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.
Tag: travel
Technologica Artistica di Roma
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. 
—— *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)
Romin'
Yesterday I managed to throw down a quick drawing at the Trevi fountain before becoming overwhelmed by sun and jetlag. This morning, chipper and well-rested, I packed up my gear to head over to the Vatican. A block from my hotel, I stepped off the too-high curb and crumpled to the ground as tendons thwanged unnaturally in my ankle. Fortunately I had the self-control to get up, hobble back up the hill to the hotel and tell the desk clerk to send me up some ice.
My outer ankle had quickly developed a lump the size of a Mallomar but after three hours in bed, pack on, hoof on pillow pile (RICE- rest, ice, compression, elevation) the patient is still pink and healthy looking and my toes waggle freely so amputation can probably be postponed. I am going to be here for a couple of more weeks so I think I’ll curb my lust for the Sistine Chapel and take it easy.
Was it the Pope, cursing me? Michelangelo pegging me for an interloper? A frustrated cobble-stone-layer who, wishing he too could be watercoloring of a Monday, decided to thwart brush wielding tourists of the future?
The irony: I was crossing the road (or trying to) to check out a place that rents Vespas. Maybe it was just as well I took my spill in my sandals, rather than scraping off several layers of skin and a handful of teeth while zooming around the Coliseum on a two stroke bike. 
I have constrained my drawing to my hotel’s neighborhood which in Rome
is not much of a liability. One could spend the rest of one’s life
drawing this city — the architecture is so rich and organic, the light
is wonderful, the juxtapositions are endlessly diverse. I did this
first piece during an exorbitant pasta lunch (more than $50 for a handful of
pasta and a cappuccino) at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant. Slumped low,
my hoof propped up on another chair, I strained to see the view over
the parapet.
A few blocks away on the Via Veneto, I discovered this marvelous
church. Beneath is a wonderfully macabre series of crypts, room after
room of Benedictine monks’ dismembered skeletons arranged into
sculptures and decorations — piles of skulls, chandeliers made of
tailbones, shoulder blade rosettes and baldacchinos made of pelvises.
Long lines of teenaged American girls file in and out, squealing “Ew,
gross!” and “Creeeeepy!”. I found it quite beautiful and touching, so
many 17th century bones committed to remind one of the temporary nature
of life on this planet, “As you were so once was I ; as I am so shall
you be.”
It was impossible to draw down there among the crowds so I retired to
the Church of the Immaculate above and drew its back room as the light
slowly faded and my watercolor box disappeared into the gloom. At one
point, a nut brown monk came over and wished me “Pace” but I was
already suffused with peace.
On the Piazza Barberini, I started to draw an old cinema surrounded by
lovely crumbling facades when a big white panel van pulled right up in
front of me and blocked my view. Instead I worked on another building,
listening with one ear to two slurring Englishwomen at the next table
who were drinking huge vasefuls of lager and snapping pix of each other
and emailing them to pals back home. Eventually my friends, the Pratts,
came and joined me and I laid down my pen.
Annie Pratt is a believer in homeopathic medicine and prescribed some
Arnica to me. The next morning my ankle was a lot less swollen and,
after various meetings on casting and production, we headed off to
visit the Colosseum and the rest of ruined Rome. It was blazing hot and
crowded and I couldn’t bring myself to tackle drawings of the broken
columns. En route, my pocket was picked on the subway; the bastards
made off with about $100. Sprained ankle, thieving gypsies, John
Roberts … I wonder what sort of bad luck I’ll face today.
I’m not the tourist type. My neighborhood in New York is always
overrun by people wearing comfortable clothes and cameras clutching
guide books and asking “Scusi, where Greenwich Village?” I am always gracious but wish they would walk a little faster and get a clue.
