I dream very intensely on the first few days of a vacation, as my brain reorganizes its hard drive. Weird hallucinogenic dreams feather into each other, dredging up dramas, ancient and new. Old bosses, old addresses, old mistakes, reappear in new masks to cavort on the brinks of skyscrapers or wrestle in Jello®. It’s like File Day, as rusty drawers squeak open, folders and envelopes get hauled out and dumped in piles, sifted through, tossed or reformatted. All this housework doesn’t necessarily result in clarity but it’s an important part of growing and assimilating experiences.
Here, however, are a few of the things I gleaned while lying poolside:
• It’s a mistake to start a vacation by saying, “I sure hope nobody gets sick on this trip.” I am a hardy type, rarely sick, but in Tuscany I got a virulent ear infection (my first in thirty five years); in Puerto Rico, Jack got chicken pox; on the Jersey shore, I got poison ivy (that required two courses of steroids) and so, inevitably, we succumbed in the Dominican Republic too: head colds, coughs, skin allergy, sunburn, insomnia, and diarrhea made for a fun time.
• Cheap rum is cheap for a reason.
• Al Franken is funny, right, and a bit too much of a shrill wonk.
• You can only draw so many palm trees and no one but Albert Bierstadt should try to paint sunsets.
• The Da Vinci Code is an abominably written regurgitation of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a preposterous best seller I read ten years ago and is just a disservice to Leonardo. It wreaks with wooden dialogue, leaden characters and lumbering plot twists and treats art like some sort of word jumble. Wait for the TNT miniseries to come out.
• European and South American pop music uses harmonizing vocal chorus in almost every hit. American pop almost never does.
•Jhumpa Lahiri richly deserved her Pulitzer prize. Many of the characters in The Namesake are still hanging around me, offering me pakoras. I can’t wait for her next one.
• Rapidographs leak after air travel.
• How to be Good suggests that Nick Hornby may have been a one or possibly two book wonder.
• I still love James Herriot, almost as much as I did at twelve.
• Sixpence House is the story of Paul Collins’ year in Hay-on-Waye, the Welsh town with 1,500 inhabitants and 40 antiquarian bookstores. He is a deep and infectious bibliophile and the book is very entertaining. If you love sifting through shelves of dusty obscure books that no one has read in a century (as I do), it’s worth a quick read.
• Topless sunbathers make me yearn for more covering, rather than less.
• A.P.P.B. (Always Pack Peanut Butter)
• It’s nice to go traveling, but, oh, so nice to come home.
Tag: pens
Pendemonium
An inventory of my current stable of pens. They are all waterproof and under $10. Each drawing was done with the corresponding pen.
Dip pen: I love to write with this pen. It’s a little scratchy and there’s something very organic and wild about dipping it in ink. I never know entirely how the pen will react, whether it will stammer or buck and so it makes me draw in a very particular way. It’s my favorite thing for ‘calligraphy’ and turns any writing into a decorative element. I’ve saved a lot of boring drawings by scrawling with it. I’ve used various cheap nibs; this one is the most expressive. I hate italic nibs and think they should only be used by people who really know what they are doing. Otherwise, you look like some fancy 8th grader.
Staedler Pigment liner 03 – Roz recommended this pen to me and I like it a lot, The line isn’t perfect like a technical pen but it’s reliable and consistent. The flow is smooth but not luscious and the nib responds to pressure so you can vary the line thickness somewhat. 03 is the right gauge for me most of the time.
Staedler Pigment liner 07 – There’s also an 05 but I tend not to use inbetweens. This pen is good when I want to loosen myself up and draw big and chunky. My only complaint about pigment liners, in fact all technical markers of this type, is that if I hold the pen at too extreme an angle to the page, it rubs the metal part of the nib and causes the line to suddenly thin down and skip. That’s of ten a good indication that I’m drawing too fast and should pay more attention to what I’m seeing.
Rotring Rapidoliner: I am really in love with this pen these days and I never would of thunk it. I first tried Rapidographs when I was a teenager but they always clogged and leaked and were a pain to fill. I was forever dismantling the nibs and washing them in the sink and finding ink blots on my shirts. This pen is perfect. My nib is the finest they make and the pen just won’t clog or skip. The guts are disposable, for $4 you get a fresh new nib and supply of Indian ink. I have been drawing with this pen every day for two months and am still on my original cartridge. The pen’s feeling is ultra smooth, a little creamy and a little brittle, like icing on a cupcake. The best $10 I ever spent.
