shrugs didn’t seem to dissuade her ardor. Midterm, I dropped out and far too embarrassed to tell my parents what was going on, I spent my Sunday afternoons at the library instead.

The summer after junior year, I followed the example of my idol, Eric Drooker, who the year before had gone to the RISD summer program. It was fantastic; we lived in campus dorms like grownups, studied painting and drawing and printmaking, but more importantly stayed up late, drank loads of beer, and made out with girls.

This was the mid 1970s and I was an overly intellectual, arrogant, and insecure teenager. Most of the art I made was highly conceptual. If I could figure out a way to outthink the teacher, all the better. When our design teacher asked us to use up a whole pencil in a single drawing, I had a brainstorm. I ground up a pencil and its eraser into a fine dust in a sharpener. Then I painted a nude woman in rubber cement, and used an atomizer to blow the shavings all over the painting. When the teacher saw my soft, gradated image hanging among the grimy black works of my classmates, he chastised me for not doing the assignment. But when I explained my ‘ingenious’ technique, he apologized publicly and my triumph was complete. Summer school proved to be another opportunity to refine my mastery of the fine art of pissing off authority.

It was also the end of my art education. Being surrounded by the most talented kids in schools across the country at RISD has lowered me a notch or two. I think I gave up on art at that point and frankly no one else seemed that concerned.

At Princeton, I took some art history classes but loudly resented having to memorize what other people said said about famous art. I don’t remember being asked for my opinion of the masters and instead resisted the ideas of the art establishment that had, in my mind, calcified the history of art into just another academic discipline to keep professors tenured. Mine wasn’t a very coherent critique but I loved clinging to my opinion, which seemed to be the underlying point of much of my education.

It took me another twenty years to accept my ignorance, in fact, to embrace it. These days, I am hungry to learn about art and to saturate myself in as many different ways as I can find to explore it. I wonder what my life would be like if I had been able to find teachers who could have kept me enthusiastic and open-minded, for all these years.

Posted in Art

Perfect storm

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So far this millennium has been a strained and sweaty passage. As the moorings are loosened, it seems that any and everything could unravel. A terrorist attack a half a mile and four years away, still feels like it could metastasize and engulf my life. A hurricane a thousand miles away prompts my mother to buy new insurance while I seek reassurance that my home sits a hundred feet above the ground, ground made of rooted bedrock.
Our government is hopeless and corrupt rather than governing: our religions are a source of division and destruction rather than comfort and moral guidance. It’s tough to express opinions in this climate, tough to make plans, tough to depend on the wisdom of one’s years. And yet, I’m optimistic.
Our times are about keeping it real and perhaps, as our illusions shatter, we’ll be left with a more reasonable set of expectations. Maybe we’ll stop hoping to be lottery millionaires or movie stars or CEOs. Maybe we’ll stop idolizing fabricated celebrity and vicious gossip and impossible perfection. Maybe we’ll realize that true love doesn’t depend on fake breasts.
Nature is brutal and beautiful. One moment the seas are placid, the next they inundate the condos on the shore. We act surprised, oblivious to the millions of years of hurricanes that have shaped our coasts into random, twisted lines. We fantasize that there is a divine plan, an intelligent design behind this terrible judgment. Instead, we must come to see the beauty and the brutality as unpredictable and inevitable. We must relearn our place on the planet and in the universe. It’s time to get a little humble.
Think about Katrina and New Orleans next time you draw. Release the 20th century need to do it right, to make it perfect, to lay down lines just as you’d planned. Instead, take a moment to acknowledge your own imperfections and contemplate how your personal deviations are helping our species to survive. There is no room for perfectly met expectations on this wobbling globe.

The river is ever flowing, breeching its banks, leeching into its bed, never stopping to pose. Everything you draw is mutating as you draw it. Every nanosecond, your pen, your fingers, your sketchbook are all in a flux of atomic migration. We are not grindingly consistent computers, you and I, and we don’t live in Sim City. A twisted, crooked line is the only true line.
Study the gnarled tree, the rotting apple, the ill-kempt hairdo, the defecating dog. Capture the spirit of this imperfection, this constant change, and allow yourself to breathe as you draw. In and out, up and down, tendons bowing, bones creaking, brain cells dying, ink evaporating, paper curling. Ride the act out, and don’t dare think of posterity. If you draw just so you can hang your work on the wall for eternity, your picture frames will exploded in the hot glow of the ever threatening blast. Draw only for exhibition and your gallery will be washed away in the gathering deluge.

