May 30, 2004
Mini-break
Thanks to every one who asked after me recently; I am pretty busy with some important projects these days so I shall be reducing the pace of fresh updates to the blog. I shall send out an announcement when a new post is up.
Your pal,
Danny
May 26, 2004
Just shoot me
For many reasons, I am a big advocate of drawing in one's journal. It is a meditative practice. It helps one to deepen one's appreciation and count one's blessings. It is a good impetus to draw often. It looks beautiful. And so on.
But there are times when it's great to put photographs in one's journal too. Some moments have to be seen to be believed. Photos can capture emotion and power in ways drawings can't. And sometimes the world is moving so quickly, only a shutter can freeze it for posterity.
But I'm not interested in turning my journal into some crappy photo album. You have to be judicous and appropriate with photos or they will overwhelm everything else you've made.
For instance, generally I like my photos to have an organic feeling that goes with the spontaneous and rather rough hewn aesthetic of my journal. To that end, I recently bought a JamCam on eBay for about $25. It's a very simple and indestructible digital camera with no real controls. its memory will accommodate 8 low res pictures or 24 low low res pics and that's it (I think you can buy some sort of memory upgrade card for it but that's just too fancy). You look through the view finder, release the shutter and wait till you get home to see what you got. The pictures have a weirdness to them that I like a lot, murky and yet brittle like they were shot through a pinhole.
If that's too high-tech for you, buy a disposable camera (one with black-and-white film would be even better) then slather the lens with clear nail polish. When it dries, take misty, glowing pictures.A few years ago, Polaroid designed the iZone camera — apparently just for me. It is a groovy plastic camera with a puny flash that takes postage sized instant pictures (my current one is a Barbie model that comes with a comb and fold-out mirror).
Snap, wait, then pull out a gaudy strip of paper with your picture in the middle. Clip off the paper (all of it - I have heard rumors that doing so causes the pictures to fade but I've had many for five years and they all still look fine), peel off the plastic backing and it sticks right in your journal. You have to take bold, simple pictures but that's fine with me. Here's a page from one of my moleskine journals, about actual size.When you get ready to shoot, apply the same principles you would when making a drawing. First, make your picture obviously about something. And make it clean and clear without distracting doodads in the background and trees coming out of people's heads.
Be sure to frame your shot properly. (I live a block from a major tourist attraction, Washington Square Arch, and I am always seeing tourists posing their loved ones in front of the enormous Arch then stepping way back to get the whole monument in the picture. Mother ends up so small in the frame that she may as well be Brad Pitt or a three headed poodle by the time the pictures get back from Rite Aid. Might as well have left her at home.) Once you have your picture composed to your satisfaction, take a good-sized step closer to your subject before you shoot. It'll only improve things, regardless of Junior's acne.Once you have your pictures in hand, don't be a square. Feel free to trim your photos however you like, regardless of their original dimensions. And if they would look better with some writing on 'em, write on 'em. Grab a Sharpie® or a china marker and get to it! Throw in arrows. Blank out the background. Just make 'em better.
Look at these journals of mine. In this one the pictures are all carved up. And in this one I went wild with gel pens like some hopped-up teenage girl. Here I used just what was important about the picture. And here I used three pictures to make one. Apparently I didn't break any laws in the process or the Man has yet to show up at my house with a warrant.
Ultimately, no camera will ever replace my pens and watercolors but, used judiciously and creatively, it can still help me to seize the day.
May 25, 2004
Homeless Journal #1
Curtis has been living on the street for over a year. He tells me he can do any sort of work if he's just given instructions and left to do the job. He doesn't like it when people hover over him, monitoring. Despite this adaptability and independence, he's worked for just two weeks over the past sixteen months.
He hasn't had a regular job for quite a while. He was in prison, serving thirteen of a twenty-year sentence. It's a little hard to understand his offense. According to Curtis, he invited the wrong people to a party in his apartment. When the police burst in, they found guns and narcotics, which the culprits attributed to their host. The whole crew went to the big house but Curtis, the allegedly innocent bystander, got a harsh sentence as well.