But in Rome, do as the Romanians do. Get a guide book, a map, and start
blundering around town. Nonetheless, despite my backpack, my folding
stool, my sandals, and my sweaty, parched ways, I try to pretend not to
be desperately foreign. Of course, I fail. Waiters address me in
English, vendors hawk after me with postcards and foot high replicas of
David
My self-loathing came to an end in Vatican City. When I lined up with
the rest of the unwashed and finally reached the portal of St.Peter’s,
I was so overcome by the beauty and splendor of the place that I just
let go and gawked. Wow. The plundered marble and bronze of the Coliseum
is mind-bpoggling lavish.. And then, waiting until the end of the day
to avoid the lines, I swept through the Vatican Museum to the Sistine
Chapel, discovering amazing things I’d never known along the way. The
map room, hundreds of yards long and encrusted with thousands of
perfect paintings worked into the walls and ceilings, the Raphael
frescoes (how could the Pope manage the hubris to command such geniuses
to paint his apartment floor to ceiling, wall after wall? Here he is a
single guy with the most ornate, Baroque pad in the universe.. How did
he sleep in there at night? It’s awesome), and then finally the
Sistine. I have read books about it, seen endless reproductions and
thought I grasped Michelangelo’s accomplishment. But to be confronted
by so much epic scenery, so many perfect, enormous bodies…; whether he painted it alone or with a crew, it’s an incredible, deeply moving feat.
I gush. I can’t help it. Despite my cynicism and my discomfort with the
Papacy’s greed, I may have to go again. My name is Danny and I’m a
tourist (don’t tell my boss — I am here working after all).
Two Roman drawings that took a while. The first about an hour, the
second, close to it,
I was moved by police three times during the first which screwed up my
sight lines a bit. The second I’m less happy with, too many stylized
people, less observed, more illustrative, too much blue underpainting,
but, whatever, it was fun to do.
Rome is just insanely great to draw because of all the details and textures and juxtapositions. Work is
done for the week — I can’t wait to spend my weekend out on my stool.
This wonderful building is on the corner of my block. It sits on top of its own little hill, surrounded by gardens. I pass it most days and finally took the time, on two separate occasions, to study it in detail. 
This city is so full of surprises. Turn a corner and a wonderful composition or juxtaposition will just jump out. This one suddenly appeared between the trees as I was hiking out to eat dinner; branches parted like a curtain to reveal this vista backed by the setting sun.
Another view that popped out; this one seen from above from a hill. These little temples must have been restored in the Roman fashion; the little tubby demons are so sweet.
The Borghese Gardens have a giant air ballon in the style of the Gondolfier Brothers. It rises silently in the air for fifteen minute trips from which one can see the whole city. Nothing in Rome is more than six stories so the big landmarks pop out across the landscape. I have now been here long enough to identify the Vatican, the Victor Emanuel Monument, the various piazzas, the Coliseum, etc.
A little bit of color, exaggerated, as it was painted in the failing light of an ending day.
I’m finally getting the hang of tires. Wheels have always confounded me when I draw cars and stuff but as I say, in Europe, I’m finally getting the hang of tyres. 
Notice the small brown mini dots on this drawing? That’s because when I start doing and drawing of something so complicated or big or whatever that I get nervous, I take a few measurements with an outstretched arm and a pen and then make little marks to indicate where things fall.
Despite all that, this drawing, made as people were rushing to work at 9 am and I had to get my ass moving for a 10 o’clock meeting, is lopsided and misisng all sorts of bits that didn’t end up fitting on the page.
Another drawing done in decline, lopsided, colored like a coloring book and full of cheats to fit stuff in. When I slow my ass way way down, I can draw things like that Vespa up above. When I rush and people hang over my shoulder and I’m roasting in the sun, Things get bleak. I know that about myself and yet I keep doing it. Sometime I can save a drawing afterwards with loads of crosshatching but it’s a lost cause, a charade, not in the moment. But, then, later in the afternoon, during the wardrobe fitting, waiting for our actors to change, I drew the Vespa which I’m pretty happy with, particularly the tyres. So even when the knack hides, it resurfaces. So shut up and do another drawing.
Chicago on four hours' sleep
I am posting this from my room in Rome, still fairly jetlagged but eager to get out there tomorrow and start drawing. Meanwhile, here are some journal pages from the last few days while I was shooting in Chicago, specifically at an 80-year old institution called the Aragon ballroom.
