January 31, 2004
Ideas and the end of the world
In nature, we organisms have a tendency to seek balance. We want to adapt to our environment and develop the most efficient life style based on the resources around us. You and your descendants will change in order to find your niche. If there is an abundance of a certain hard nut, those with a large, hard nut cracking beak will survive. If
the leaves are most plentiful at the top of the trees, those with longer necks will flourish. Once you reach this equilibrium, you won't have much incentive to continue changing. In fact, change could imperil your success as a species.
As a result, evolution goes in spurts of change with long periods of stasis in between.
Our lives work the same way: most of us tend to seek a stable job, a stable community, a regular diet, or form of exercise. We find a place we like to vacation and we go there every year and lie in the sun reading our favorite authors. We go to the same church, vote the same party line. We make friends with people who share our interests and we settle into regular social schedules with them.
We avoid disruption. We shun risk.
Deep in our reptile brains, we know that this is the key to survival. Herds only change grazing lands when the drought comes.
There are two results of this type of habitual existence: The first is that we are afraid of trying something new for fear that it won't bring us the same level of reliable reassurance as the things we have always been doing. We don't want to endure the discomfort of failure or even of the unknown. We prefer to limit suspense to Friday night at the movies. Better not to do at all than to do badly. We wouldn't want to stick out and possibly send ripples through the quiet watering hole. I'm not saying any of this derisively; it's a perfectly logical perspective, a perspective the vast majority of people in our society share. Far better the devil you know.
The second result is that we are completely unhinged when change does occur. And there is no question that it will occur, as sure as summer follows spring, as death follows the cradle, as the #9 train rolls into Christopher Street station.
America had no real idea how to respond, for example, to September 11. When I was eleven and living in Israel, terrorist bombings were regular events. When my bus stop was blown up fifteen minutes before school let out, they didn't even bother reporting it in the local paper. But in America we had a real sense of apocalyptic doom after the World Trade Center attacks. It seemed like everything was going to unravel and our entire way of life was done. We were like hens in a coop, completely unable to interpret any howl in the night. Perhaps that's why we have so many pundits, so many people who reassure us by telling us what is to come. The fact that their collective opinions cover every possible outcomes doesn't shake our confidence.
My point is not political. Because what I am really discussing here is creativity. We must understand that creativity is both essential to survival and anathema. That's why it can be so hard to overcome the resistance we have to our own creativity. Why it causes us such a deep sense of fear and dread. And it is why artists are so reviled in our fat, contented world. Look at the government sponsored art of the WPA. Look at the creativity that springs up during revolutions. Think of the wild architecture that was proposed to rebuild downtown New York in the immediate wake of the attacks. As the dust still lingered we welcomed a vision of a new world, collective recognition that our times and our landscapes were different. But all too quickly, we became more conservative, more calcified and the designs morphed back into the predictable, corporatist visions that suited a calming with the public mood.
To be creative, you must be brave and allow your self to take risks. You also must be a little crazy to take these risks.
But have an appropriate degree of perspective. You must reassure yourself that by doing a watercolor or throwing a pot you won't set off some chain reactions that destroys your entire universe. The whole reason that you are feeling any sort of need to be creative is because you, as an organism, feel some need to adapt to changes in your environment. Your job may be too restrictive. Your relationship may be showing you new possibilities. Your daily paper may be reshuffling your deck. Your body may be changing. Or you may just be more sensitive than those around you, a canary on the coal mine, a bell weather to changes that others don't yet sense.
Under all those conditions, creative change is no longer a risk, It's an imperative. Give yourself the chance to experiment and reconfigure your life. Start today. Before the volcano erupts or the meteor hits the earth, before you get run over by a bus, or your candidate loses, or your bosses makes a cut back, before the changes erupt, and it's all too late. And even then, it won't be.
It'll just be time to stop being a dinosaur and start figuring out how to become a bird.
January 30, 2004
Help from Roz
Today's going to be a rare day. I am going to introduce you to one of the most inspiring journal artists in the world. Roz Stendahl is the master of many media: the image above is from a journal for which she carved a fresh rubber stamp image to commemorate every day of a month. I first discovered her work via a series of journals in which she drew and painted her dog, Dot, every day for five years. Her drawings, her watercolors, her calligraphy and her creative approaches to journaling can all teach us a huge amount.Rather than blather on here, groping for superlatives, I urge you to browse through her website in depth.
Last week I mentioned some invaluable Roz gave me in response to the following question:
Here is the response in full: Danny, don't get me started! This is my favorite topic (well one of the top 100 at least).
I have made a small 3 x 5 inch palette of Daniel Smith watercolors for myself. By that I mean I bought a small palette and filled the pans with DS colors (1/4 of a pan at a time so they could dry fully). I find that DS rewets really well. Windsor Newton and other brands don't.
Then I carry the palette with me, and the famous Niji waterbrush. I use Staedtler Pigment Liner pens because they have a rich black, come in different nib sizes and are almost completely waterproof. I'm a goof when it comes to "waterproof labels" I test test test. SPLs do great on most papers and the DON'T SMELL. I'm allergic to everything [except DOGS] and so I hate Microns because while they are nice to write with and waterproof, they smell. With the SPLs I can draw, and paint pretty much immediately and I'm splashing the color around but there isn't much bleeding of ink and the line shows through nicely. So I'm happy.
I also have made a small palette of Schmincke and M. Graham GOUACHE. Both these brands don't put lots of filler in their Gouache like Winsor Newton does so the colors aren't chalky. Both brands (Sch. and M. G), also rewet VERY nicely!!! And because there isn't a lot of crap in them you can use them in thin washes like watercolor glazes and then add some white on the top as needed (that will mess up your line a bit, but I don't mind it). Also, if I want to go opaque with the other colors I can. I just love the stuff. This was how I was meant to paint. I knew it when I was 8 years old and have been looking for the tools ever since.
The first two links are paintings I did with gouache over either SPL or another Pen called NEXUS which comes in a variety of colors and is also almost completely waterproof. It is kind of a rollerball tip so it is better on some papers that are too rough on the felt tip-pseudo technical pens. I particularly like the magenta ink and sepia and red ochre. Both of these paintings are done on Turner Wove Blue from a now defunct mill in Britain. The sizing is wonderful. It's the paper I've found that is probably closest to what most 19th century watercolorists were painting on. FABULOUS. Of course when I discovered it I bought 4 sheets, made them into a small journal, and put it on a shelf for two years before I used it (I was using other journals with white pages at the time). Now the paper was already discontinued as the mill was already closed, but the local art store owner had so loved the mill she had bought huge amounts and was selling them off.
When I started using the journal and discovered how fabulous the paper was I went over to buy whatever was left, determined to hock everything to get as much as possible. It was all gone.
So that, and the immediate events of the final months of Dot's life, provided the final puzzle pieces in my education that I should give up the search for the perfect paper, etc. Why bother, I go through journals so quickly anyway that if I don't like a paper, well I'll be able to start a journal with another paper soon anyway! (I do have several favorite papers that I keep making journals out of though.)
http://www.rozworks.com/y5_5.html
http://www.rozworks.com/y5_6.html
The following reference is another gouache painting that I did of Dottie but this time I used the sepia (dark brown really) Faber Castel Pitt Artist Pen BRUSH nib. (these come in 3 colors that have brush and various point sizes of straight nibs, and then 24 colors total of brush tips.)
http://www.rozworks.com/y5_25.html
As you can see I don't care if the line gets painted over at some points. The brush pen forces me to be very loose and not get futzy about details. I carry a number of them around in different colors.