His mother told him to let go of his anger, to have faith in the Lord. Then she died. His father passed too while their son was still behind bars. Curtis says he refuses to be angry but he seems full of rage. He reports to his parole officer every Monday and must continue to do so for the rest of his life. At each visit, he contributes what cash he can towards the $4,000 fine he owes the state. He pulls change out of his cup and hands it over. He's been given no assistance, no job placement, no help with housing. When he was released, the guard said, "See you in six months." Curtis says he's not going back, no matter what. He is always pursing opportunities, out to Brooklyn after a job making deliveries, up to the Bronx to a car wash. No dice.
Whenever he applies for a job the last question is invariably, "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?" Once, he lied. That's the job he kept for two weeks until his boss discovered the truth. As he fired Curtis, he told him, "if only you hadn't lied, I would have hired you." Curtis doubts it. So he sits on Sixth Avenue with his cardboard sign and cup, a healthy thirty-five year old man with a thousand yard stare. He says, "Everybody's done something wrong. But I'm a good person. I am. And I don't judge any one else. How can I?"
May 24, 2004
Doings
I have been off on various adventure-like things over the past week. I spent two days with my friend, Julie Dermansky. She lives on a former farm on fifty acres in Upstate New York. The barn is now a welding studio where she makes beautiful and hilarious metal sculptures and furniture. The chicken have been run out of the chicken house and now painting and ceramics gear fills the huge loft. I did lots of drawing of her taxidermy collection and her tools, shot photos of the fog-filled valley and threw sticks in to the river for Tess, her aging poodle. In the evening, we barbecued and talked about art. In the near future, I shall write more about Julie's work and the year she spent on a grant in Europe doing illustrated journaling.
By the way, Julie is selling her farm and much of the art, furniture and stuff she's collected. A lot of it is amazing and wild and well worth a look. I bought a taxidermy dog throw rug.
On Friday, we drove to Atlantic City, our car reeking from the two dozen garlic bagels I had brought along for the class to draw. We spent the day on the Boardwalk, sort of a convergence of three types of vileness: Times Square, 14th Street and Coney Island. The the skies opened and we dashed twenty block along the shore through torrential rains and were utterly soaked to the marrow (nothing like being in an air conditioned hotel room filled with heaps of wet clothes and several other damp people).
The Artiology conference I was attending featured about a dozen classes a day, most of them crafty, textile-y, embellishing paper and collaging sorts of things and I was a little intimidated that my 'students' wouldn't emerge from my tutelage with some perfectly crafted final project in hand to show to friends and neighbors. Journaling is in the end a lifelong endeavor and one rarely a accomplishes that much in a single day. Oh, and the Atlantic City Convention Center is frankly the last place you'd pick to spend the day drawing in , full of industrial-aesthetic columns and beams, and the occasional giant goldfish mobile to break up the monotony.
Armed with these excuses, I faced the nineteen erstwhile journal keepers. They were a mixed group — well, all but one were female — of varying degrees of ability, experience and enthusiasm. Some drew quite expertly, others cringed and moaned that they could never and would never be able to draw. Some seemed quite familiar with the whole Everyday Matters oeuvre while others knew me not from an Adam (one student approached me after lunch and said "Ooh, I was telling one of my friends about our class and she told me you were a celebrity!" How did it come to this?).
I began the class with a gaff: going around the room asking people to share about about themselves and what they hoped to accomplish. Two hours later, we got to work. We ran through a series of drawing exercises (drew and thankfully disposed of the bagels) and confidence seemed to rise sufficiently so that by the end of the day everyone was quite happily scattered around the convention center filling pages with drawings and writing down their thoughts in various ornamental ways. We also went through my huge satchels of illustrated journals, mine and others, which seemed to inspire rather than intimidate. I do hope that it was a help to some and that there are now a few newly-minted journalistas among us.