Faber- Castell PITT – The best brush markers, hand down, far more robust, consistent and black than Sakura. I like the whole PITT series, including the pens. Waterproof, Indian Ink, highly lightfast and most of the colors are quite good. They’re just being introduced so you can get them at incredible prices. I bought a set of 24 for a little over $30.
Sakura Pigma Micron: D.Price first turned me on to these pens and I used them exclusively for years. They come in sizes 005 to 08 and are archival. The point is a little hard and the pens aren’t terribly robust. I think I strayed from my exclusive relationship with Sakuras for tiny reasons: the type on the pens wears down over time and it can become hard to tell at a glance what the size of a pen is as they all look alike, I wrap mine in tape to preserves the numbers. I still use them but have diversified.
Penstix: this pen’s nib is plastic and yet it has a fine feel. The ink is a little less opaque and ultra black but it’s nice to draw with, almost crayon like sometimes. I get in the mood for it and tend to use it for a week at a time then it gets lost in my pen box.
Grumbacher Artist pen. This little hypodermic syringe is ultra sharp and precise, the finest point I know. It’s a 25 like the Rapidoliner but it seems frailer and more spidery. This pen makes me draw teeny details and endless crosshatching. The design is awful — the cap won’t go on the weird sticklike barrel and the pen can, after time, leak a bit. They’re hard to find but I hoard them when I can find them. About $6 and last for ages.
The Old Bamboo
My passion for my Rotring rapidoliner deepens. Unlike any other technical pen I’ve used, it is always on the ready, never clogs or sticks or leaks and I’ve never even had to shake it one time to force ink to the nib. The ink itself is deep black, fairly quickly drying and water proof. The drawings I do with this pen are detailed and full of crosshatching. Occasionally, I catch glimmers of the sort of line that r.crumb coaxes out of his Rapidographs and those are very exciting occasions to me.
Still the pen tends to make me draw and see in a particular way — I find myself looking for immensely detailed things to draw, elaborate building facades, the interiors of overflowing closets, or else to do lots of postage stamp pictures crammed on the same page. To shake things up, I switch hit with the crudest, most blunt drawing instrument of all, a bamboo pen.
This pen is just a stick carved into a point on either end. I dip it in Higgins waterproof ink. The line is surprisingly smooth and responsive to my pressure, delivering lines of different thickness.It makes me draw far more gesturally and to switch my vision to a different focal length, taking off the microscope of the Rapidograph and seeing in sweeping outlines, forsaking the miniscule details I could never render with the bamboo.
I am drawing from one of my favorite sources, the 1955 yearbook of Spalding Institute of Peoria, Illinois, full of hundreds of well groomed Catholic faces. I have a shelf full of yearbooks, picked up a for a dollar or two at flea markets, and they give me a great range of faces to study, all similarly composed, sharp and clear, covering the 1930s through the 1970s.
Jonesing for a 000
My mum’s house sits nestled in the middle of several acres of wild forest and is full of stuff to draw, including her cat, Fred, and the family collection of stone Buddhas, many of which my grandfather acquired in Pakistan years ago. As we all sat around and she unwrapped a basketful of birthday gifts, I drew anything within eyeball reach with an old/new pen.
Old, because I used to love its fine, sharp line and hard-as-a-hypodermic nib until I decided it was bad for me and gave it up years ago. New, because I was craving it again and bought a fresh one last week (Grumbacher “Artists Pen” very hard to come by).
Why ‘bad‘ for me?
Well, the pen is so fine and hard it makes me draw in a very particular way that appeals to the most anal retentive part of me and I make these would-be photorealistic drawings that are so tight and rigid and tiny and, while that’s all well and fine in small doses, I ended up tossing the pen when I started wanting to do teeny tiny postage stamp drawings full of stippling and cross-hatching and little else.
But it was my mum’s birthday, so I gave myself a break.
Am I nuts?
P.S. I do quite like this page. Is it too small to read?
Danny Gregory 