Imperfection, misjudgment, failure, these are what you have and don’t dare flee them. Embrace them, cherish them. For chaos is the true way of the world, of your soul, of your destiny of Art with a twisted capital A.

Study your world and draw it. Draw crooked, draw with a stick, draw in the dark, but draw. Draw for now, for today, for this moment. It’s all we have. And, believe me, it’s more than enough.

Releaf

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On Sunday, I took the first drawing class I’ve had since I was eleven. It was at the Open Center, a sort of granola-y place in Soho which offers many new Age classes on creativity, meditation, and other sorts of grooviness.
My particular class was called “Drawing as a way of being” but I’d not been lured so much by the title as by the teacher’s teacher, Dr. Frederick Franck. I learned a lot about drawing from Franck’s books, The Zen of Seeing; The Awakened Eye; A Passion for Seeing, etc and, now that he is ninety six, blind, and deaf, he has passed his workshop duties onto Joanne Finkel, a fiftyish woman with bright eyes, pigtails and well-furred calves.
Most of the other students identified themelves as undrawers, anxious about their inability, and armed with Venti Starbucks and Pearl Paint bagfuls of art supplies. My supplies were new too; I decided to abide by the class materials list and had a mechanical pencil loaded with .5 HB lead and a kneadable eraser. Under my arm, I clutched a huge virginal drawing pad.
We did a pleasant meditation exercise and then the teacher handed out leaves. I clicked my pencil a few times and got going on the blind contour exercise. It ws a little dicey at first as I just never draw with a pencil, but by the second pass, I was in the groove.
When we were given permission to look at the leaf as we drew, I got heavily into the details, mainlining the veins that branched off the stem, sinking deeper and deeper into the plant’s very cells. The teacher came by to say, “Wow, you’re really into those veins, huh?” As that was what the leaf seemed to be to all about, I was a tad puzzled. On her next pass, she suggested that I squint and only draw the major landmarks of the leaf. This seemed regressive but in the spirit of being a good student, I complied and felt like a half-walked dog. On the next circuit, she suggested I vary the intensity of my grip on the lead, making lines that exressed where the leaf seemed very clear and where it was ‘less crispy’. It all looked pretty clear to me but dutifullyI rode my pencil up and down with fluctuating line weights, something I rarely do with my ink pen. Before long I recognized Frederick Franck’s style expressed on my page. My drawings looked just like his, not much like mine.
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It’s interesting that what our teacher saw as a pure response to the subject, I perceived as an exercise in style. I was seeing the way she and Franck saw, but not really as I do. I tend to bore deep into things, and to treat every line and detail with similar emphasis. There is something more sensual but tentative (dare I say ‘feminine”) about the varying lines of this new style.
As we broke at lunch for an hour, the teacher dangled the opportunity to draw fruis and vegetables after we returned. I decided to forgo the salad and played hooky. Instead, I went out and bought myself a 1980 Honda motorcycle. In Dr Franck’s honor, I spent the rest of the afternoon drawing the road with my tires, shifting from first to second to third gear, depending on how crispy the potholes looked.