I'd very much like to try my hand at it again as I learned an awful lot in Miami and in AC and am distilling the key points further and further each time. We'll see if any one asks.
On Sunday, we drove home in the sunshine and went to Radio City Music Hall to attend the World premiere (red carpet, stars,etc) of the new Harry Potter movie. It was all very heady and the movie was by far the best one so far.
May 19, 2004
The Art of War
Where's Johnny Got his Gun? Where's All Quiet on the Western Front? Where's Catch 22? A Farewell to Arms and For whom the Bell Tolls? From Here to Eternity? The Naked and the Dead?
Where's Guernica?
Where's Alice's Restaurant? Where's All Along The Watchtower? Where's Give Peace a Chance? Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy? We Gotta Get Out of This Place? Born in the USA? Rocking the Casbah?
Where's The Star Spangled Banner?
It's been three years since 9/11 and yet, (except for a couple of forgettable efforts from Springsteen and Bowie, a few made-for-TV movies, and Michael Moore's upcoming Fahrenheit 911) artists don't seem to have responded in a significant way that has caught on with the public. Where's the first great anti-war hip hop song? The Whitney Biennial was great but if any of it referenced 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, I missed it.
Granted, it may have taken a few years for great art to emerge from other wars, and so far no one's been drafted for this one, but we live in accelerated times and all feel threatened and yet there doesn't seem to even be a movement afoot. These events are changing our lives and our world, and people all over the planet seem to have strong feelings about it and yet, the music, film, fiction and art world seem way, way too peaceful.
May 18, 2004
A new old friend
Sunday afternoon, I was walking through Astor Place when I saw a man in a familiar position, hunched over a big old moleskine, a pen twitching between his fingers. I knew, from across the road, that he was drawing in a journal.
As I approached, I suddenly realized it was my old partner, Tom Kane. We'd worked together in the mid-80s, dreaming up advertising campaigns for Life magazine, for cigarettes, for Barnes & Noble— we even did a very early rap song about IBM ("We were the mothers who invented high tech, now everybody wants to play Star Trek, but there just ain''t room for all that crew, all the wildest ideas come out of Big Blue, etc...).
Although I never saw him actually draw, I had seen a few pieces in his apartment, near-photorealistic paintings of pop icons, horses, and women. He obviously had a lot of talent but he expressed it on the sly. We'd lost touch over the next decade, but hooked up for a long, candid noodle lunch three years ago. Then I, in my executive haze, lost touch with him again. And now here was Tom drawing in a moleskine. What a weird coincidence.
Tom looked up from his page and, seemingly unsurprised to see me, immediately told me that he had been bought multiple copies of my last book and been lurking around this blog for a while, my book, all of which had inspired him to start keeping his first ever journal. I was floored. It was so strange to find someone who I knew and admired as a very creative and talented person hooking up with the Everyday Matters crew.
Well, as you can see from the drawing Tom was doing at the time, he sees very well. Look at how specific each window is, not just a row of squares but the very particular windows, one by one. His crosshatching is rhythmic without being monotonous, reminding of my all time favorite, r.crumb. I also love the way he fills the page, how he uses the negative space of the sky and integrates his text right into the scene. It's a great drawing and a beautiful exercise in mediation.
Tom is a very imaginative art director. If you've ever seen those wild, bubble headed girls in the ads for Steve Madden shoes, you've seen what Tom does in his day job. We dropped over at his place and he showed me dozens of fantastic paintings, photo collages, drawings and rows of tomato cans. I could sense that he is being called more and more to devote his energy to making things that express his passions rather than peddling ladies' shoes. I hope he follows that call.
In the meantime, I have a new journaling buddy to roam the streets with. What a happy accident it was, running into him.
