TCL: Supplementary Material, II: Walton

Walton Ford and I met when we were both sixteen and at the Rhode Island School of Design summer program. He was one of those rare creatures who was born with phenomenal talent. The drawings he did at four and five would put most adult artists to shame. We eventually lost touch and only crossed each others' paths decades later by which time he had emerged as one of the top painters in the NY fine art scene. He makes enormous (sometime twenty feet long) watercolors of animals. Each is life sized and breathtakingly accurate. They are clearly influenced by early naturalist/illustrators like John James Audubon and Carl Bagner and yet he has added political allegories to his work that make them very contemporary.
Of all of the people I know, Walton is the most "successful" as an artist. He is represented by one of Chelsea's finest galleries, does a couple of shows a year, and will probably be able to spend the rest of his life living comfortably from his art. Though they have six-figure prices, his paintings are enormously marketable and every show is sold out before the opening. Despite all this success and talent, Walton still struggles with the politics of the art world and is fiercely competitive with those contemporary artists who are just ever so slightly better know than he is. He also resents the fact that his craftsmanship was slighted and ignored in the days when figurative painting was not what the market sought. As I talked to him I realized that the art world is basically just another industry, a bunch of stores selling stuff; dealers create and maintain the market and the artists themselves, regardless of their ability and vision, primarily luck into popularity.
I hung out with Walton at his upstate New York studio and we ran a tape recorder while he prepared a huge sheet of watercolor paper for an upcoming painting, turning the pristine paper into a mottled, browning relic that looked like it had fallen out of an 18th century folio of engravings.

Walton: I like to see Art as a tool. Audubon cut things out, pasting things together, scribbled notes to printer on it... The process of making was part of the work. The drawings weren't the end result, the work was the final engravings so he allowed himself the freedom to be so cavalier with his work, not precious. I make my paintings look like they have that attitude, that feeling of unfinished ness, like it was done in the field. The writing focuses it, explains it.
I make 10-foot watercolors of tigers in which the stripes tell allegorical stories about Vietnam. Paintings so large they are experiential, like a diorama, filling your peripheral vision. I make them life size because, well, when you see a beaver, you think of it like the size of a woodchuck with a weird tail, then you see what it's really like, it's awesome, it's totally startling, the size of a 50 gallon drum, it's freaky and I like to that in my work, the fun of finding an animal that large and more grotesque than in your mind's eye. When its life sized, when it's extinct, it's shocking. Flocks of millions of passenger pigeons that have never been painted before. It's like a time machine too. To see things for real that can't be seen anymore.

Danny: So what's your attitude towards the fine art world? You have always made figurative paintings even when they were hardly in vogue. Isn't it a little surprising that despite the accessibility of your work you have had such success?

Walton: I got a lot of very positive feedback on how I could draw and how I could see when I was young. I was a very precocious talent. My daughter, who’s a talented violinist won't practice on that frantic, 18 hour a day level. It's different in art than in music or sport. Art is a lot more forgiving you can be really good without working quite as hard. And there’s not that competitive thing battling for a small number of slots. But the drop out rate, the number of people who can't handle, can't go to the studio every day, is enormous. I was incredibly persistent and didn't take no, I wasn't terribly interested in being trendy. For many years it was not cool to do what I was doing. I had to not be discouraged by the fact that I was doing something that at the moment might not be hip. Now there's a trend toward representational art, but so much of it strikes me as incredibly lazy and lacking in thought or depth. It's just about irony and it's hard to compare with the great portrait painters of the past, to Sergeant, for example. I feel like I don’t want to waste your time if you're going to bother paying attention to what I've done, I want to at least have put in as much thought in doing it as the person looking at it. I didn't want to stop even if others who I didn’t think were as capable were getting more success. And still something encouraging happened very year making it worth while if I looked as a long term thing.