Drawing Fire

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I wrote about Steve Mumford last year when his work was only available on Artnet. Now he has published a sumptuous book collecting all of the watercolors and observations he made during his visits to war-torn Iraq.
He told me that he drew almost exclusively with a dip pen while there and that he carried his art supplies in the pockets of his flak jacket, ready to sweep everything together and haul ass if there was any sort of trouble. Some of his paintings are of bombs blowing up under humvees or soldiers returning sniper fire and those sorts of pictures he admitted he had done from photos he took on the scene and then painted back at his hotel or even in his studio safely in New York.
He said that drawing gave him a sort of access he could never have gotten as a journalist. Many photographers were embedded with troops but the Iraqis were often suspicious when they saw a camera. Women in particular did not like to have their pictures taken and retreated behind their veils.
But when Steve sat down to draw, he was trusted. People could see what he was doing, and knew how they were being depicted. And they had the universal interest most people have to watching a work of art come to life, seeing how the lines emerge and take shape. Iraqis have a rich artistic tradition and enormous respect for artists. Steve was able to sit in meetings between the soldiers and the Iraqis, to capture everyday life as it was led in the streets of Baghdad, because people welcomed him.
Steve says he is a shy person and yet he drew crowds whenever he set up his little folding stool and began to draw. Imagine what it’s like to sit on the sidewalk in a war-zone and sketch. Imagine being under the scrutiny of people who could be suicide bombers. Imagine being in tense situations like negotiations with local mullahs or driving down dusty roads in a US military convoy. I’m amazed he could relax enough to do such wonderful work.
Most people are enormously self-conscious the first time they draw in public. There is something very presumptuous in setting yourself up in public as ‘an artist’. You are sure people are watching your every move (which they may well be doing) and then dismissing your feeble efforts and snickering behind your back at your ineptitude. All of these paranoid thoughts swirl in your mind as you draw, little yammering voices nipping at your pen, distracting you, judging every stroke you make.
Of course, like so many excuses we give ourselves for not taking risks or trying new things, your fears are hogwash. The only reactions people have when they see an artist at work is fascination, respect, and envy. Most people will watch from a distance but some will stand right near you. When I draw in Chinatown, the locals come right up and virtually lean on me as I draw; often the same people will stay glued to my side for a half an hour as I work. Occasionally people will gently ask a question about what I’m drawing or why I’m drawing it. If I wear headphones, they probably won’t. I can stop and engage them and reap some quick admiration, or just carry on with my work. On extremely rare occasions, something a little more dramatic might happen. In Jerusalem, some boys try to rip my sketchbook out of my hands and run off with it. Every so often someone has realized I was drawing them and felt violated and insisted I stop (of course, I always do; I wouldn’t make a good drawarazzi).
I urge you to get out with your journal and capture life in the streets. If you are unbearably nervous, sit with your back against a wall or draw the view through a caf� window. I think it’s nice to share your work with the people you are drawing � though I don�t do it often enough. Last week, my pal Tom drew a fire station; the firemen saw him and loved the piece so much they gave him a t-shirt and asked to make a copy; they said they want to make it into a poster. I had a similar experience at a brothel in Nevada that Dan Price and I drew (long story, another time).
If you ever get horribly anxious as you ply your pen and pad out in public, think of Steve Mumford in his flak jacket surrounded by unfamiliar faces and the smell of smoke, and suck it up.

My perspective on perspective

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School’s back on and NYU students wander through my neighborhood, clutching new books and pencils. Quite often, I see some of them set up in the park, preparing to draw Washington Square arch. It’s a beautiful landmark, and I’ve often tackled it myself.
I like the ones who slop around with paint and charcoal but I can’t relate to those who show up with t-squares and turn out tight engineering schema, that look more like blueprints than any expression of soul. To me, drawing is about observation and sensuality more than perfection. That’s my esthetic.
I draw a lot of architecture because they define the landscape we New Yorkers live in. While I’m no Brunelleschi, I understand the principles of perspective. I know generally how to locate a vanishing point and that knowledge can be useful if I’m really stuck. But I think of it as more like understanding the principle of the internal combustion engine; I get it but it doesn’t enter my mind much when I’m driving down the road.
Here’s how I’d go about drawing* the view down my street. perspective-pen.gif
It’s a fairly complex scene so I lay down some little marks first. I find the midpoints of my page (in green) using my pen as a rough ruler. I take the same sorts of measurements of the thing I’m drawing. I also uses my thumbs as rough rulers� so and so many thumb widths to this point, so and so many pen cap lengths to this point � that sort of thing. If I didn’t measure things out like this, I’m sure I would have misjudged how wide the library’s facade was in the foreground. The actual part of the scene that is of interest only occupies about 1/8 of the whole space.
I usually start drawing in the upper left hand corner and work my way across. I’ll make little marks if need be to tell me where things intersect. When I just whip out a long diagonal line like the one in the upper left, it probably won’t hit the mark unless I set a target point.
I’ll also look for some sort of large and broken line somewhere to use as a reference point. In this case, the building on the right has a regular pattern of tiles down its length; I can use this like an in situ ruler to guide the other buildings’ proportions. I count down three tiles and say, ‘Okay, the roof of the ornate building in the center hits this height. Go down one more tile and that’s the point at which the angle of the receding part of the roof hits. Down two more and that ‘s the roof of the building behind it…’ and so on. If there’s no guide in the landscape (as there wasn’t horizontally here) I can also use my pen length to bifurcate the space and create a partial grid to set my reference points.
Remember to check your verticals. Unless you have birds’ or worms’ eyes, make sure your verticals are straight 90 degree angles to the ground. It’s so easy to start leaning them over and soon all of your lines will be out of whack.
I measure other sorts of angles by holding up my pen horizontally and then rotating it to meet the angle. That action temporarily imprints the deviation of the angle from the horizon into my brain. When I go down to the paper, I just repeat the rotation and I can usually get it pretty dead on.
I like to do all these little measurements rather than ruling down the artificial lines of perspective and then erasing them because I am trying to record my own observations in my drawings. I find that all these little measurements bring me closer and closer to my subject and that’s the goal of my work. I don’t care if it’s all accurate and perfect but that it reflects what and how I am seeing. The deeper I go the better. Somehow rulers and perspective lines make it all seem more mechanical and artificial and I just don’t like it.
In any case, the results seem okay to me. In fact, I will often be a lot wilder and just draw lines and angles on the fly. I don’t care that much of my buildings are misshapen and irregular, so long as they feel alive. Those T-square folks seem to make drawings that lie on the page like dead, academic fish.
Drawing buildings is just like drawing anything else. Be slow. Keep your eyes on the subject most of the time. Don’t freak out if you make a ‘mistake’. And do it as often as you can.
Drawing isn’t a science. Don’t reduce it to one.
—–
*Atypically, I drew this in Photshop on a tablet so I could use layers to demonstrate my methodology.