May 17, 2004
Miles ahead
I've been reading about jazz recently, specifically about Miles and his seminal album, Kind of Blue. Miles was intensely committed to what he did, brave in a way I wonder if I can ever be. He seemed to live without doubt. At one point, he and the author had an argument about what day it was. When he was shown a copy of that day's paper, proving he was wrong, he said, " See that wall of awards? I got them for having a lousy memory." He didn't dwell on the past, didn't repeat himself, did what he did and kept on forging ahead.
What keeps one so resolute? Miles was successful, rich by jazz standards, but he was derided for how he behaved. People thought him arrogant, racist, mysoginistic, and uncommunicative. He would often play with his back to the audience and never spoke on stage. I don't believe he behaved this way because he could. I think he was just being uncompromisingly himself. That was the key to his art. He was an asshole, but that was okay with Miles.
How do you learn from a person like this? How do you follow his example in order to become purely yourself? Does it mean being unresponsive to any input, being pigheaded, selfish and rude? Of course not.
Miles believed in his art. His commitment was complete and he worked enormously hard on his technique and ideas. Even if he wasn't right (and by and large he was), he could tell his inner and outer critics that he did his very best and that he had faith in that . Perhaps that's the point of one's life. To discover what one loves, to pursue it to the utmost of one's ability, and then to gauge the success of one's life by how purely one has done that, rather than by the criteria others set.
It can be a rough road. One can struggle to make a living. One can fail to get accolades or even support from others. Personally, I wouldn't be satisfied with a life that offended and alienated the rest of the world but maybe I am just a pussy. Still, I think if you can sustain Miles-like focus on your art, your chances are good. Van Gogh spent a decade drawing crap, but he kept at it, and then suddenly blossomed.
I'm sure many people will say: "Are you telling me that if I work hard enough, I will succeed? And conversely, if I don't achieve the heights, it will be due to my lack of sustained effort?" I don't know. I don't want to paint such a black and white picture. But I think focus and perseverance are critical. The thunderstruck artist, whacked by the muse, and suddenly a huge hit, is a myth. You've gotta practice and practice and practice to bore to your core. Then you've got to have the bravery to be unflinching about exposing that core. You've got to be smart, figuring out ways to share your work with different people who will give productive advice and help share your stuff with others. It helps to be lucky (whatever that means).
And I believe that a positive outlook is essential too. That takes work as well. I am often my own worst enemy, my inner critic baying at every shadow. I can wake up at 4 am and keep myself awake with horrible images of my 'inevitable' fall from grace. In my churning mind, my foolish ways destroy my family, my savings, my health, my promise. Instead of being a grownup, I am dabbling in feeble, artsy things. Unwilling to suck it up and just do my job as a man and a provider, I am indulging myself in crap like this blog.
But, when I wake up, exhausted from the assault, I try to get to work to paint a sunnier picture. The fact is, I have dealt with harder things than nightmares and nagging internal voices. And I have done that by being positive and proactive.
The future is a blank sheet. I can try to catapult shit at it but that's just making the present uglier. And a long succession of ugly todays will lead to an ugly tomorrow. On the other hand, I can impact the future by believing in myself, by working hard, by staying the course, by confirming my directions with those who have already travelled it, by purifying my expectations and intentions, by keeping my chin up.
Maybe Miles wasn't actually all that confident. Maybe that's why he put shit in his arm and up his nose, why he raged and sulked. But I know he was positive about his art. If he hadn't been, he would still have had all that doubt and stress. But he wouldn't have Blues for Pablo and Bye Bye Blackbird. And nor would we.
May 14, 2004
John Hancock
The font worked well for the book but I was troubled by the fact that the point size is set by the height of the tallest letter, including descenders and ascenders. That meant I was also ways having to scale up the letters and that if I cranked down my leading, I would have letters from different lines bumping heads and tails.