Most of our days lasted more than 16 hours and we wrapped at 3 am; the effects are visible in my drawings which are actually quite nice and loose though manically, Tom Kanesian in their crosshatched detail.
My colors are a little bolder than usual — I should probably continue to paint in the gloom.
I drew entirely in Sepia ink and watercolors, and many of these entries were doing in semi darkness and while severely sleep deprived. My marginal comments seem even more crabby and distracted than usual.
Seeing the forest, oh, and the trees
In The Art Spirit, my pal Bob Henri talks about the importance of that original intention which sparks one to make a drawing or a painting. What caught my interest? And, all critically, how do I hold on to that intention so my art is infused with that interest? It’s not enough to decide to draw a tree, one must feel something about that tree and have that feeling right in front of one’s eyes and one observes. His advice is to work fast and furiously, blocking in the big masses while the flame is still burning.
My usual technique is to move slowly, with a blank mind. I enter a meditative state and let my eyes cruise around the contours, laying down every line with equal weight until I have explored the whole object. I rarely try to feel anything as I do this but I must be. I choose certain subjects over others because I like them or am curious about them. So I decided to be more aware and to explore some other ways of looking at a tree a few blocks from my hotel.
I spent a good long time working in ink first. I was very into the carbuncles and folds of the tree’s skin. As I drew, I became increasingly aware of the tree’s colors: it was quite yellow but cloaked in purple, two complimentary colors. I kept thinking about how these colors inter-played and then I painted over my line with watercolors. I was using my new paper, this Yupo pad I picked up on the weekend. The ink went down very smoothly on it but had a tendency to smear. As I painted I was pretty aware of how unnaturally the paint went down, pooling on the paper instead of soaking in. The colors remained pretty vivid, undimmed by the fibers, but it all felt temporary somehow. I couldn’t really let go, worrying that the whole thing would wipe of the page when I was done. I also felt like I had a long lens on — I was only looking at each square inch of the tree but had little sense of the whole as I drew.
While the pad lay drying in the afternoon sun, I decided to have another go and grabbed my trusty Japanese journal with its 100+lb paper ( intended for drawing but it’ll take watercolor pretty well) and my Faber-Castell PITT bold brown brush marker. In three minutes, I knocked out a sketch, thinking all the while about the flow and energy of the tree. I did a caricature of the yellow and violet and capped my pen.
Next I took a black PITT pen and thought about the tree’s architecture, how it anchored into the ground and how the limbs were bolted onto the spine of the creature. I bore down harder on my pen, drawing firmer lines and painting in more defined shapes of color.
Finally I took my cheap Sheaffer italic pen, loaded with dark brown non-waterproof ink and this time I thought about the movement of the trees, how the carbunckly growth flowed like water or vomit from the trees crotch, how the limbs pulled in different directions and how that tension held the tree together and propelled it into the sky. Now the tree seemed almost serpentine to me, writhing out of the soil, phallic, twisting, alive. The watercolors dulled the lines but it felt okay, as if the fusing the whole thing together.
I look at these four drawings and I’m not sure yet what conclusion to draw about them. I like the earthy energy of my last drawing (as if it was made by a goat or a mole) but there’s still something lovely and light about the first bird-like one. Each has something to say in its way, like the varied members of a string quartet, the ingredients of a cassoulet.
One conclusion is clear: Drawing never fails to amaze me; how it can rip open the doors into your head, how it can transform the world and your place in it. Nobody but me can see this process, this unfolding, as it happens to me. All that’s left for others to see are the pages in my journal, the ass wipings on paper — but never the feast.
Feeling a little La-la
I have been holding on to my jet lag quite well while here in LA; getting up early and going to sleep most nights before ten. Still my internal clock has slowly drifted west a little more each day; I’m probably somewhere over Oklahoma today, rising at 6:30 and feeling rested (last week it was 4:30). It’s been great to get up at dawn and have a couple of hours to myself. I usually walk along the beach for forty five minutes; to the Santa Monica Pier and back before breakfast, passing the homeless people still in their sleeping bags under the palm trees.