The following sketch was done using a Nexus pen in the red ochre color, and then DS watercolor washes. The paper is a wonderful British paper that is no longer made. It is very dear and I'm screwing up my courage to go in and buy more to make some more books out of it like this one, as I love painting in watercolor and gouache on it. The entire zoo journal on my website is on this paper. It's soft, not really sized for watercolor, but sized enough so you can get some neat washes, and it has nubbly bits in it which, when viewed in person, difficult to see on the web, are delicious if you're a paper person, i.e., will cause immediate drooling.
http://www.rozworks.com/zooB5.html
One thing that I've found is that different "waterproof inks" are less waterproof on some papers depending on the sizing of the paper. I think that in some cases the sizing floats the ink too long and if you start painting right away the ink hasn't had time to dry or in other cases there is too little external, internal, or both, sizing and the ink sinks down into the paper and spreads around, only to be reactivated by the wetness of the wash.
I've been letting go of waterproof standards lately, experimenting specifically with pens that produce a wash when I touch them with the Niji Brush. So I'm enjoying my Pilot Varsity fountain pen.
http://www.rozworks.com/Fair08.html
Is an example of my work with this fountain pen. This journal was CARDS I cut from Fabriano Artistico (the old stuff if it matters to you, but the new stuff is OK too), 300 lb. Hot Press Watercolor paper. I prepainted with acrylic ink which is more or less waterproof when dry (you really have to scrub to get it to lift) and then took the cards to the Fair. They were easy to carry around, I could whip them out as needed, the pen wrote nicely on them and the Niji waterbrush helped add some shading and dimension.
I do a lot of painting on this kind of background. I think I like the challenge and the bright colors, and well who knows. A lot of serendipity happens. And I don't get bound up trying to do a perfect page layout.
Sorry you asked yet?
And finally I like to color pencil over my ink sketches. I just work mostly within the lines, but if I go over the lines I'm not too concerned. Some ink lines I might restate when I'm all done.
But my favorite is SPL pen, watercolor or gouache wash.
I have a charcoal gray Tombow which is fun to sketch with and wet, and draw shading out of the line.
I'm sorry you're having to switch hosts. Do you optimize your photos down for size? are you having a size problem with the site? I didn't understand what types of problems you were having. Hope they all get resolved quickly for your sanity!
January 29, 2004
Dear Danny:
I've been lucky enough to get lots of email from visitors to this journal. These are some of the interesting questions I received over the past month:When did you start to draw? I mean, did you ever draw when you were younger? Or try to draw? — Katharine
This is a tricky question. If I show you an example of how I use to draw before I let myself have permission to make drawing a habit, and you say, "well, that's pretty good. I could never do that." then it'll be raw meat for all those innner critics out there, just chomping to trash your drawings. Or you might just say, "Hold on, this guy sucks! What the hell am I listening to him for?" (Right answer, by the way).
So let me put it this way:
I've always doodled in symbols: cartoon heads, cubes, grids, etc. and over the years I've done a half dozen lame acrylic paintings. But everything changed when I developed the habit of truely seeing and of recording, deliberately and carefully and without preconception, what I saw on paper. As I have mentioned here and in my book, that is a very different thing from doodling. But if you'd still like to see some typical doodles and promise not to get thrown by it either way, go for it.
O no... you can't take away "25 books"! — Katrine
Noooo... we NEED the 25 books! — Serena
Oh, okay. here it is: the return of 25 Books.
I would like to start drawing/sketching/doodling. Do you have recommendations for paper/pencils etc for a beginner — Alan
My tools change all the time. I love to experiment and playing with materials is part of the fun for me. Generally, the only pencils I use are colored ones and I never erase my lines no matter how 'wrong' they may seem at the time. I urge you do to do the same. Try out different pens till you get something you like. It should flow smoothly and feel good in your grip. I like Sakura's pigma micron pens, also Faber Castell's PITT artist pens, and my new beloved Staedler pigment liners, but there are many other good choices. As for paper, I like to buy heavy bond paper, in sketch pad form. It'll hold up to all sorts of abuse, ink, paint, markers, without bleeding and it feels solid and good. It also makes each page feel important, somehow.
Frankly, though, you could use a ball-point pen and a sheet of copier paper. The main thing is to begin, have fun, get hooked and then branch out. Don't worry about posterity, readers, mistakes, etc.
My husband could not locate your book in B&N in Manhattan on Monday. THEY said they had quite a few copies and then three people could not find a single one. We ordered it from Amazon instead. — Melly
Bastards. It's a part of the massive conspiracy to keep journal-making an obscure hobby instead of an awesome power that will take over and transform the world. Barnes & Noble loves to shelve my book in the New York section. Look for it there or take some form of political action.
I don't know who you are! Stop emailling me! Take me off your fucking list! — Ganesh
I'm not sure who Ganiesh is either. He won't be joining us in future discussions.
Was wondering, do you ever sign your books and sell them yourself or should I just follow the link from your site and buy the book on Amazon? — Myra
The most efficient way for you to get a copy of Everyday Matters is via Amazon or by badgering your local bookshop. If your really want, though, I'll gladly sign it for you. And please let me know what you think of the book when you get it.
Did you hand-write the text in Everyday Matters or use a font? I'm curious because your handwriting is fascinating to look at. If you've managed to make your own font, I'd be interested in downloading or purchasing it... or just admire it from afar. I really like your handwriting. — Wileen
While I hand wrote large parts of my book, the opening pages were primarily set in a font based on my own handwriting. It helped to distinguish these big blocks of text form the rest of the higgledy-piggledy stuff and stopped my publisher from asking if we couldn't just set the whole thing in type. I find it ironic that an English teacher would admire my handwriting — when I was in high school, I was always getting in trouble for illegibility!
What do you use to color in your drawings? I have been wanting to color in some of mine in my moleskines but I don't want to mess them up. —Joe
Although I am not a moleskine user any more, I used Tombow brush markers, colored pencils and occasional patches of ink. The pages are water resistant so they're not friendly with many paints. But don't be afraid to experiment; it's part of journaling. Even if you screw up a page you can always write about the experience!
Did you do a little Photoshopping on the color lay-in (of your Martha Stewart Piece), maybe? If so, how'd you like the experience? – Karen
I hated it.
I rarely work this way and regret it when I do. I did random sketches on location and made notes. Then I came home and scanned the pages and built my layouts in Photoshop, then printed them out, wrote in the captions, rescanned the calligraphy and laid it back in. Then, I colored the whole thing on screen because I was rushed. The colors are insipid and vague and didn't come from observation. The computer makes me fussy and wooden. I also hate having the ability to undo things and to mechanically work with transparent layers and I hate using a Wacom tablet instead of a pen and I hate working vertically instead of flat on my lap. And I also hate the fact that it exists only in 72 dpi form on line. I hated it. Hate.