Recently I decided to try a new one, based on my other style of handwriting, a printed uppercase face with slightly larger letters for caps. I wrote out the alphabet and all the punctuation and numbers, then copied out many surreal sentences like "You hope havoc and chaos will ebb when you tattoo a kiwi at the zoo" and "A yoga guru will hew the yucca with a hacksaw." I made a high res scan of all this palaver and emailed it to Alexander and a couple of weeks later, he sent me a link so I could download the font. Alexander also gave me a macro that runs in Microsoft Word to randomize my text. This useful feature takes all of the variations on a given letter that I have printed and randomly substitutes them in to my text. Instead of the same exact Y, for instance, it will insert one with a longer tail, an angled shaft, uneven tines, etc. This helps to give the font the little bit of chaos that makes for verisimilitude.
Jack immediately asked if I would load it onto his computer. I wonder why.
PS: About 50% of Everyday Matters, captions, some of the nuttier pages, is handlettered.
May 13, 2004
Idol worship
She's so good she drives me crazy.
May 12, 2004
This will go on your permanent record
It seemed a bit weird to assign journaling to students, to make it homework that would be graded. The deeper truth is that I was also anxious about teaching, coming off as some kind of authority on something that I feel I myself am still learning about. And finally, I was intimidated by the idea of all these hotshot designers and art directors making me feel completely inadequate in the visual department. Instead of being a wuss, though, I agreed to give it a go.
There were about fifteen students in my class, folks from all over the world — Thailand, Mexico, Poland, etc. — most on their mid to late twenties. While virtually every woman in the class had kept various kinds of diaries on an and off through out their lives, not a single one of the men had. And even though they were all planning careers as art directors, designers, and photographers, 75% were pretty uncomfortable with drawing.
I'd brought a big bags of books to show them – dan price, dan eldon, richard bell, hannah hinchman, peter beard, sabrina ward harrison, sara midda, muriel foster, tony forster, chris ware,etc. and while they flipped through my trove, I sat with each student to check out the journals they'd been keeping for the past two weeks. Most people used drawings intermittently, yet some hardly wrote anything and filled their pages with doodles and abstract drawings. I think the examples I brought were eye opening and they saw how many different ways there were to keep journals and how rich they could be.
I was surprised to see the quality of the work many of them had on display in the school, beautiful, complex and sophisticated graphic work that was quite different from their comparatively primitive journals. I had the suspicion that they were pretty used to working primarily on computers and simply weren't that fluid with working on paper. Still, though they may have been blowing smoke up my sailor skirt, most claimed that they had really enjoyed the exercise and would keep on journaling. I explained how I thought it would be helpful in developing their creativity, their ideas and their lives.
It was quite cool to be back in school, though briefly. I often have the fantasy of enrolling in an art school, to spend all day learning about making stuff, a stooped greying figure among all the young things.
I drew a little bit while I was there. Here are some pages:
#1
#2
#3
P.S. In my absence, by the way, I see a great discussion has developed on the Everyday Matters Yahoo! Group about whether visual journaling is art.
May 09, 2004
Ten thousand things to draw
Content of kitchen cabinet, fridge, bedside table, medicine cabinet
All my shoes, clothes
Covers of ten favorite CDs, books
Every significant front door of every place I've lived or worked
Everything I eat today
Contents of my bag, of my pockets
Every tree on my block, labeled with its official Latin name
All the cars on my block
Views out each window in my home
Clutter on my desk
A map of my neighborhood
A map of the house I grew up in
Portraits of my wife, son, and pets asleep
Every appliance in our house
Every phone in our house
Series: every cup, mug, vase and lamp
My hands, feet, face, body
The exterior of each place I buy lunch
My car's engine
Every pen and pencil in my desk
All of Patti's cosmetics
Every present I got on my last birthday, Christmas
All of our sports equipment
Every chair in our house
Every outlet and all its plugs
Everything that belongs to a pet: food, toys, clothes, bed, medicine, cage, etc.
All the liquor in our cabinet
The portraits in my yearbook
Ten pieces of broken cookie
Ten manhole covers
Ten hydrants
Each component of a sandwich, individually, then assembled
All our jewelry and watches
Every hat I own
Every bill and coin in my pocket
Ten things from any catalog in our mailbox
A plate of spaghetti
The laundry: clothes, machines, detergent, etc.