After breakfast, I work on my book. I am able to dart on to my computer several times a day to make adjustments to the work in progress, rewriting, redesigning, lettering and drawing elements to insert into the layout. Last night, while waiting for a final meeting on casting, I finished my final read through and am pretty much satisfied. The book is 208 pages long; each with a unique design, rimming with drawing and colors and thoughts and weird lettering. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done and I feel deeply satisfied by it. I could go on tweaking forever and yet it also feels quite complete, organically whole. I will look at it on the plane again tonight and then send it off to my editor.
I’ve spent most of my days over the past week and a half working on the campaign we are set to start shooting next week. We’ve figured out every shot and transition, pulling the spots apart and reassembling them, challenging them to their basic premises and seeing how we can plus them. We have dozens of roles to cast across the campaign and each day look at DVDs full of actors in LA and New York. Last night was our last round of callbacks and we are in pretty good shape. This afternoon we will take our clients through all of the decisions we make and on Tuesday the cameras will start to roll. We have tested so-called ‘animatics’ (basically cartoon versions of the spots that let us see how people respond to the basic plots of the spots) with consumers and they have all done exceptionally well, hitting historic highs for communication, persuasion and likeability, so we are hoping that our clients will be filly on board with all of the subsequent decisions we’ve been making. But, of course, one never knows. Our director has just finished shooting a movie and every day must meet with the studio and discuss the edit; he says it is a horrible experience and one he won’t repeat any time soon.
This evening, I’ll be on the red-eye back to New York. I’ll get to spend a few days with my family (who I miss terribly) and to duck into my office and straighten out some things on the other parts of my account. We are in the midst of launching a huge print campaign too and have photographers to hire and many, many details to work out.
It has been a very stressful experience because so much is riding on our efforts both at the clients and at the agency. Hopefully things will all go smoothly and the tension will subside.
My book is keeping me sane, quite honestly. It is like a quiet lagoon I can dive in to when all around me is chaos. It’s not just the fact that it’s a real project that has been met with so much good energy so far. It’s also that it’s mine; a little world of my own making that reflects nothing but my own experience of reality. It’s also something I hope will be very positive for those who share it and will help them to embrace their own creativity and make lagoons of their own. Drawing has always brought me such peace and happiness and the further I wander into the Valley of Darkness, the more important a beacon it becomes.
Sure, my book is going to be published — but that’s not it; all of the books that precede it, the 38 volumes of drawings I have filled in the past few years, have all brought me this satisfaction, helping me see the world as it truly is, not a tangle of subjectivity and judgment and tensions and ego, but a place of peace and great beauty, even in the smallest things.
That said, I’ve finished my breakfast now. I’m going to go and do a little drawing in the sunshine before my day takes off.
A Writer's Paris
Dr. Eric Maisel is a psychotherapist who works exclusively with artists and has written many terrific books like The Creativity Book, Staying Sane in the Arts, Fearless Creating, Deep Writing, A Life in the Arts and other inspiring guides on the creative mind and process. Recently, Eric invited me to illustrate his new book, A Writer’s Paris, which will be published in a year or so.
On Wednesday afternoon, Patti and I will be skipping turkey and heading across the Atlantic; over the next four days, I’ll make as much progress as possible on the 30 full-page illustrations I’ve promised Eric for his book. I’ll be working in black, using a pen and ink wash.
The sketch crawl will be good preparation. I’m going from the 10K of the Met to the marathon of the sketchcrawl to the Iron Man triathlon of Paris. I’ll be dealing with possible snow flurries, temperatures in the 40s and jet lag but it will be a great adventure.
We had a terrific visit to Paris over Thanksgiving. We arrived (via Frankfurt) on Thursday morning and spent the day in a bit of a jet-lagged fog (I can’t sleep on planes) but did quite a lot of drawing. We had Thanksgiving dinner of escargots, foie gras, biftek, and lashings of bordeaux at a bistro in the Latin Quarter.
We started Friday at the Musée D’Orsay. I’ve only been there briefly before but this time we made a bee-line for the Van Goghs and Gaugins and then I spent an hour drawing the beautiful old clock in the main room. A wonderful museum.