I still have this feeling that I don't quite belong. Those who get success much younger have a sense of entitlement I haven't got. I have to try to develop that attitude and stop cringing, "Thank you for the attention." My work is so accessible that for ages people made me think was stupid. I think it's more important to make something that's great art and is also popular, not just for other art professionals. It's just a feeling that driven into you as soon as you come to New York, that being a populist isn’t interesting, creating narrative is stupid. Look at Goya, Daumier, Doré,etc.

People are very suspicious of craftsmanship. But Mathew Barney and John Curren are craftsman that are considered successful, intelligent artists so it's good for me, that benefits all artists who care about carefully making beautiful pictures. There's no meaningful distinction between art and craft. Once you've sussed out what the idea for a picture will be, it's all craft, it's all about making your picture. You need technique.

Danny: Is it terribly hard to be a fine artist? To make it in that world?

Walton: The hardest part of being an artist is not getting noticed. I worked very, very hard on a show about ten years ago and I thought it was a very good show. It went up came down and no one wrote about it, no one bought anything, and I felt like I had done all this work for no reason. Being able to get over that was very hard but kept me around for when people started to admire my work. You want people to admire what you do. I don't care if it’s vanity or greed or what the motivation was when I looked at a work of art. The work redeems it.

Danny: Yeah, but practically...how did you survive until you made it?

Walton: I was able to survive for years as an artist, living on grants and selling a few paintings and then my big show was a flop and I had to go to work for the first time for years, doing restoration carpentry, wood refinishing, and some illustrations work, book covers and things. Making museum exhibits, building scale models of ships. It wasn't what I wanted to be doing but it made ends meet.
I resigned myself to the idea that it wasn't going to go as well as it ended up going. I always had some people who liked my work but it's delusions of grandeur for an artist like me to think that there were people who didn't like my work. It was more that nobody knew it, like a restaurant with no customers. Perfectly nice pizza pie but no one comes in. That humility helped me get by.

Danny: Is it important to be an artist?

Walton: At the end of the day, the only thing that human beings have to feel proud about is what sort of art did that culture leave behind, what sort of music, food, creativity, writing, the objects they made. That's the value and legacy that will endure.

In traditional societies, the making of things was tied to the survival of the group. They didn't worry about justifying their motivations. They all knew they were doing it for the interest of the group. The rugs on the floor, the paintings on the wall.

Danny: So what's changed? It sure doesn't feel that way today.

Walton: People nowadays are made to feel self conscious about drawings, about singing, about being different. And professionals are to blame for mystifying the role of the artist to the point that people feel stupid if they don't understand things. And there is no attempt to educate people as to why the things that they may not understand right away are worth understanding. And then there's this tortured pathetic version of an artist. Ed Harris showing Jackson Pollock as an inarticulate bastard, Kurt Cobain blows his brains out.
All this stuff adds up and people don't want to be involved in this kind of thinking or being or making stuff. They're interested instead in Hollywood people who aren't that interesting but who corporations make money out of.

Danny:So is it worth it? Would your recommend that people try to make a living as an artist?

Walton:The advantage I have over people who don't do this for a living is that I get to do it to think about it all day, every day. I get to wake up each day and just think about making some thing cool.

Danny: That does sound cool.

January 09, 2006

Dadhood

A group of us men discussed the ups and downs, ins and outs of being a father. The results were published this morning on The Morning News. Check it out and then be glad you have your own dad. Sorry, Jack.

January 08, 2006

TCL: Supplementary Material, I: Roz

Despite the hundreds of drawings and essays and exercises and blood and sweat and tears, many readers have said that they wish they could get more of The Creative License.

