My new pen of choice is the Rotring Art pen, and as I've discussed before, I have been filling it with India Ink because it's waterproof. Richard, who first turned me onto the pen, was a little leery of my putting a shellac based medium into the pen, fearing that it would gum up the works. The pen is very occasionally balky so so I decided to get a second opinion.
Pearl Paint is the largest art store in the City, five stories on Canal Street just west of Broadway. It's filled with almost everything one could want and a few things one wouldn't, like blasé art student employees who greet most questions with a heavy exhalation of breath and monosyllabic answers. However, I was on my bike, heading north after drawing buildings down by City Hall so I thought I'd lock up next to a parking sign and seek advice in the pen department.
I approached Charles, a middle aged black man with a grey beard and a bald head. He was studying a book on watercoloring that I had ben quite interested in myself and I tried to keep my question to the point so as not to distract him too much form his reading.
Off the bat, he was quite helpful though a tad terse. My pen would be fine if I flushed it out on a regular basis with an ammonia solution that will cut the shellac and stop it from binding up the pen's innards. I explained why I was so interested in waterproof ink (because I use it with watercolors in my journals) and soon we were having a great conversation about pens and ink and illustration and life.
Charles pulled out his own fountain pen, one he had rebuilt using an old Koh-i-noor nib, that was incredibly flexible so he could make a line that started out hair-thin and then expanded to a wide ribbon and then narrowed back down. He showed me how he likes how his fountain pen smears onto a Payne grey wash. Then he started pulling stuff out of his own backpack, his moleskine, his watercolors. Soon I was hearing the story of his career. He had been a top airbrush illustrator, doing technical illustration for Wiley but then the bottom dropped out of his business when computers took over.
Like many of his colleagues, he had considered dropping out of the business altogether but then five years ago, he sold a lot of stuff, rented a room, invested heavily in hard-and software and began teaching himself to draw again from scratch. Working at Pearl gives him health insurance while be rebuilds his business.
He then pulled out a portfolio of spectacular work, dramatically lit pictures of mechanical bees flying through rooms and battling toy robots and breathtaking flowers. Clearly, the guy was good and is on his way back. These days, he says,thanks to all this new learning, he is as excited about art as he has ever been.
The conversation went through interesting gear shifts. First, I was just some moron who knew nothing about ink. Then I was at least a fairly committed amateur. Then, as we began to talk about computers and how they are changing illustration, I let drop that I do a lot of my final compositing in Photoshop so I can respond quickly to editors' requests. I told him that I have a piece in the NY Times today, not trying to be sort of puffed up about it, but simply telling him that Susan, my editor, had asked me to revise the piece a bit and that it would have been a nightmare to patch it or redraw it the old fashioned way.
This anecdote moved me to the next gear, a professional, and our conversation really got going. Soon Charles was turning other customers away with the kind of clipped answers I'd been expecting so he could come back and chat with me some more about 3-D modeling and brands of ink.
I am discovering more and more how important it is to be in the company of other committed creative people. This weekend I went to the Morning News' annual offsite in Sag Harbor to discuss the future plans of our magazine and got to meet all of the writers whose work I have admired so much, people who had flown in from Dallas and San Francisco, DC and Boston, to hang out, drink, smoke, eat and talk about life online, the freelance writing scene, great bands and movies, old TV shows and low-carb beer. Saturday night my mum had some pieces in a group show in Riverhead and so again I got to hobnob, this time with a group of painters and a great guitarist who was playing at the opening.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that most of my long term New York friends, though I do and will always love them a lot, really don't get it when it comes to the world of art, a world I am learning to feel more and more comfortable in. While they respect my drawing and think it's cool when I'm published somewhere, it's just not the same as sitting with a drawing pal, talking paper and transparency, comparing pen lines and wondering how you can make ends meet while still doing what you like. Most of all, either you get it or you don't when it comes to the peaceful meditative thing that happened when you draw. The point is not the quality of the work we do, whether or not we get paid to do it, how much experience we have, etc. It's really about sharing a religion, inspiring each others' passion, encouraging and working through issues from a common place or trust and understanding. Maybe it's more akin to one heroin addict talking to another (only with less needle-sharing and nodding out). Or one Yankees' fan to another, I dunno.
When I was a kid, I was never really part of a crowd. Inept at sports, a dork and a foreigner, I tended to hang out between the covers of books. Even as an adult, I guess I don't have the loads of great friends to go golfing and poker playing with that seem the domain of the average red-blooded American male. Not that I miss it.
I am so glad that the comments on this blog and the Yahoo! Group give me a chance to connect with and listen to like minded people. This community is one of the greatest advantages to this whole effort. The friendships I have made here, even though many are very long distance, make me feel at home, relaxed and among my peeps. It's great.
Thank you.