I had a check list of more than thirty things to draw and, by Sunday morning, Patti had checked off about 80% of them. I had taken reference photos of the remaining subjects and will finish the project at home.
We were very lucky with the weather. One day of blue skies, two overcast, and the first raindrops fell on our cab’s windscreen as we got in to travel to the airport. The mercury hovered in the mid 40s most of the time so it was quite comfortable sitting outside most of the time. We would duck into cafés or shops for periodic refreshment.
This sort of three-day drawing trip has a lot to recommend it. We were on the go all day, saw every corner of the City, really studied the sights, and came home with a wonderful souvenir without spending much money. Though the dollar is weak, you can do a trip like this for just over a thousand bucks per person and you will remember it forever.
I drew on heavy bond either with a Rapidoliner (.25 and .50) or an Art (fountain) Pen . I then pulled out a Niji waterbrush loaded with black Dr. Martin’s transparent water colors . I colored in the darkest bits and then, while the color was still wet, I used a Niji filled with clean water to slosh things around, mixing various shades of grey right on the page or on the knee of my jeans or on the nearest surface (park bench, Rodin sculpture, whatever) using the clean brush to dilute it and then my Welsh pub towel to clean things up.
When I got home, I made photocopies of the drawings and FedExed the originals. The images I’ve posted are scans of the copies.
My aim, and I think I fell far short of it, was to emulate Ronald Searle’s 1950 Paris Sketchbook.
This book is now available on Amazon
Cross Country
I have just returned from a cross country trip to visit some of my journaling friends.
My first stop was in Minneapolis where I spent several days with Roz Stendahl whom I first encountered through the 45 wonderful journals she kept documenting the life of her dog, Dot.
Roz is a designer, illustrator, teacher, and writer who has been enormously generous to me with her time, advice and friendship.
Roz has been teaching me a great deal about pens and watercolors and I was anxious to see her studio. She has every conceivable type of paint and brush, marker and pencil, not to nention 3,000 rubber stamps in a painfully orderly library. My current journal was bound by Roz with 140lb. Arches watercolor paper and a hemp canvas cover. It was terrrific to work in and I have really been enjoying working in a book with landscape proportions once again.
Spending time with such a dedicated, prolific, fastidious, creative and talented artist was a great treat. I was really happy with just about every drawing and painting I did in Minesota and it was largely due to Roz’s example. She’s so full of energy and ideas that I really wish I’d had another month to visit with her.
Our drawing trip began at a hilarious junk store called Axman filled with my favorite sort of drawing subject – intricate gizmos. I couldn’t make up my mind what to tackle until I saw Roz and her mini paint box hovering over a gas mask.
Next we headed to the Minnesota zoo and turned ourselves into major attractions by drawing various critters. Roz draws standing up so I joined her and foud it quite comfortable though it was a little tricky propping up my paint box and my pub towel and all.
I’ve never drawn at the zoo before, thinking it would be impossible to capture moving animals but I discovered that they tend to assume a handful of positions and if you keep a bunch of drawings going at once you can go back and forth between them to capture the different positions. we draw a bunch of beavers in an overly chlorinated pond. One of them scratches himself with feverish determination.
Roz is a prodigious notetaker; she speckles her drawings with all sorts of observations about her subject, writing down colors, behavior, funny things passers by say to each other.
I tried to emulate her but all of my notes tend to be a string of jokes instead. But I do love the look of hand writing and drawings together.
It’s quite amazing how people just zoom past exhibits, checking off the animals they’ve seen as if it was a competition. If they linger, it’s often to say something mind-blowingly ignorant or mean, particularly the adults.
Drawing them makes me appreciate the incredible miracle theses beats are and how extraordinary that they are right here in front of me, in Minnesota.
It’s so intimate to be just on the other side of a thin sheet of glass watching a slumbering lion. I was no more than a foot from him; I could have taken his big soft catcher’s mitt of a paw in my hand and felt the coarse hair of his beard were it not for the window.