We're not ready for a box set or a deluxe edition (The Da Vinci Code), it ain't), but I am going to release some supplemental stuff that didn't make it into the book.
When I started out, I planned to have a significant section that would include in-depth profiles of various people who were living various types of creative lives. I thought I'd explore various issues with them such as: what is it like to be a successful fine artist, or conversely what is it like to be fully committed to making art regardless of the financial impositions it takes, what is it like to become an an artist after living a different sort of life, and so on.
I traveled half way round the worldvisiting and interviewing people for this part of the book but in the end felt like this material was dragging the book in a different direction than I wanted to go. Instead of it being an intimate dialogue between me and you the reader, it became more of a spectator event.
Nonetheless, I learned a lot from my artists friends, and much of this accumulated wisdom found its way into the book in other forms.
Recently, I was rereading a lot of the interviews and photos I took on the trip and decided that they would probably be worth sharing. Over the next week or two, I'll be presenting a series on our chats here on dannygregory.com. Stay tuned.

Roz Stendahl is a designer and teacher and bookbinder and dog trainer in Minneapolis, Minnesota who has been a great inspiration to me and to many people on the EDM group. There are several of her journal pages in the book and they are beautiful and detailed. We talked about many things during my visit and I left with a bunch of tips and expanding ideas. Here's some of what she said about drawing in public during the several days I was lucky to spend at her house.

ROZ: I'm pretty used to writing and drawing in public and do it all the time. In fact some would say it is the only way I function. OK, let's just say, I can't help myself. My journal is pretty much attached permanently to my arm, until of course I need to start a new journal.

You get used to drawing in public and the advice I would give is borrowed from Nike, "Just Do It." Over time you'll be glad you did even if a particular session doesn't go well. My philosophy is that if every fifth page of my visual journal isn't a complete mess than I am not trying and the whole point of my journal for me is to capture my life, the way my brain functions, the things that I observe, the projects I want to do, the painting ideas, story ideas, whatever, that occur to me, and whatever happens to be right in front of me, and to practice, practice, practice.

It's all practice. I can always use more practice. (I'll be practicing until I die.) Those really bad drawings and messed up pages, I learn the most from them.

If you aren't used to drawing in public you might want to hang out with people who are used to it. Being in a group sort of dilutes any curious attention paid individually to you. (People focus instead on the paranoid aspects of, "gee, they are all drawing, maybe I should be drawing," and leave to get a sketchbook, or just leave.)

There is also the very funny thing that happens when you're out with a group of friends sketching and someone comes up and asks what you're doing and you all say something bland like, "just drawing." The person asking questions is just convinced that there must be something you are all noticing that he needs to notice. He'll repeat the question. It's pretty funny.

We just don't look in our culture (U.S.). I was at the San Diego Zoo a couple years ago and a woman, man, and two kids in tow came whipping by me at the bat display. I was standing there sketching and they pushed right in front of me, which is no big deal for me because, hey, I know I’ll be there long after they are gone.

Click, click, click, went the man with the camera, "Got them, let's go,” he said. The kids hadn't even up to the enclosure. I don’t think they ever did see the bats. I have a feeling the photos didn’t turn out.

I digress. Seriously, going out with a veteran public journaler (is that a word?) is great for another reason. I tend to be anti social and going out with those more gracious than I am has allowed me to painlessly learn ways to deflect the curious without generating any bad karma. I find that if you look intently at your drawing and drawing subject someone might come over and say something, but if you give monosyllabic responses in a polite tone and keep focusing on your drawing people leave you along. And it's very easy, if you're in the middle of THE DRAWING OF YOUR LIFE, to simply say, "thanks" to any compliment the observer might give, while you keep drawing.

Alternately you can begin to write down everything the interloper says. They tend to read over your shoulder and see that you are writing about them and bug out pretty quickly. I call that "found dialog," some people (back me up here Bonnie from Minnesota) call this part of "Minnesota Nice," and clinically I think it's called "passive aggressive." Whatever you want to call it, it's effective. (I don’t think the karmic cost is high, but I'm not an expert on karma.)