I was just curious as to how you get such great resolution on your drawings whenever they are posted to the web. — Jon
I scan my book at 75 dpi. Then, in Photoshop, I adjust the curves so the whites are white, the blacks are black, and the colors look right. Then I use the 'Save for Web' function, and boil it all down to a medium quality, JPEG 650 dpi wide. Then I mutter a brief prayer to St. Twain, the patron saint of scanning.
I'd stopped drawing and printmaking when I started a new career, but have since rediscovered journalling through your book and website...I discovered, yesterday, that I had inadvertently left my journal on the subway. What did you do when you left your journal on the plane? — Michelle
Maybe the pain of losing your journal was meant to remind you of all the days you lost when you weren't making things. Don't lose any more! As for some practical advice: put your name and number in future ones!
January 28, 2004
Zeitgeist
Illustrated journaling is becoming trendy. The Gawker and The Gothamist were both kind enough to write a tidbit about my stuff on the same day. So now I guess Moleskine sales will skyrocket, Paris Hilton will start sketching and presidential candidates will endorse their favorite pens.Worse things could happen.
(Meanwhile, Everyday Matters is only #9 on my publisher's best seller list. If you have been hesitating to spend the ten bucks the book goes for on Amazon, you may miss the boat, Everyday Matters will languish unreprinted, and my life will lie in smoldering ruins. Or not.)
Bookbinding 101
I have bound many of my journals myself. I learned how at a fantastic place called The Center for Book Arts, here in Manhattan. It was a lifelong dream come true, learning to make my own hard cover books.
I would like to show you the basic steps for making a thin, one signature book.
The trickiest part of bookbinding is being reasonably neat, which I'm not. Try to cut straight lines and have plenty of scrap paper to absorb glue. Most of the supplies are basic to any art supply or craft store. It's worth getting real bookbinding supplies after you've made a book or two; the right glue, cloth and board will make sure your books last for a good long while.
An awesome resource: Talas
- A pad of good bond paper for pages
- A sheet of book board (heavy cardboard)
- Some book hinge cloth (muslin)
- Some colored or marbelized paper for endpapers and cover paper
- Book cloth (a heavier cloth, usually a solid color)
- Paste (ideally PVA, an acrylic, water based glue)
- Thread (heavy, even dental floss)
- Wax paper
- Wastepaper (newsprint, but not newspaper)
- A bone folder (a heavy letter opener will do or even a butter knife) used for rubbing & folding
- A darning needle
- Scissors
- Mat knife
- Ruler
- Glue brush
- Pencil
- Heavy books to use as a press
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Take a sheet of paper and determine which ways the grain runs - the direction of least resistance - or your book will warp. Stack ten or so pages with the grain running up and down. |
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Fold in half to make a pamphlet. Crease with the bone. Wrap the endpaper, decorative side in, around the pamphlet. |
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Cut a piece of cloth hinge, the same height as the pamphlet and extending 1.5" on front and back of pamphlet. |
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Sew through the hinge, endpaper and pamphlet in a figure 8 pattern, starting on the inside, through the center(1), then in an inch from the bottom (2), back through the center, in an inch from the top, then back to the center, ending in a double knot. |
 Draw a line on the hinge cloth, 1/4" in from the spine. |
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Cut two pieces of book board, making sure the grain runs up and down. Each should be 1/8 larger than the pamphlet on the top, the bottom and the foredge. |
Put some waste paper between the hinge and the endaper. Mix your glue with water, 70:30. Apply it to the entire hinge with a brush. Remove the wastepaper. Lay the board on the glue covered hinge, lining it up so it projects the same amount above and below and that the spine edge of the board is right on the line you marked on the hinge. Do the same on the other side.
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Put the whole thing under some weights until it's dry. |  |
| Cut a strip of bookcloth so it wraps around the spine and 1/4 of the cover and projects 3/4" above the top and bottom of the boards. Cover the inside with glue. Lower the pamphlet onto the center of the cloth and pull the sides up around the spine and onto the board. Rub it down well with the bone. |
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Hold the book by the pages and release the covers down on either side, then fold the cloth over the front and back boards. Rub everything down snugly with the bone. |  |
| Cut 2 pieces of covering paper, extending 3/4" beyond the top, bottom and foredge of the boards. It should slightly overlap the book cloth on the spine edge. Coat the underside of the paper with paste, position it on the boards and rub it down well. Cut off the corners and fold the edges down tightly with the bone. |
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Put waste paper between the heavy endpaper and the first blank page of the pamphlet, coat the underside of the endpaper with glue and close the book so the endpaper sticks to the inside board. | |
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| Slide out the waste paper, turn the book over and do the whole step over with the back cover. Slip wax paper back against the endpapers and put the book under weights. Check the wax paper to make sure glue doesn't seep through and join the pages together. Leave overnight. | ||
While I realize this sounds horribly involved, I hope it demonstrates that anyone with a little patience can do it. Your first book may be kinda funky, but practice will make future ones perfect. Have fun!
January 27, 2004
It's a good thing
The Morning News, described to me by its editor, Rosecrans Baldwin, as "some mutant underground version of the New Yorker," is publishing a story I did on my visit last week to the Martha Stewart trial. It's not that well drawn, as the environment was a little hectic and scary, but it is fairly mutant.
Dream on
Creative minds need plenty of shut-eye, sleep study says
By William McCall , AP
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards said the riff in "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" came to him in his sleep, while the 19th-century chemist Dmitri Mendeleev literally dreamed up the periodic table of elements.
Now, for the first time, scientists say they have proved what creative minds have known all along: that our sleeping brains continue working on problems that baffle us during the day, and that the right answer may come more easily after eight hours of rest.
Scientists at the University of Luebeck found that volunteers taking a simple math test were three times more likely than sleep-deprived participants to figure out a hidden rule for converting the numbers into the right answer if they had eight hours of sleep.
The findings appear in today's issue of the journal Nature.
Jan Born, who led the study, said the results support biochemical studies of the brain that indicate memories are restructured before they are
stored. Creativity also appears to be enhanced in the process, he said.
The changes leading to creativity or problem-solving insight occur during "slow wave" or deep sleep, which typically occurs in the first four hours of the sleep cycle, he said.
The findings also may explain the memory problems associated with aging, because older people typically have trouble getting enough sleep, especially the kind of deep sleep needed to process memories, Born said.
History is rife with examples of artists and scientists who have awakened to make their most notable contributions.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the epic poem "Kubla Khan" after a long night of rest. Robert Louis Stevenson credited a good night's sleep with helping him create scenes in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." And Elias Howe came up with his idea for the sewing machine after waking up.
(Thank you, Rachel)
New weapons
After being utterly sick of my watercolors because they blur my ink drawings, I followed Roz's advice and got a nice new set of Grumbacher deluxe and three of my new favorite pens — the Staedler pigment liner.
To try 'em out, I joined Jack in drawing robots.