After two zoos, we decided to check out some cadavers. I love natural history museums and Minneapolis’s is a pip — the specimens were posed in wonderful dioramas with wax leaves and meticulous details. I enjoyed standing close so the painted backgrounds filled my peripheral vision and I could imagine that I was standing in the forest with wild beasties. It was a nice change to draw a critter that wasn’t going to turn around and scratch its butt, lick its genitals or wander behind a tree in mid-drawing.
We were basically the only visitors looking at the taxidermy and, after drawing this sheep, I took a nine minute nap on one of the hard wooden benches. The museum also had a touchie-feelie exhibit where you could pet taxidermy and toss skulls around so we drew a few of them.
My time with Roz and Dick was running out; I took pictures of her voluminous collection of hand-bound journals, we ate dinner at an Afghani restaurant, and the next morning I began the most arduous leg of my trip, flying to San Jose, connecting to Portland and then renting a car to drive 300 miles across Oregon to visit my pal, d.price.
Here are a few more souvenirs from Minneapolis. I so envy Roz her neat and orderly studio. What you don’t see are the big computer/scanner/printer end of her studio as well as a second room crammed with journals, research materials, bookbinding stuff, and some 60 drawers full of boxes of rubber stamps. Heaven!
Upon arriving in Portland, I began the longest drive of my life, across Oregon. I am a native NYer and don’t drive much so tackling the endless, dead straight roads of the West was a new and somewhat daunting experience.
I broke the trip in the small town of Pendleton, bought myself a magenta cowboy shirt, and checked into a wee motel. The next morning, I headed out at 7 a.m. and promptly got my first ever speeding ticket.
From my letter to the judge:
Dear Judge Dahl:
On August 19, 2004, I received a traffic ticket (#32914) for driving over the speed limit. While I do not deny that I was traveling at the recorded speed, I would like to explain some of the circumstances to help you reach a final decision on the matter.
This was the first time I have driven in Oregon. I live in New York City, NY and was driving across state in a rented car. I had just come off Rt. 84 (where the speed limit is 65) and onto Rt. 82. The roads were fairly empty at this early hour of the morning and very straight. I have never driven in the West before on such long straight, sparsely populated roads and, after driving 200 miles from Portland in an unfamiliar vehicle, I did not gauge the appropriate speed properly. I have been driving for over twenty years and have never received a speeding ticket before, so I hope you can appreciate that this sort of driving is certainly not a habit with me. I’m sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused you, the officer or the State of Oregon but can assure you that I will never drive in this manner again.
I enclose a check for $237 but hope that you can see your way to reducing my fine.
Yours,
In a state of shock and high anxiety, I finished the drive and pulled into Dan Price’s little town, Joseph. After a restorative cup of tea, we headed over to the cemetery where d.price is the groundskeeper.
Joseph has an interesting blend of residents. There are cowboys and construction workers like you’d expect in a small Western town. There are also several bronze foundries so a healthy art community has sprung up. There are aging hippies and young anarchist freaks. And there are a few very rich folk, some quite mysterious.
Dan’s friend Dave is one such millionaire and the source of his money is of endless intrigue to his neighbors. I proposed that he might be D.B.Cooper — he hijacked a plane in the early 1970s and then parachuted out over Oregon with the ransom and was never found. Dave collects planes and loves ultra lights. We drew this one in his hangar at the Joseph airport. 
On Saturday, Dan assembled a group of local artists for a drawing get-together. We breakfasted at the Wild Flour Bakery and shared journals, then headed out to the Kooch’s farm to draw stuff. As usual, it was great to draw with like-minded folks.
It is so different here from my life. Everyone knows each other and there’s endless gossip. The pace is gentle and free and open-minded. I don’t know if I could stand small town life for long but it makes a great break.
Last winter, Dan Price’s son, Shane, volunteered to make a sculpture of his school’s mascot. Dan offered to help. Before long, the project has mushroomed, the eagle was seven feet tall and, while Shane put in a couple of hours here and there, Dan was working ten hours a day on this massive bronze bird. Neither of them had ever welded or sculpted before and they used the welding test scraps from the school’s metal shop as their raw materials.
After several months of herculean effort, the bird was unveiled at graduation and it looks like it’s been there forever. A family of yellow jackets has taken residence in a klieg horn between the bird’s scapulae.
