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.

Going to Van Gogh

dannygregoryLeave a comment


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

dannygregoryLeave a comment

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

dannygregory1 Comment

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

dannygregoryLeave a comment

leaves1.jpg
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.
leaves-2.jpg
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

dannygregoryLeave a comment

cupandsaucer.jpg
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

dannygregoryLeave a comment

perspective-vanishingpt.gif
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.