January 26, 2004
Patti's problem
Patti and I were discussing her journals and scrapbooks a few days ago and, for once, I was able to give her some useful advice. Her dilemma: she collects all sorts of clippings and pictures and cards and souvenirs and stuffs them between the pages of her book or into an envelope, waiting for the rainy day that she'll stick them all in and make something beautiful. But it rarely arrives, so the piles of ephemera grow bigger and more daunting, like a corner of the Collier Brothers� apartment, until the whole thought of tackling the project is more than she wants to deal with. Why is it so hard to move from the collecting phase to the making phase, she asked me.
I think it comes down to a matter of purpose. Why do you want to assemble this stuff? What are you going to say with it? Is it just there because you collected it, because it seemed interesting or pretty at the time, but has long since lost its significance? Souvenirs shouldn't get amnesia. It's more important to have a point, a vision, a story to tell than it is to use all the materials you have. But most important of all is to just get started and make something.
I have lots of different kinds of art supplies, but I never sit down and say, well, I'd better make sure I use everything that's in the box. I also usually don't sit down, thinking, �I haven't use my burnt umber Caran d�Ache pencil in a while I really ought to.� No, I just have a glimmer of an idea, look at my materials, and gravitate towards one pen or another.
A variation on Patti's problem I encounter in others: "I haven't written in my journal for so long, I have months of catching up to do, It's too overwhelming, I'll wait till another day." It�s the same impulse that�ll make you put off going back to the gym or breaking up with your lousy boyfriend. The only solution is to express something, anything. Turn over a fresh page and just do something about procrastination or dread or laziness or ... You don�t need to record every single moment of your life. Just record one, in a careful and heartfelt way and the rest, all interlocking, will string along with it.
These are your enemies: procrastination, self doubt, obligation, perfectionism, judgmentalism. Now, depict them in your journal and you'll already have them licked.
January 25, 2004
It's not easy being chartreuse
I start most days by choosing a palette. It's often a fairly subconscious process as I flip through my pants, shirts, sweaters, etc in the semi-darkness of my closet. I have a lot of drab, typically male colors: khaki, olive, grey, brown, black. But I also have some ludicrous shades to pick from because I like to buy light color trousers and dye them in my washing machine. I have bright orange cords, raspberry and Pepto-Bismol jeans, lime green, lemon yellow and purple paisley chinos.
What a ghastly inventory.
So what determines why I'll end up wearing a sap green cashmere sweater and burnt umber jeans one day and a black turtleneck and black jeans another? It 's nothing to do with my mood really.
I can be bad tempered and dress like a clown or feel chipper and gear up like a mime. And when I choose Jack's clothes, I invariably dress him in a similar style and spectrum to whatever I picked for myself.
Of course, a major factor is whom I'm dressing for: although when I go to ad agencies a wild wardrobe can work for or against me. The biggest subconscious factor is probably the view out the window. If skies are sunny and blue, I put on the peacock. If the day lacks color, so will I.
Then Patti will come in and say: "You’re not wearing that are you?" and I'll say, "Of course not" and head back to my closet. Color me yellow.
January 24, 2004
Mother Nature
Flowers, leaves, and ferns can be beautiful reminders on your journal page. I'm not too fussy about how I preserve and mount them — I press them between my journal pages, folded in a paper towel if they're very moist and meaty. A few hours or days later, I take a strip of clear packing tape, preferably the rippable variety, and laminate the specimen onto my page.
An artist named Hazel Kahan does far more elegant work with leaves. She combines varieties from around the world with ink, paint and calligraphy to create ornate and elegant works on paper. Some of the text comes from the Bible, the Koran, the ancient Greeks or her own imagination, stories of fantasy worlds and fictional mythologies. Other pieces evoke plates from Victorian botanical notebooks.
Hazel only became an artist when she was in her sixties; now she sells her work in galleries from coast to coast and has a devoted following of collectors. I'm pretty familiar with her work — she's my mum. To see more, visit Leafages.
January 23, 2004
The Unwanted
This is a big journal drawing, chronicling a recent wander through other people's trash piles. Click on the pic above to see it big.
I Have a Scream
I guess I feel a bit like Howard Dean. Everything is going great, the Internet is getting the mesage out, folks are getting excited, and then, on a cold day in January, "Kapowie!", everything fizzles and I'm all alone in the snow.
I'll try not to bore you with too much backstory but I feel I owe you an explanation as to why this site has been stuck on January 15th for several tedious days.
When Everyday Matters started to develop an audience, it put too much strain on my host's servers. On one day, there were 64,291 hits and visitors downloaded 2 gigabytes of files — a lot of journal lovers looking at a lot of image files. So I went searching for a new host who would be happier with this situation and found one who, unfortunately couldn't help me reconstruct all this stuff and getting it to run again. It turns out a blog and its databases are fairly complicated.
Fairly quickly, I hit the limits of my technical knowhow until, after much flailing around, the folks who developed Moveable Type agreed to bail me out. Finally, late on Thursday, Everyday Matters came back on line.
While I was waiting and shredding my cuticles, I managed to write and draw a few new things and I'm back to regular postings, starting with "The Unwanted." Thanks for your patience; I hope we can start the dialogue up again and I'll be slathering on all kinds of massive banwidth goodies and boatloads of pictures (well, within reason. Fear not, all you AOL and dial up critters).
As for Doc Dean, well, his blog never went off line.
January 19, 2004
Write on!
A minor question to ask your self on this Martin Luther King's Day: are you having enough fun with the lettering in your journal? Study magazines, old books, the fonts on your computer for inspiration. Try brush pens, calligraphy nibs, quills, rubber stamps, collaging, anything to make your pages look more alive.
Diversity is beautiful!
January 18, 2004
Ars longa, vita brevis
In America, we love athletes. We love pop stars. But we love to hate artists.
When we are about ten we are taught that being an artist is impractical, childish, and self indulgent, that 'talent' is a god-given gift you either have or you shouldn’t bother. Artists are arrogant, disconnected, elitist, millionaires or paupers. This myth is why parents accept all the cuts in art and music education yet will do anything to promote athletics in school. No one would want their kid to want to grow up to be an artist.
It wasn't always this way. Doing watercolors used to be a standard part of a decent education, So did reading and writing poetry. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, they were all government employees.
But in 21st century America, that critic in your head has the support and encouragement of the whole gang; your parents, your teachers, your neighbors, bosses, and role models (even so –called creative people in the media promote the illusion that it’s either a fool’s game or the lottery).
Small wonder it’s so hard to drown out. It says, "Don't sing unless you're going to become a pop star. Don’t paint unless you know you'll be a genius who is recognized in your own lifetime. And if you have to practice at something, work on your pitch, your swing, your kick, skills that'll pave the way for your future."
You are fighting enough obstacles as it is. Don't let your own brain join the conspiracy. Tell it to shut the hell up and let you get back to work.
Because all those voices, so right about how to build profit, are flat wrong about how to build a decent life. Without art, your soul suffers; you lack a chance to express who you are, to hone your own point of view, to make your life your own. You are less than human, no matter how many Super Bowl rings you’re wearing.
When you do make something and share it with the world, your voice will be proven wrong again. People won't say, "Well, that drawing is pathetic. That poem is lame. That note was slightly flat. That diary reveals what a moron the writer was." If they stop to judge it all, they'll almost certainly say, "I wish I did that." Which will give you the chance to say "Well, why don't you?"