On crosshatching

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As you spend more and more time drawing, there usually comes a point when contour drawing isn’t enough. You can set down lines that perfectly describe the shapes in front of you but you become interested in giving your work dimension and exploring the effects of light and shade. Several people have reached that point recently and written asking me to talk discuss the whys and wherefores of cross hatching. let me try.
Cross hatching is quite miraculous. How is it that black ink lines on white paper have the ability to create an infinite number of shades of grey, to evoke all the colors of the rainbow and to suggest textures and materials and varied as silk and stone, glass and schnauzer hair?
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The first thing to do is to get in the groove. Practice drawing lines until you can lay them down in fairly predictable parallel strokes. Do it in boring practice sessions or just start working them into your drawings. Try greying gradations, filling boxes from pure white to solid black — space the lines far apart in the first box, then halve the distance in the second box, then halve it again in the third and so on until your final block is completely black. Next, try crossing your vertical lines with horizontal ones, weaving darker and darker gradations. Then lay a diagonal set of lines over the grid, upper left to lower right, then cross back upper right to lower left. Try keeping them as regular and even as you can, so you can create various sorts of grey with various sorts of combinations of lines. Don’t make yourself nuts just experiment with lines at 45 and 90 degree angles.
The next things to consider: What do these shades of grey represent? The answer seems to fall into three main effects: Tone, color and texture. You can decide that darker greys mean things in shadow, or that different greys represent different surface colors, or that the lines represent different textures.
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These drawings (by Guptill — see below*) are basically about light and dark. The lines tell you the volume and direction of the light on the object and that’s about it.
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These lines tell you a lot more about the materials the objects are made from; straw, wood, wicker, etc. all accomplished with crosshatching various sorts of lines.
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In this drawings, my pal Tom Kane uses lines to suggest different colors in a girl’s kerchief.
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But here he uses the same sorts of lines to express the direction and shading of light on a girl’s hair.
As you can see, once you start introducing these tones, you have a lot more decisions to make. You aren’t just recoding shapes; you are expressing an opinion about what you found interesting in the scene.
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Consider the differences that values and tones make in these three interpretations of a scene:the various choices evoke different temperatures, distances, moods and degrees of importance.
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It’s interesting to play around with line quality and stippling too: Consider the different feelings these drawings have because of the varying degree of regularity and the direction of the lines used in each identical composition.
My inclination is to avoid incredibly regular lines; they seem mechanical and inorganic to me. I lay down one value in the middle then go back and firth balancing areas with more or less crosshatching until I have described the effect I want. It’;s all a matter of balance and crosshatching is pretty forgiving, If things feel off, just go back and hit your darker areas with a new layer of lines to get the emphasis right.
Like so many things in drawing, there aren’t a lot of hard fast rules or rights and wrongs. Crosshatching is just another opportunity to record your observations, capture your feelings and have fun. And there’s something about that hypnotic regularity of drawing parallel lines that is very soothing.
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“Drawing is just an excuse to crosshatch”— R.Crumb
———–
* The greatest practitioners and teachers worked and published in the 19th century, when every day’s paper was full of endless engraved examples of cross hatching. I have learned a lot from the publications of Watson Guptill, beginning with seminal works by Arthur L. Guptill himself, like Rendering in Pen and Ink and moving on to the less encyclopedic but crystalline Henry C. Pitz’s Ink Drawing Techniques. I also love Paul Hogarth’s Creative Ink Drawing. Many of these are still in print or can be picked up cheaply second-hand.