The highlight of my visits to Oregon is always staying in Dan’s place, Indian River Ranch. Over the past decade or so, he has lived on a meadow on a river bank and had erected various sorts of residences there. He has lived in a teepee, in a one man tent and then built a kiva, an underground structure like a hobbit house. You enter through a knee-high door and crawl into a wood-lined burrow, a round room about seven feet in diameter. It has wall-to-wall carpeting, electricity, a sky light and is always 55 degrees, year round. I always sleep like a hibernating squirrel in there.
The meadow contains other buildings: a garage for Dan’s trike (he recently drove it 5,000 miles across country) ; a little kitchen/shower; a sweat lodge; an outhouse; and his most recent construction : a fantastic boulder covered studio where Dan publishes his zine, Moonlight Chronicles.
(If you don’t subscribe to it yet, I’d be very disappointed. It inspired me to start drawing, journaling, and get on the path I’ve been on for years. It is a mixture of adventure, philosophy and art that will make a serious impact on your life. I simply insist you subscribe right now. Come on! It’s inexpensive and wonderful! Or at least download yourself a copy of your license to be a kid).
The meadow has a lawn, a vegetable garden, and a couple of acres of wilderness. It is a Walden-esque paradise.
I have created a special gallery of images from the meadow. I hope they bring you peace.
We finish up our sketching for the day and pack up the car for the hour drive to LaGrande where Dan’s parents live, stopping en route to pick a bouquet for Joanne Price.
The Prices have a large bison ranch and I drive out with Dan’s dad to visit the herd, about a hundred of these monsters and their families. Dan’s mom is an accomplished pianist and after dinner she plays beautiful music as I draw. The serene evening is jarred by the abrupt and uninvited arrival of Dan’s ex-wife, Lynn, who, as is her wont, causes a scene. Nonetheless, I sleep well and head out early for the long, leisurely drive back to Portland. No speeding tickets this time!
Last stop on my cross-country trip: the Mission district of San Francisco to visit my e-pal, Andrea Scher. If not for Andrea, this blog wouldn’t exist. Last December, she convinced me that I could and should start a blog of my own after I showed admiration for her site, Superhero Designs, a combination jewelry showroom, photography gallery and creative coffee klutsch.
We spend a couple of days walking around her neighborhood, drawing, shooting photos (she also convinced me to buy my wonderful new Canon Rebel digital camera), and talking about art, commerce, and her time working for SARK. Andrea is wise beyond her years and has given me so much sound and illuminating advice. Like many young people and creative and sensitive people she is still looking around to define her own identity, to figure out what she should do for a living, how to make ends meet without surrendering her spirit and her creativity.
For a weird West Coast experience, she took me to Psychic Horizons for a psychic reading. An intense looking man examined my aura and told me that he saw a floating glass vial of red liquid that indicated that I had a substance abuse problem. All I could think was that perhaps the vial represented ink, the only substance I indulge in with any regularly. Then he cleaned my chakras and filled my being with an imaginary pink liquid filled with golden flecks. I felt rejuvenated and my walled was lighter by ten bucks.
There was a madonna in the psychic courtyard and, to avoid being ensared in conversation by any of the inmates, I drew and Andrea photographed her.
“Mi Casa”
When I was in San Francisco, I stayed in a little guest house called “Balmy Casa” . It was a lovely apartment that even came with two bikes to rise up and down (puff) the hills of the Mission. My favorite thing was the street, every house of which was covered in spectacular murals. There is street art all over the neighborhood and, on one morning, I saw no fewer than four artists at work on fresh ones. New York has occasional murals but they are are rarely well done and quickly desecrated. In SF, the art makes the street glow. If I wasn’t so in love with NYC, I would definitely be packing for ‘Frisco town.
I took a few pictures of my neighbors’ digs to share with you.
Meet Prash
Every so often I see work that makes me say, “Well, yes, that’s what I’m trying to do but some thing seems to have interfered between my brain and the page.” Prashant Miranda’s journals always make me feel that way.
He emails me tantalizing glimpses from them every so often and I get quite green with envy. His watercolors are so loose and bright and expressive.