January 17, 2004
More moleskines
I was invited to be a contributing blogger (had no idea there was such a thing) to a new site called Moleskinerie. It's a smorgasbord with tangential connections to the litle black book. They made my drawings a little small, but you can see a bigger version here.
Belongings.
Maybe it was going to the James Rosenquist retrospective at the Guggenheim but I've been feeling sort of sick of materialism. Everything we encounter, it seems, is in some insidious way aimed at making us burn to buy something, anything (and, yes, I've spent twenty years in the belly of the advertising beast, stoking that flame). Even at the Rosenquist show, where the art is all about the decadence of commercialism, the giftstore has all sorts of Rosenquist books and fridge magnets and coffee mugs.
Anyway, I feel like I own too much and appreciate it too little. So I am going to try to get more out of what I have and scale back, if possible. I even cut out my planned trip to the art store this afternoon. We'll see how long this resolution sticks.
I like the idea of a journal diet. Draw everything you own. Everything. Every single book, every stick of butter and shoelace. Now that would be a humbling experience. Or just draw everything you eat for a week. You'll be thinner, calmer and happier.
Speaking of calmness, I continue to wrestle with my new server, but the break at the Guggenheim was refreshing and inspiring.
January 16, 2004
Time for Self Examination
I'd like to give you some more ambitious advice but I am neck deep, transferring this site to a new web host and will be fairly tied up with all things right-brained.
My current host flips out when we transfer loads of files as we do everytime a new drawing flies back and forth through the ether.
As a result I have been trimming this site down, removing features (remember "25 Books of the Year"?) and putting up fewer and smaller pics. I don't want to be like that so we'll be moving from California to Texas and hoping for the best. If things are screwy this weekend or I seem non-responsive, you now know why.
But you'll be far too busy drawing yourself to meddle with the internet, right? So let's get to work.
January 15, 2004
Trust or bust.
In 1975, Keith Jarrett recorded the best selling solo piano album ever, The Koln Concerts. What’s even more extraordinary is that the music is purely improvised. Jarrett had spent the day feeling jet lagged and under the weather, he had to sit down and start performing almost immediately after arriving at the concert hall with little chance to prepare himself, and the piano he was provided with slowly went out of tune.
Jarrett credits the quality of his performance to all these distractions. Before every performance, he tries to make himself blank. He doesn’t practice for a month beforehand. He doesn’t plan, he doesn’t have tricks to get over the hump — he just empties his mind, feels the silence completely, then wanders out on stage and sits down before the 88 keys. What balls.
“It’s far more interesting for me that for the audience even,” he said in a recent interview on WNYC . “If you don’t have total freedom, you will not make mistakes. With total freedom, you’ll make mistakes you would never have dreamed of and may end up hating yourself more than ever. I aim to be completely devoid of ideas. But I’m not going to tell the music what I should be doing."
“I’m not going to tell the music what it should be doing.”
He is just a vehicle, an audience member, and his art has a life of its own.
Now, how do you get to that place? If I sat down in front of a concert hall full of Germans, we’d all thrill to 15 seconds of chopsticks and that would be that. But Jarrett has laid down a lot of foundation. He had years of lessons, then played in cocktail lounges and Pocono resorts for years and committed all the jazz standards to mind. He played with Miles Davis and others, learning, absorbing, filling himself up. But so far that’s ‘just’ technical preparation. Many other people have that.
But when Jarrett improvises he allows the performance to be a distillation of who he is and what he knows. He says you have to assume that what you are doing is meaningless, be willing to toss it away. You can’t think that what you are making will be recorded, sold, reviewed, even listened to. Just do it and see what happens.
The best moments, he says, “are when I am playing only in the present and not heading anywhere. I aspire to not know what I am doing.” This is mindfulness, living in the present.
In this week’s New Yorker, in a review of Savion Glover’s new show at the Joyce, there’s the following quote: “I try to keep my chops up,” Glover told Jane Goldberg, for Dance Magazine, “so I can just be.” Glover is the greatest tap dancer who ever lived, a breathtaking artist and his goal: to just be.
Don’t dismiss all this because these are incredibly accomplished craftspeople. Sure, you need enormous amounts of technical expertise to be the best in the world. But to accomplish mindfulness, you just need something you already have: the willingness to quiet down, clear the crap and trust yourself.
* This piece was inspired by re-reading Keri Smith**’s new essay, Ode to Ross Mendes but I have tried to avoid reiterating what she has already written so eloquently. Nonetheless, I have come to a similar conclusion via a different path: “The answer is me.”
** Keri is a wonderful illustrator and writer and a very good soul —if you’ve not done so already, please examine her inspiring new book Living Out Loud
January 14, 2004
Pen pals
I am really lucky to have a friend who has taught me an awful lot about journaling. D.Price is the author of a wonderful zine called Moonlight Chronicles (subscribe and you will be very happy) and he and I have been sharing our work for years. We copy the pages from our journals and send them to each other and, whenever possible, we get together for journaling trips in different parts of the country.
It's a great experience to sit down and create a page in your journal, chronicling your current experience and then share it with a trusted friend who is doing the same thing at the same moment. Sometimes, when we share the same vantage point, the same size Moleskines and and the same paint box, Dan and I discover our pages are very similar.
But when we really take our times, we see things quite differently. I tend to see light and shade, whereas Dan tends to focus on shapes. I can get quite lost in a muddy mess of paints or crosshatching and his colors are bright and sharp. Our writing is quite different too. I'm the City Mouse, he's the Country Mouse and we are impressed by very different stuff.
When we are done, we swap books and discuss why we did what we did. It's a great way to learn and grow.
PS. If you visit d.price's site, check out the video. It's a hoot.
January 13, 2004
Guest Blogger: Jack Tea Gregory
I’ve been drawing for years, since I was 2 years old, but (unlike my dad) I’ve never, ever. . . . . . ever been good at drawing real live things . For example; we have a rooster made out of wood. I’ve tried to draw it many times but for some reason I’ve never succeeded, either the neck was too fat or it was too small or even the feet were too small! I really hate it! My dad started drawing as a kid but then he stopped (I’m not sure why but… whatever) then this guy Dan Price came along and convinced my dad to keep drawing and this wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Dan. My dad always says to me that I should keep drawing forever and I say “yeah okay”.
My dad has gotten me many things such as my email address, most of my lego, my first ever stikfas ( mostly found at a place called kidrobot, these are little models) , and my computer (my dad got my mom a laptop for Christmas and me and mom my had shared a imac originally so I got the imac! (Yeah!).
January 12, 2004
Seeing bread
Drawing is seeing. If you can see, you can draw. But can you see?
Let's see.
Looking is a language. Look: a dog, a tree, a car, a man. We apply labels to things in order to understand and process them. In Genesis, God has Adam name the animals. Labels makes abstract thinking possible. But because we over do it, looking replaces seeing and we soon stop seeing things for what they truly are. We say 'tree' and stop saying 'elm', stop saying 'thirty year old elm, with silvery bark missing in fist sized circles on the eastern half of its trunk, 37 foot 8 inch elm with 37,437 leaves, some mustard colored, others sap green", and we completely miss going to the next level where language fails us all together, where things are so specific they can have no name, where they are absolutely real.