May 08, 2004
See you in the Funny Papers
Kelly Kilmer wrote to me to let me know that Everyday Matters has been selected by Comic Journal as one of
the notable comic books of the year! She tells me that as a result, her husband insists on keeping the book in a plastic bag. It has become a collector's item! Maybe I should start attending comic conventions next. I could charge a dollar for my autograph.
May 07, 2004
Serendipidity do dah
When folks undergo what, for lack of a less gooey term, I'll call a creative reawakening, they often experience a surge of synchronicity. Opportunities bounce into their laps. Like minded people just show up. Connections are made, sparks fly, light blink on. Life gets spicy.Some attribute this to a greater power: "God loves those who create". Maybe so. I have a more down-to-earth hypothesis.
When you allow yourself to be creative, to make things, to smell roses, see colors, hear symphonies, dance fandangos, your antennas rise. You start to scan through new stations, to retune. Instead of trudging in your rut, you look up and see stars and bluebirds.
The world is always full of opportunity, of possibilities, of stimulus, and pots of gold. When you finally start to look around, to see clearly, to live in the Now and dump your baggage, you can't help but notice. When you notice the world, you notice it notices you. You open up to people who you would normally ignore, and they open up to you, revealing how much they are like you and how much they like you too. You discover new pages of the menu. You hear lyrics to songs you used to fast forward. You read poems carved in monuments. You open your fortune cookies.
Small wonder the world suddenly seems to be flowing your way. It always did but perhaps you were too busy paddling upstream to notice.
May 06, 2004
MemoryLane.com
This morning someone interviewed me and asked me how long I've been on the Internet. I wasn't sure. My first online experience was in 1983 or so with a thing called The Source, a sort of online community not that different from out Yahoo Group. As for the Web itself, I had several different kinds of sites pretty early on. To track them down, I visited an amazing site called the Wayback Machine which has archived the entire internet (there are some broken links and stuff but you get a good snapshot).
At the beginning of 1998, I built a quite cute website for disabled people called curbcut.com: (the wheelchair accessible entrance to the internet) whose mission I described this way. Curbcut.com was pretty huge back in the day when the Internet was a lot smaller. I got millions of hits and the bulletin board was very active. This was the first time that a lot of disabled people could freely chat with each other and share information and stories. Eventually, the site was harassed by hackers and then other similar communities cropped up so I shut it down after a year or so.
Then I set up the first of several personal sites It's interesting to see oneself in the rearview this way. Even though it was just seven years ago, I wasn't the me I am today, really (don't they say that every seven years you completely replace all the cells in your body? So in a way I am a completely new person, cellwise). I obviously thought of myself as a frustrated writer in those days and had posed several short stories. I also had some terrible reproductions of some dreadful paintings. I have no idea who if anyone ever looked at this site. Nor why I am bothering to tell you about this today.
May 05, 2004
Living well through bad drawings
When some people see an illustrated journal, they say, "Wow, that's great. I could never do that." With some coaxing, they may be persuaded nonetheless to give it a try. Others say, "Wow, I'm going to do that." And they start too. And quite a few say, "Huh, where do you find
the time?" then use your journal as a coaster.It's comparatively easy to start. To bring yourself to draw your breakfast once or your coffee cup once and to keep it up for a couple of days. Ideally those first few days infect you with the fever and you're compelled to carry a long series of journal books around with you for the rest of your days.
But more likely, your initial enthusiasm will wane. You'll forget to do it one day, give in to resistance the next, then feel like you've broken the chain, the narrative is lost, a month's gone by, and you drop it altogether. Why? Often it's because you are disappointed with your drawings. You may say you don't have the time, forgot your book, grew bored but it's really because you aren't that impressed with your drawing skill. You haven't made something that looks like Art.