Prash came to Toronto from India some five years ago. He says: “if I was to describe myself…i’d say that I am a scribe. I keep sketchbooks all the time, it’s moved from sketchbooks to sketchboxes…with loose pages, and now they are leather pouches that I stitch myself.”
Prash has sent me journal pages he made in India: on his recent visit to Quilon, his childhood home on the south west coast of India, and of the lighthouse in Tangeserri; to Benares, the holy city in the north; and to Goa. And also scenes from Canada, his new home: his solo camping trip on an island in the Moose River; and, most recently, an old sedan being being shot in his neighborhood for the Russell Crowe movie, Cinderella Man.
Prash worked for Cuppa Coffee, a lovely animation studio where he’s developing a kids’ show called Ted’s Bed. The series looks to be an updated version of Nemo in Slumberland and the website is full of watercolored postcards with beautiful calligraphy in Prash’s signature style.
If you’d like to know more about Prash, drop him a line.
Inklinations
The only downside to my vacation (and this will give you an indication of what a hopeless nerd I am) were a few pen problems. First of all, though we packed virtually everything in the house into our car for the trip, I left my trusty Rotring Rapidoliner in my bedside table drawer. The only reason for such an oversight is that I had just begin to use a device called the Rotring Art Pen — a sort of fountain pen that Richard Bell uses all the time and seems to swear by. I have been interested in drawing with a fountain pen of late because I like the more variable line it gives (I love my Rapidoliner because it flows so smoothly but the line can seem a little mechanical and rigid at time) and so I have been two-timing the Rapidoliner with this long, black stranger.
The Art Pen has one obvious design flaw, the back end tapers to a near point which mean that when you take off the cap, you can’t snap it onto the back and have to lay it down somewhere and then be mildly distracted about whether or not you’ve left it behind which may effect your drawing in a sort of stone-in-your-shoe sort of way.
Then, poolside, I discovered a more significant problem.
The Art Pen comes with a half dozen little prefilled plastic ink cartridges. The ink, I discovered after laboriously drawing this geezery couple and then beginning to slather on the old water color, is not waterproof. The ink began to branch out into spidery tendrils and my lines became fuzzy.
Fortunately I had bought a special bladder, the “Piston Fill Ink Converter”, that allows me to fill the pen manually and later I tossed out the feeble cartridge and pumped in some India Ink.
Another minor problem arose which is that the bladder, which is a sort of syringe that you advance and withdraw by rotating a little stick at the end, doesn’t seem to draw entirely of its own accord and one must ocasionally recrank it up and refill the nib. If you don’t do this very carefully, big drops of ink fall onto your drawing.
All that having been said, I continue to use the Art Pen but plan to send Richard a nasty note.
I’ll admit, I am a fickle pen owner. I search for years, find perfection, but my eyes keep roaming. Another pen I keep on the side is called the Grumbacher Artist Pen (there’s not alot of creativity in the pen naming community, it would seem) which has the teeniest needle point and the same pointed-end, cap-losing design as the Art Pen.
It is not refillable but the line is so fine it seems to last forever anyway. I did a drawing or two with it on my trip and still quite like it but for optimal performance, use very smooth paper.
Finally, the Art-Pal Creative pen — a very groovy-looking, gold pen with a brush nib that you fill with the ink of your choice. Looks, however, are horribly deceiving. It is a piece of junk. I filled it, used it briefly twice, and the nib sort of crumbled and the tip broke off. It might be possible to replace the nib but the pen came from Jerrys Artarama with no instructions and no way to buy new nibs. I’ve written to them for explanation but so far they have been mute.
And finally, I am determined to pick up some gouache today. I tried working with watercolor and no line drawing but the results felt wishy-washy. I need to be able to add a layer that is more defined and sharp and bright on top of watercolor and I have resorted to white ink put on with a dip pen and then tinted the ink with watercolor which works okay but is fiddly and hard to control.
I’m sure if I paid better attention to my lessons from Roz I wouldn’t have this dilemma but it seems easier to just buy more art supplies.
Danny Gregory 