Happy Old Me

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It’ll be my birthday in a few days and this year I’m feeling it. My ankle is still a little shaky and it has made me physically unsure. It gets a little better every day but it has made me contemplate my mortality anew. I step off the curb more deliberately; I put on an elastic bandage if I think I’ll be walking for a while. I think about the body I usually take for granted.
My barber, an old Italian man in a toupee, horrified me yesterday. He said, “You know, your hair is very thick at the back. You could easily do a transplant and put some up front.” I barked out a laugh but he was serious, “One session, not very expensive at all.”. For the briefest of moments, I imagined what it would be like to have a full head of hair and then dismissed it in a vision of doll’s hairplugs and snickering comments behind my vain back. I told him that receding hairlines had been a family tradition for generations and to go easy on the gel.
Time does seem to be fleeting. Jack is nearly up to my shoulder these days. Summer’s almost done. And we are repainting our apartment and replacing the furniture we bought when we moved in nine years ago. Sic transit. Last weekend we went to 18 West 18th Street, the address where Patti and I met in a long defunct restaurant called Café Seiyoken. When we got married there, five years later, it was a another restaurant. Now it is a children’s book store. The spot where we said our vows is now a cupcake counter. The bar where we first met has been replaced by a rack of Eric Carle books.
I know, I know. What’s more tedious than a middle aged man bemoaning the passing of time? The odd thing about it all is how full life seems to be of things I’ve never done or known. In many ways, I feel dumber and more inexperienced withe each year. I am still learning how to be married after two decades, how to be a dad after eleven years. I still wonder where my career is going, still plan on getting into an exercise program, still consider getting a therapist, still consider moving to the other side of the world.
My grandfather was born in 1909 and he’s still alive and kicking, so chances are I may only be halfway through my journey. Then again I may be electrocuted by this computer and die today.
I do know I wish I had more time to draw so I could get really good at it. Last night I was curiously liberated when I spent an hour tracing a devilishly complex drawing by Ronald Searle. For months I have been looking for the right pen to duplicate his lines, thinking he must have used a dip pen or a rubbery fountain pen of some sort. But when I studied and reproduced his drawng, I discovered that his individual lines are remarkably consistent and that my Rapidoliner traced them perfectly. There’s no trick, no tool that I am missing. My pen is just fine.
Enough excuses. I should just take it outside and use it. But first, let me wrap up my ankle and suck down some Geritol.