I don't think that illustrated journaling is really about doing great drawings. You're not out to make something that you could frame or give as an Xmas present. I'm not really into doing the sort of exercises on perspective and tone that you see in most drawing books, exercises that will move your skills to another level artistically. Not that you shouldn't do them if they are fun or if you have some other goal in mind but I don't think they are essential for the true purpose of illustrated journaling.
That purpose? To celebrate your life. No matter how small or mundane or redundant, each drawing and little essay you write to commemorate an event or an object or a place makes it all the more special. Celebrate your hairbrush and it will make you appreciate the intricacy of the bristles, the miracle of your lost hair, the beauty of you. Sounds sappy but it's in there. Draw your lunch and it will be a very different experience from bolting down another tuna on rye. If you take your time (and we're just talking maybe 10-20 minutes here, folks) and really study that sandwich, the nooks and valleys, the crinoline of the lettuce, the textures of the tuna, you will do a drawing that recognized the particularity of that sandwich,. That's the point: to record this particular moment, this sandwich, not something generic. If you approach it with that attitude, you will create something as unique. reaching that place is just a matter of concentration and attention. A brief meditation and you will have a souvenir to jog your memory back to that a moment forever more. Imagine if you can keep doing that, keep dropping these little gems in your day, recognizing the incredible gift you are given each morning upon awakening. You will be a millionaire.
There's a demon in your mind that will fight this, that will tell you your life is unworthy of acknowledgment, that today sucks through and through. It will tell you you have no time for this, that you are too harried, too stressed. Which brings me to Marybethd who wrote to me from Nebraska where she just had emergency eye surgery. For two weeks, she could only see the floor. She wasn't sidelined though— she drew all of her visitor's feet. She pulled art out of that tragedy, celebrated her visitors, created a positive memory that she will have to cherish long after her vision is back to normal. He nightmare became a lesson.
I have gone through my fair share of shit. My regret is that I didn't celebrate all of it. I can't say it often enough: life is short, art is long. Get the habit.
May 04, 2004
Sky Mall pop quiz
I have a new piece in my favorite online magazine that you might find amusing. I first thought of it on the way home from vacation when I pulled the bizarreness that is the Sky Mall catalog from the back of the seat and wondered, "Who dreams up all this crap?"
"And who buys it?"
May 03, 2004
The Art of the Cinema
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In the movies, artists are generally bastards, nuts or addicts. Here are some of my favorites. Biopics The Agony & the Ecstacy: Irving Stone boils down the Sistine Chapel with a liberal amount of artistic license. Good painting scenes. With Charlton Heston (ugh) as Mike B and Rex Harrison as Julius II. Lust for Life: More Irving Stone. Kirk as Vincent, Tony Quinn as Gauguin, Vincent Minelli at the helm. Beautiful and nutty and the best Vincent biopic. Bird: Clint Eastwood's version of Charlie Parker's life.Good but not as good as: Round Midnight: Dexter Gordon plays Bird, Lester Young & Bud Powell all rolled into one. It will make you love jazz. Moulin Rouge: The original: Toulouse-Lautrec and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Basquiat: Julian Schnabel directs this story of fame, drugs and demise. I liked Basquiat a lot more than the film but it's still worth a gander. Ed Wood: Proof that one of the most important things an artist needs is belief in himself. Tucker: Automaker as artist. A sunny metaphor for Coppola's battle with the Hollywood establishment Amadeus: Nothing like the scene where Mozart dictates the Reqiuem to Salieri. I could watch this dozens of times. And I have. Savage Messiah: I loved this movie in college. Ken Russell's bio of French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and his mad affair. Tortured, weird and romantic. Pollack: Ed Harris's tribute to Action Jackson but with a little too much drunkness and a little too little painting. My Left Foot: Danny Day Lewis as Christy Brown, paralyzed poet and painter. Have been meaning to see it for 15 years. Will soon. Shine: Pianist David Helfgott has a mean dad, a breakdown, and a lot of scenery to chew. Decent but overrated. Hilary and Jackie: The lives of classical musician sisters, one wild, one straight. I enjoyed it but honestly don't remember it that clearly. |