This is where drawing comes from. When you can look at something slowly and carefully and refuse to see it for anything but what it is - at this very moment - in this light - from this angle. And as you begin to see, you cease to be the many things that limit you. You drop judgments, cultural biases, history, and baggage. Time slows, and then disappears. All you feel is the pen on the paper, the slow cutting drag of the nib against the grain till even that sensation fades away too. You don't think about art or what people will say or whether you are inept or ugly or stupid or self indulgent. You stop thinking about bills and aches and grievances and chores. You, your pen, your paper, your subject, you just are.
You sink deeper and deeper as you see more and more. You draw the edges and then the textures, the shadows, the textures and shadows within textures and shadows. The orange, the tree, the body you are drawing is just a landscape your eyes traverse. Your line takes you through adventures and surprises, over hill and down valley, into light and through shade. And eventually your journey brings you home again and you feel your pen thud back against the dock, the door step, and the world slowly cranks back up again like the merry-go-round it is and you come back to all your senses, sharpened, refreshed, renewed.
On your paper, there's a map of your trip, a souvenir, only as accurate as the clarity of your vision. Keep it if you want, frame it, sell it, but it won't matter - every twist and turn of the trip itself will be seared into your mind.
Are you ready to give it a try?
January 11, 2004
Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Fabrication
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Don't get me wrong — I’m not a huge motorcycle enthusiast. The Hells’ Angels HQ is several blocks due east of us and I usually cross to other side if I have to walk by. Dentists and attorneys in leather gear roar, unmuffled, up our street most weekends, shaking the glazing out of our windows. But Jack and I are hopeless addicts of the motorcycle fabrication shows that are on cable: American Chopper and Chopper Mania and the like. Why? Because they are virtually the only opportunity you get to watch the creative act unfold on TV. The problem |
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| solving, the conflicts, the failures, the deadlines, the varying styles and work habits — where else can you see craftsmen working with their hands from inspiration and inception through production and completion? I find it really satisfying to see raw metal being turned into machines, to see nickel chroming and airbrushing and guys bending iron over their knees, to see years of experience coming to bear on new problems, to see people standing by their vision in the face of time and money pressures. Unfortunately, our society doesn’t value artists or even craftsmen enough. Fortunately we have a strong car culture, fed by corporations and consumer whims and good old American testosterone, so this little corner of creativity is still honored. What compares? I discovered that on the DIY channel there is a daily show on scrapbooking but it is certainly lacks the passion and anarchy of American Chopper’s warring Teutel family. There are programs like This Old House and Trading Spaces, shows about renovation and remodeling but they are generally as slick as their gleaming brass doorknobs. Creativity is an ugly, messy business. And even though all TV programming is by its nature artificial and contrived, it’s nice to find a little creative headknocking somewhere between commercials. Now, who’s going to put on “American Journalmaking?” Stay tuned. |
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From Abby & James
My good friend, Richard, was kind enough to share a wonderful letter he got from his nephew, James, and his partner, Abby, who recently got a copy of Everyday Matters. They have given us all permission to read it.
Top Five of the Moment
Allegedly my moment has arrived — at least in Philadelphia. See the bottom of this page on Philadelphia Weekly's site. Thanks, PJ
January 10, 2004
To Jacqui
Illustration by my favorite artist, Jack Tea Gregory
It is hard to be perfectly imperfect.
I am having a helluva time struggling with it today.
I want to be approximate, patient, comfortably flawed, and yet I am afraid that I am hopelessly wrong in everything I am doing. But I am, on some deeper level, sure that tomorrow will be different, that today's fears will fade into insignificance, and though they may be replaced by a fresh batch of anxieties, I shall survive them too.
As Jack just told me, quoting his great art teacher Mr. Smith, "Mistakes are you friends, not your enemies."
And while I'm grumbling, damn those Canadians for sending us this cold.
Happy Birthday, T!
If you're American, you probably don't know much about Tintin, the first and finest graphic novels. We own and have reread them all. So many of the scenarios seem written for today — pesky Middle Easterners, loony dictators, terrorists, trips to outer space,... And, oh, those drawings!
Lucky break
I am going to have my second piece in in the City section of the New York Times this Sunday. It's called "Dogs in Coats".
See it big.
See the first piece.
The Good Book
So what is this journal business all about? Is it narcissism, a vainglorious attempt to turn one's life into some sort of keepsake for posterity? Or is it about commiseration, "Dear Diary: today sucked..."?, a wallowing that lets you turn your problems over and over like so many balls of dough until they have risen and turned into full baked obstacles to your progress?
And why bother with an illustrated journal, feeble doodles of your day, the bagel you had for breakfast, the fireplug on the corner. And then there's collaging and rubberstamping and Hello Kitty stickers and other sorts of embellishing crap. And why the secrecy, the book with a lock on the cover? How about some calligraphy in vanishing ink? What's that all about?
For years, I kept diaries of various sorts. I had books that I used to take out at 4 a.m. on sleepless nights and I'd fill their absorbent pages with bucketloads of self pity and misery, ripping other people apart, laying out hypothetical scenarios, dumping loads of adrenaline into my system as I pondered nightmarish what-ifs. I'd moan and groan until I was sick of myself and the next morning I'd feel better. The catharsis probably didn't come from purging. It's more that most things tend to look bleak at 4 a.m. Like picked scabs, these predawn sessions actually made the situation worse, infecting my mind with things I might not have worried about otherwise, peeling away the lining of my stomach like an onion. If I bothered to go back to those barely legible pages, I invariably found that, like the mind -blowing revelations that come with acid trips and bong hits, most of my peregrinations were banal and self evident in the light of morning.
I also kept logs of various kinds. How many reps at the gym. How many calories. How many hypochondriacal panics. How much money. How many books. These flirtations with OCD quickly turned into relics to shake my head at. Why did I bother keeping a card catalog through most of my adolescence recording not only every book I read and my accompanying review (always from the same smug, precocious, pimply POV) but also the copyright info, page count and publishers or foreign editions. Did I really want to be a librarian
Still, I felt the need to make books and to fill them with the stuff of my life. Eventually I realized that a journal's true purpose was not to reflect my pain but to blunt it. The fact is, I realized in my lucid moments, life is wonderful. It is full of extraordinary things and people and moments but the black clouds that swirl over my internal landscape were blocking out that beauty. My journal could become a place of contemplation rather than catharsis. By taking something around me, anything at all, and studying it with a clear eye, I would be able to see the wonder in it. And the more things I studied, the more I'd come to know, deep down in my core, that these wonders are all-pervasive, that everything is connected, that the world is good and will support me when I stumble. The food I eat, the shirt I wear, the woman I married, the store that sells me my paper, they are all solid and intricate and unique. This is a cliché and yet it seems to be a difficult thing to know. That's why reading these words from me will only give you a hint of that truth if you don't yet draw, and why I need to keep up my practice every day, When I abandon it, that knowledge tends to seep away and I am left alone and unable to see beyond the bulwark of my mind once again. So, ironically, journal making actually makes you less self-absorbed, more connected to the things that fill your life, more aware of your loved ones, your blessings, your purpose.