My best journaling in public story: I had a class of nature journaling students (adults) at the Minnesota Zoo. They all spread out to work. I was standing alone drawing a small miniature deer from Southeast Asia, being available if any student had a question or problem (or started having a panic attack from trying to draw in public). A small child, a boy, about 7 or 8, squeezed in front of me, walking along the fence line. I kept drawing. He squeezed in again in the opposite direction.
I was holding my watercolor set and painting so I pretty much had my hands full, but the third time he went by he stopped right in front of me and paused and I thought, maybe I should step away, nah, too much stuff to move (my coat was at my feet with my back pack). So I kept drawing. His mom called him from stage right, and back he went again, past me. I caught him looking at me smiling, when our faces were even, because his passing coincided with my looking up at the subject. He had a wonderful smile.

I finished my drawing and bent down to pack up my painting kit. There was a small pile of M&Ms (plain not peanut, thank you very much!) on my back pack which he had placed there on his third fly-by as a gift to me.

January 07, 2006

[everydaymatters] Digest Number 850

I have to say that, though I tend to lurk and not to join the chat as much as I probably ought, I think I have read every single post (11,798!) made to the Everyday Matters group. This afternoon I read through the latest digest and thought to myself

how lucky I am to be able to eavesdrop on such lively and stimulating conversation. It is such a privilege to be able to read just part of a single day's discussion including:
-- a dialogue between two masters (mistresses?) of nature journaling like Cathy Johnson and Roz Stendahl,
-- the ongoing frank and touching thread titled "Strange Feeling"
-- Karen Winters in-depth journal round-up
-- Jill Campbell's floor finishing tips
-- the various kind comments about my books
and the overall sense of community and support that has always been a hallmark of this group.
Thanks so much to everyone for being such generous contributors this party as we near our second anniversary. If you haven't yet joined us, please do.

Your pal,
Danny

January 06, 2006

The (heavily painted) envelope please...

Not that it's terribly important, but if you'd like to nominate a blog you like (hint, hint) for the 2006 Bloggies, you have till January 10th. Do it here. Categories include: American, craft, writing, best kept secret, best overall, etc.

January 05, 2006

Newly discovered drawings sites

Spend some time with these inspiring sites. But not too much. Save time for drawing.

A great animated tour of a ball point sketchbook collaboration:DQ3.

Fascinating flight of imagination: Drawings of skeletons of cartoon characters

Fantastic illustrations that combine drawings with found object collage:
Kurt Halsey Frederiksen

A very talented 22-year-old illustrator in Chicago: matthew woodson's portfolio site

Julian Beever's disturbingly real sidewalk chalk art:Virtual Street Reality

The Master: The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

A self taught illustrator who seems to love the same 1950s illustrators I dig: S.britt Make sure your read his hilarious interviews!

The blog of a sketch group in Toronto: Bobby Chiu's Subway Sketch Group

The entire contents of some classic old drawing instruction books:Andrew Loomis Lives!

January 04, 2006

The Magic Mailbox

Over the past month, I have been so excited to go through the mail. Almost every day, nestled among the Christmas catalogs, there'd be a special envelope or two -- painted, calligraphed, covered with rubber stamps, all responses to the illustrated letter contest

I announced in November, inspired by the new book More Than Words : Illustrated Letters from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. They arrived from all over the US, from the northern reaches of Canada, from Sweden, France, and Germany, each unique. Inside were wonderfully personal stories, jokes, experiments, all testaments to the terrific creativity of the people who'd sent them.
It was a wonderful month and I felt so lucky each day. I hope it inspires you to try your hand at sending me or somebody somewhere a letter describing your doings in words and pictures.

I have created an online gallery of the illustrated letters. Every page and some of the envelopes are there and I tried to make them large enough so that you can read every word. At the bottom of each gallery page is a link that will let you download a full-res image.

Visit the Illustrated Letters gallery here

The 'contest' aspect of the event was the hardest as I loved every letter. So Patti and I decided that the most obvious solution to the dilemma was a random drawing and the big winner was Mr. Frank Bettendorf. Congratulation, Frank, look for your book in the mail!