Clarification

dannygregory1 Comment

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I’ve been following a discussion on the Everyday Matters group and it has gotten my wheels turning. The talk has been about the utility of specific drawing assignments suggested by others, whether there’s really utility or purpose to everyone deciding to draw a piece of fruit one week, a pair of shoes the next, and then sharing their work and discussing it. While some people love it and have made it the main business of the group, others have complained that it has diverted the purpose of the group and distracted it from its original intention.
I’m not interested in taking sides because I think any sort of drawing is a good thing. However, I’d like to clarify what I’m up to with my drawing. While I have done some nice drawings here in Rome, I’m not interested in being a travel writer or an illustrator or a fine artist.
I want to live my life to its fullest and I find that drawing what I encounter deepens my appreciation. While I share my work with others, I make it for me. When I have unusual and interesting experiences like I’m having in Rome right now, my drawings seem to have a wider interest. But my core philosophy is that every day matters. Every single day. The day you meet the president. The day you have a baby. The day you find a special on sirloin at the supermarket. The day you get your shoes back from the cobbler. I find that drawing helps me to commemorate those events, large and small, dull and transformative. For me, that’s the point of art. To deepen my understanding of my life.
If someone else’s suggestion that I draw a particular thing opens my eye to fruit or glasses or the pattern of sunshine on my counterpane, then that’s great. But ultimately, we all live different lives and are handed assignments by each dawning day. Each day we’re handed a new set of challenges, new rivers to ford, new choices and wonders and pains and lessons. If we think the day is full and familiar, we need just dig deeper into it, look for fresh insight, peel back the layers of the onion. I find that drawing helps me do that.
Art lessons familiarize one with the tools but they are not a substitute for digging one’s own ditches, constructing one’s own nest. They are just abstractions and life is very concrete. I enjoy what I learn in life-drawing classes, but learn far more by drawing my wife’s sleeping body, my reflection in the bedroom mirror.
To draw, one must draw. Exercises and academic and books provide examples of what one might do, but experience is the real teacher. Take tomorrow as your assignment. Draw your breakfast, your bus stop, your bathroom wall while you’re shitting, your laundry as you fold it, your children as they watch TV, your pillow as you wait for lights out.
Be bold with your exploration. Capture what you do and have always done. Then push yourself to new experiences if only to draw them. Visit new neighborhoods and draw them. Meet new people and draw them. Try new foods, read new books, smell new flowers, do anything that will deepen your understanding and your appreciation of your world and your place in it.
I don’t care if you think your drawings suck, if you are ashamed to show them to anyone else. What matters is that you pause and contemplate. If your record of that contemplation is inaccurate, try again. Feel deeper. See deeper. Slow down. Relax. And tomorrow, do it again. You aren’t being graded or evaluated on your drawing. No more than you are being evaluated on your life itself. The only thing that matters is you. What you experience. How you experience it. How much you get out of this day and the next. This is your life. Dig into it. Embrace it. Notice its curves and angles. Explore its corners. Feels its edges and put them down on paper. The pen, the page, are just tools for you to take time and slow it down. I can’t make you do it my way, any more than I can force you to live your life my way. You decide, you forge your style, you pick the line that draws your life.
Take tomorrow and instead of hesitating and questioning and doubting and fretting, draw your breakfast, draw your day. Then try it again the day after. With each successive day, you’ll be clearer and deeper. If you miss a day, don’t freak out or beat yourself up. Just take on the day after that.
Share the results if you’d like. By sharing you will find commonality and support. But maybe you don’t need more than self sufficiency. In that case, keep your drawings for yourself. Or toss them out as you do them. The drawings don’t matter, the drawing does.

Technologica Artistica di Roma

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Rome-20.jpg
So there have been various technical questions from readers who wonder what sort of mountain of gear I have brought with me here to the Holy City to get shit* onto paper and onto this site. It’s an important and pressing issue so I will explore it here in full.
Here’re the highlights: I carry an aluminum alloy Soltek Pro Easel in a calfskin and spandex torsal harness and a Herman Miller folding titanium stool with translucent Cygnus mesh; a 22×30″ Roma Luss Journal re-bound with 300 lb. Fabriano Artistico Cold Press; a full set of Series 44-14 Dan Smith Autograph Series Watercolor Round brushes in Russian winter male Kolinsky sable fur; my trusty 18 Kt rose gold finished Mother of Pearl 85th Anniversary Aurora fountain pen and three different sets of Daniel Smith watercolor pans, each customized for optimal performance under varying heat and humidity conditions.
Oh, and my personal assistant, Franellika, carries a 72″ linen parasol; two Art Bin Ultimate Solutions tote full of miscellaneous markers, pencils, paints, brushes, scalpels, quills, sandwiches, and iced martini fixins; a fully loaded iPod plus backup; a portable library of travel guides, art monographs and r.crumb sketchbooks; and a yellowing skull for contemplation
Back at the hotel, I have two Power Mac G5s (2.7GHz dual-processors) each rigged up to 30-inch Cinema HD Displays and 2-terrabyte external drives; I digitize my drawings with my Aztek Premier drum scanner and run off prints of each page on my HP Color LaserJet 3700dtn Printer. The gear takes up most of the extra hotel room I set up as EDM production HQ but it’s worth it to bring you my high quality art work in the sort of breath taking verisimilitude you have come to expect from this site.
Any further questions on techniques? Please post a comment and/or refer to this profile of my usual gear inventory and inventory of art supplies. Rome-21.jpg

—— *My language may be a little questionable today as I have discovered my new favorite filthy thing: The Dawn and Drew Show, the fucking funniest thing I have heard at least since coming to Italy if not before, and am listening to it on iTunes while I write this)