I am not a traditionally religious person, but my journal has brought me spirituality. I am like a supplicant bent over the altar of my little book each day, hoping to connect with the fount of inspiration that fuels me, that imbues all creation with complexity and variety, harmony and beauty.
Unlike most traditional religions, Art doesn't punish you if you fall out of practice There is no Art hell where unbelievers are marinated in turpentine or condemned to a million paper cuts. But the community of artists (or if you're uncomfortable with that label, try "Creative folks" or maybe just "people who make stuff") functions like any group of believers, spurring each other on, supporting, parsing, giving nw direction, etc. Inspiration is so important because it keeps us going, reinvigorates our belief, and fights off the "inner critic", the one true satan we fight every day.
Alright, let me come down from my pulpit and stow the religion metaphor. Keeping a journal is a way to focus your life, to extract what is meaningful about each day, like a resume or a camera viewfinder or a newspaper headline. In addition, I believe that drawing lets you take that definition beyond the verbal, so it deep soaks into your mind and touches you to your reptilian core. Making picture is preverbal and it brings enormous clarity. When you draw the thing in front of you, you enter deep contemplation, your pen line becomes your mantra, non-judgmental, completely present, tying you to everything else. To get there, you must get rid of your fear and judgment, You must stop worrying about whether or not you can draw. Of course, you can, you were born with the ability. You used it for the first decade of your life. Then because some people get paid for making art and others for teaching it, society convinced you that you couldn't. It's perverse, like teaching people they couldn’t play basketball so NBA players could make more or teaching people they couldn't make their own food, so McDonald's could profit. I don' get this society sometimes and the way it limits people's potential down to the mean.
Anyway, drawing isn't quite like bike riding, because you can forget how to do it, but it comes back quickly. In the future, I'll talk more about how you can start drawing again, but know that it will take a little bit of commitment and perseverance but not an overwhelming amount - more like rollerblading than, say, pipe organ playing . Take solace in the example of Vincent van Gogh. Look at some of his early drawings - they are dreadful, as if he were sketching with a potato. But how how far he came quite quickly and then what enormous heights he reached. He was surrounded by the worst kinds of critics, was a complete failure as what we now call an "artist", never had a one man show or appeared in a Gap ad, and yet he painted things that make me cry. (Second Van Gogh reference in two days — watch it, Gregory)
Let me wrap this up and go and do some drawing of my own now. Here's the executive summary: Journal making is about believing in yourself, celebrating your life, having adventures, and feeling a part of (not apart from) the universe.
It's also real fun.
From the must-read, Lust for Life by Irving Stone.
January 09, 2004
The skinny on Moleskines
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Some folks have wondered where they can buy small Moleskine journals online. I scored a box of them at Kikkerland which imports them but the best price for individual ones ($9.95) seems to be at ShiptheWeb. I also found them at Quincys for $11.95 and Kate's Paperie — for $14. There is also a beautiful new series of moleskines called Van Gogh which are bound in brilliantly colored silk shantung. I've had an orange one for several years and have yet to draw in it. Before you make a decision, you might want to read the comments on this post for more useful suggestions from others. — DOG |
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Making book
A few people have asked me what sort of books I make my journals in, so here's the short answer:
I bound all the books in this group. It's not as hard as I first thought and let me choose the paper, size and shape I wanted They are not terribly long so I can have the thrill of a new volume and the book itself won't get too dinged up from being toted around everywhere. #1 is in linen with a slipcase, #6 has a foil stamp I did with a die I designed, #7 was a travel journal for a trip to Death Valley.
After I left a journal on a plane and never got it back, I lost the heart to bind books #8 & 10 but I will some day. #11 is an old boy's adventure novel that I refilled with watercolor paper and is a big fat journal with no writing in it at all, just drawings and watercolors. #12 is full of drawings of New York I did for #13 which was an edition (1/1) of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince I did for Patti's birthday. #14 is another rebound book.
These are all Moleskines, the small kind with drawing paper. #20 has an inlaid initial made of multicolored chicken shells that my friend Quentin Webb made for me. I dedicated it entirely to self portraits.
I had gone away from drawings for a while and did a lot of digital photos and mini-polaroids so I made this all black#22. #23 is a larger Moleskine I kept on a retreat from NY after 9/11. The books I favor these days are very rough and simple and bound for me by my sister, Miranda, who is a printer. #25 is my greatest hits album and with a few mouse clicks and just $10.47 can be on your own shelf in days.
These are various and sundry books. #28 was the journal I kept when Patti was pregnant and which is the basis for a new book I wrote last summer, #29 is the travel journal we kept on our New York vacation, #30 is from a trip to Bermuda and #31 is a pile of the books I use just for writing in and are far more self-indulgent and whiney than even the things you've seen so far on this site.
God, looking at them all arrayed like this instead of shoved in their cupboards makes me seem enormously self-involved, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic and horrible.
(More on that in a few days).
January 08, 2004
Helluva town
A few years ago, we decided to take a vacation in New York. Yes, we live in New York but we've never been tourists here. So we went to the Whitney biennial and the Cooper Hewitt triennial, the Museum of Natural History, a Woody Guthrie show at the Museum of NYC, the Queens museum, the Hall of Science, the Bronx Zoo. We went to the top of the Empire State building and the Easter parade and heard music and ate in touristy restaurants.
What made it really special is that we kept a family travel journal. We recorded everywhere we went and how we felt about it. We took pictures and did drawings, we drew maps and made collages of souvenir stuff. The most avid journal-keeper was Jack – and he was just five. I'd like to write some more about travel journals in the future because I think they not only record your journey, they help to define it as you're doing it.
Something I found troubling
January 07, 2004
Guest journal - Chris Ware
| I have been re-studying one of my favorite objects of 2003, Chris Ware’s The Acme Novelty Date Book. Ware publishes a magazine called the Acme Novelty Library which has been primarily devoted to a long and spectacularly drawn story called “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth.” The story is very cinematic and deeply depressing and Ware draws it with enormous restraint and feeling. Much as I admire Ware’s work in his magazine, it is hard to learn much from it because the drawing is so perfect, so polished. The Day Book is another matter. |
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| Its pages are more or less ripped out of a decade of personal |  |
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| sketchbooks and the work is much rawer and more energetic. He draws in many different styles and media; sometimes very art school, other times based on 1940s advertising art or 1930s comics or really good versions of the | |||||||||||||||
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| sort of everyday still life stuff I do. He works on layout and drawing problems and you can see his ideas evolve. |
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| What strikes me the most about this book is that despite Ware’s enormous talent and years of hard work, he is a relentless and ruthless self-critic. | |||||||||||||||
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Time and again his pages feature drawings and watercolors I’d give my left nut to have made and it’ll be adjoined by some some | ||||||||||||||
| scathing caption that rips it to shreds. In his comics, his marginalia is always funny and self-deprecating | |||||||||||||||
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I sent Chris Ware a copy of Everyday Matters but his publisher returned it. If you have any other address for him, please let me know. Thanks!
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| Anyone who doubts that they can draw well will be blown away by Ware’s sketchbook. But instead of envying what he is doing, his constant self- flagellation leaves you shaking your head. |
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| The moral: work hard, do your best, but for Christ’s sake — be your own fan. |
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January 06, 2004
Last Year
I was feeling very bitter and mad last March when I made this. It feels a long time ago and yet not.