Documentaries Rivers and Tides: Simply the best movie I've ever seen about the creative process. Documents the work of Andy Goldsworthy the British sculptor. Still in some theatres. Avaialable on DVD in 9/04 Le Mystére Picasso: In 1956, Clouzot filmed Picasso painting on transparent canvases, revising the work as he goes, a chicken becomes a nude becomes a landscape, etc. Mind blowing. Crumb: portrait of the great underground comix artist and illustrated journal keeper, intense and revealing. See it even if you think you don't like him. Wild Wheels: a tribute to art cars (covered with mirrors, grass, plastic fruit, etc) and the people who make them. 28th Instance of June 1914, 10:50 a.m. - McDermott & McGough are a pair of artists who live as if it were PreWWI, their clothes, their home, their plumbing, their manner and their photography. Beautiful and strangely compelling. Fiction Edward Scissorhands: A fairy tale about the artist as outsider. By one of the most creative directors in modern cinema. The Royal Tennenbaums: The story of a creative family and the least good of the great films of Wes Anderson. The Moderns: Alan Rudolph's story of artists in Paris in the 1920s is wildly surreal and romantic and has a wonderful soundtrack. An American in Paris: A highly realistic story of artistic struggle. Gene Kelly, Minelli, and my fav: Oscar Levant. Quartet: 4 stories, one of a pianist who studies for years to get a critic's approval. Also by Maugham. The Razor's Edge: Bill Murray (of all people) was in the good version of this story of a WWI vet discovering himself as an artist and a spiritual being.. It was very inspiring to me when I first saw it two decades ago. The Commitments: Slightly tooraucous story of an Irish soul band but a good appreciation of appreciation. The Hours: Virginia Woolf and all that. New York Stories: The first part of the trilogy is by Scorcese with Nick Nolte as a larger than life painter who can only work when obsessed with a woman. Some beautiful moments. The Horse's Mouth: I loved this book as a kid — it made painting into the most heroic of acts. Alec Guiness plays Gulley, a screw up of a painter, in search of the perfect wall for his mural. Got any to add? |
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May 02, 2004
Todd's bestiary
My friend Todd is one of those intensely creative people who can make anything out of anything. He makes perfect model ships from bits and piece and his obsession with the Poseidon Adventure drove him to build a scale model of the ill-fated liner's dining room. He is a long time journal keeper and watercolorist but his job is being New York's top florist (he owns a store called VerySpecialFlowers in the West Village). We went to visit him to see his newest project: making sixty topiary animals for a party for Hermes. His store is full of these critters which he has sculpted straight from his imagination. Here are a few of the pictures I took there:
Bear
Critters
Kitty
Window
Bird
Shelf
May 01, 2004
Grid
The members of Everyday Matters, the Yahoo!group, have been working on an interesting project. Take a page, divide it into thirty squares (pipaudstudio created a Word template you can download here), then do a drawing each day in one of the squares. After a month, it will be filled with a rich quilt of art. No matter how lame any one of the drawings is, the overall result will be beautiful. As the month ended, some of the participants have been uploading their work. It's very interesting and inspired me.Patti signed me up to contribute a piece to the auction at Jack's school, a watercolor of the school. I carved my page up and got to work.
Inspiration Journal: Tony Forster
This guy is scarily good. Tony Forster's watercolors depict his treks around the world, to the rain forests of Costa Rica, the volcanic island of Montserrat, Bolivia's mile-high lakes, the slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the scorching desert of Death Valley. I first saw them in a froo-froo gallery, stopped dead in my tracks on Madison Avenue, thinking "Wait, wasn't I supposed to have made these, y'know, in some parallel universe?" On the edges of his gorgeous landscapes paintings (he paints on sheets of watercolor paper, usually 22"x31"), he attaches little sample swatches, topographic maps, and then stencils, types, and hand writes notes. This softcover book of his work was published by the Frye Art Museum in 2000.
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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.