Drawing - Jackass style
WARNING: the following drawing exercise may lead to death and dismemberment. I first tried this with d.price as we were driving due east from the Rockies across Kansas. The land was so flat we could see all 360 degrees of horizon; the road was an isosceles triangle that ran from our radiator to where the sky kissed the ground. Our rented Ford Navigator was the only vehicle on the road, the only object higher than the emerging stalks of spring wheat. A hundred miles rolled under our jacked up tires and the scenery never changed and the radio never got good.
"Let's draw," Dan suggested, clamping the wheel between his bony knees and pulling his Moleskine out of his hip pocket. We uncapped our pens and drew the view, thrilling at the occasional barn or silo that broke up the monotony.
Since, we've drawn on the isolated blue roads of Death Valley and Eastern Oregon, but never in Chicago or Denver or New York City. In most places, driving and drawing don't mix. Still, if you're gonna go into that good night, might as well do it with your pen in your hand.
P.S. Sorry for the over-writing.
January 05, 2004
All I Really Need To Know I Learned From Drawing:
Always carry a pen.
The best way is to be still.
Everyone can do it, except those who say they can't.
Forget your eraser. There are no mistakes. Only lessons.
Don't do it for fame. Do it for you.
Don't seek beauty. See it.
Everyone's perfect pen is different.
Learn from others. But don't be an imitation.
No books, no teachers, no system, can teach you as much as practice.
If you don't like a drawing, turn the page and do another.
Study how kids do it.
A forest is just a lot of trees. A tree is just a lot of leaves. And you know how to draw a leaf.
Value everything you make.
Give your drawings away.
If you can do it perfectly, it�s boring.
It's all about the Now. That's why it's called a drawing, not a drawn.
Know when to stop.
January 04, 2004
Subscribe
I've added a "cutting-edge" feature to this page that allows those who submit their email addresses to be notified when I add a new essay (oh, these wondrous 21st century labor-saving devices!). If you are interested in late-breaking developments in the world of journal-making or need a good stiff dose of inspiration on an irregular basis, please join the elite, titanium class, subscription club.
I promise to do very little else with your address and certainly won't sell it to penis enlargement services or Nigerian businessmen.
Never be bored.
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My grandmother used to say, "Only stupid people get bored." In our family, this threat was the ultimate insult. Still, we all end up in situations that are tedious - but your journal can be your salvation. Instead of drinking too much bad coffee, reading a crummy novel or watching sports highlights on Headline News, look around for the particular in the generic environment of a typical airport. It can turn a dull business trip into an adventure.
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 In the men's room at O'Hare, I found some interesting brown hand towels and drew the dinosaur everyone else ignores as they trudge off to their gates. |
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 Like most husbands, I spend a fair amount of time waiting outside changing rooms. Instead of pacing back and forth with irritation or slumping in misery like a four year old, I try to find a scrap of paper to draw on. |
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Another painful and endless meeting. How much of my life have I spent listening to the drone of flourescent lights and self-important colleagues? |
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Why couldn't 'the gate' be ornamental wrought iron? And why do airline personnel wear uniforms as if they were paramilitary personnel? |
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 While sittting around on a TV commercial shoot, I drew my own image in the video monitor. |
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January 03, 2004
Jonesing for a 000
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?
For the detail oriented
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For those who'd like to see details of my 000 drawings, here are blown up images: Detail 1 Detail 2 Detail 3 Detail 4 Detail 5 I hope that's helpful. |
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January 01, 2004
Dealing with turds
Marybethd sent me an email asking how she could go about finding her own voice. She also said she was reluctant to draw in her journal because "if I make a bad drawing, I am stuck with it...Forever!"
I wrote:
Isn't it interesting that everybody has their own style of drawing and making visual things? It almost suggests that we actually see things differently. Perhaps each of us is looking through our own lens that has particular scratches and distortions that come from the years of accumulated experience. We may all be striving to capture the same reality in front of us and yet, despite skill and practice, end up with very different marks on the paper and the same sense of satisfaction that we have actually captured what was in front of us. Even if you change media and techniques or look at your work over a lifetime, it is still you.
What I find is that my own lines are usually recognizable to me right off, but only my more mature lines are recognizable to others. My' style', if you will, took time to emerge. I have a friend with whom I go on drawing trips so we plunk down and draw the same thing simultaneously. It's wild to see how different we see things when we swap books, how we chose to draw different details, how we envy each other this observation or that.
Style is not just true of drawing but, if you let it, of the way you write, letter, design, etc. in your journal too.
The only real trick is to be yourself. That means letting go of fear and judgment, not worrying about being "stuck with a bad drawing ... forever." The fact is, a "bad drawing" is just a drawing you don't feel captured the moment the way you'd intended. You didn't reach the destination you thought you saw on the horizon. Maybe you were distracted, maybe you were hungry, maybe you were nervous that someone would look over your shoulder and snicker � maybe you just weren't yourself.
I say, better to keep all those drawings, and keep them in your sketchbook where they can be lessons. Honestly, I learn far more from those 'mistakes' than anything else and even more from my inevitable attempts to 'fix' the 'mistakes'. I slather on watercolor or go over the line with a heavier pen and get an even bigger mess but I learn something. My books are all numbered, carefully chosen, beautiful paper, often hand bound, and the idea of having a big turd in the middle of the book used to be very depressing. Now I flip back and remember how I went astray and am the wiser for it. If you commit to leaving everything in your book, you'll find you do each drawing a little more carefully, knowing "you'll be stuck with it." And, if not, so what? It's just a journal, right? Better to let it all hang out and be yourself than masquerade as some impeccable genius who always bats 1.000. That's not you, is it? It sure ain't me. So, back to 'finding your voice'. It's like any sport: you've got to practice and stretch. Try drawing like someone else, go so far as to copy others' drawings line by line. You won't actually end up with a copy but your drawing of their drawing. Then make yourself draw the same thing over and again. Or draw something incredibly complicated, like your car's engine or every hair on your arm � really detailed, highly accurate drawings. Then do something wild, draw with a fat brush, a sharpie marker on paper towel, whatever loosens you up. The same is true of writing. Try writing in verse, with no adjectives, incredibly tersely, whatever. Look at how magazines are laid out and let that inspire your journal. The New Yorker is very dense and then explodes with a big picture. The National Enquirer shouts in lots of display faces, USA Today uses interesting info graphics. Why not graph what you eat for lunch or how many miles you drive and where?
It's all meant to be fun and expand the pleasure and appreciation you have for life. Anyone who looks at what you are doing will just be impressed by the fact that you are doing it at all. And if they don't like it, well, it's your journal, not theirs anyway. Your journal is your baby. Love it, feed it, give it variety, and no one else will tell you if it's a little odd looking.
Sorry if this is a little rambling but I hope it's helpful.
Your pal,
Danny
A record of my exploration into all aspects of drawing, illustrated journaling, creativity, and the inspiring aspects of art. By the author of "Everyday Matters," "The Creative License", and "An Illustrated Life" and other books.