January 02, 2006

My recent post to the EDM group

Art making is not a competitive sport. Being intimidated by what others do, by the clarity of their vision, the steadiness of their line, means thwarting the very thing that will get you to where you want to be. If you don't draw because others, who have done it longer and more often, do it 'better' you are robbing yourself.

Give yourself analogies. Should you stop jogging because some people finish marathons in a a couple of hours? Should you stop cooking your family dinner because you love the food great chefs prepare in four star restaurants? Should you stop writing emails because of Shakespeare's poetry? Should you stop contributing to your favorite charity because of Mother Teresa's example?
There are always going to be people who are doing work you admire. Celebrate them. Buy reproductions of their work (or better yet, originals) . Study what they do, how they learned. Study their teachers and heroes to to learn where they came from. Absorb as much as you can. Then lay your influences aside, take a deep breath and plunge in. Get in touch with yourself, the unique you, the only one of your kind. Express that uniqueness. Do it again and again, getting ever closer to the truth.
If you must be self-critical, make it constructive and specific. How can you accomplish what you want? Are you clear on what that is? And bear in mind that by committing to your art, you are becoming a hero to some other novice. As you look at those ahead of you, be aware of those who are following your example.
And, most importantly, as you proceed down the path to your goals, enjoy the view. Never lose your sense of pleasure in each drawing you make, even if it's not 'good enough'. The pleasure is in the making.

Your pal,
Danny

January 01, 2006

New Year's Resolution

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world".- Gandhi
New Year's Day. It's a good time for stock-taking, for self-appraisal. With each change one makes in oneself, one see more changes yet to be made. of PITT artists' pens.
I am still trying to figure out how exactly this will work but I was thinking how cool it would be

Not to self-flagellate but in the spirit of creative expansion. To be alive is to grow and adapt and to spend one's days awake and aware.
In 2005, I took on several new creative challenges.
We completed The Creative License, my largest design, illustration and writing project. We launched the new advertising campaign for Chase: a dozen or more commercials and a hundred or so ads. This website was relaunched, thanks to my friends Tricia and Jacob. I made a lot of new friends and connections through the Everyday Matters group and developed the social aspects of my art making. And I discovered Rome, deeply immersing myself in a city and its art I'd never known well before.
At home, Patti and I got to spend more and better time together, deepening our love as it enters its twentieth year. My relationship with Jack changed a lot this year too and I am prouder than ever of him as he took on the challenges of entering a new school and a new community.

I'm pretty happy with much of what happened this year. But I have a new and different plan for 2006.

While it has been really rewarding letting drawing and journaling transform my life, I feel a deeper and stronger need to do more. I don't just want to sell books and checking accounts. I want to promote awareness. In the coming year, I want to see how to use art to make a difference for others. Not just to unleash their own creativity but to create a new awareness of the world and to forge a community that can make it a better place. I want to try to help people rediscover their love of drawing and then bring them together to help others. To raise awareness, to raise funds, to help make the world a more beautiful place. I began drawing because of a trauma. When Patti had her accident, drawing helped me to gain a fresh perspective, the strength and vision to persevere and also to improve. I have not done enough to spread that power to others. I think that drawing and journaling could help people with spinal cord injuries and other disabilities, with life threatening illnesses, with addiction and depression. I would like to talk to health care professionals to see how I can share what I have experienced. I know that a lot of people in the Everyday Matters community have used their art to cope with physical limitations, with mental and spiritual challenges, and I would like to find a way to share those experiences and use them to help mobilize something. I would also like to reach out to people who help others to learn -- librarians and teachers -- and see how we can encourage creativity, drawing and journaling among their students too, to help develop what could be a life long creative habit. I would also like to use communal drawing experiences like Sketchcrawls in a new way. As we raise awareness by drawing together, I would like to focus the community to help others. I think that group drawing can be a valuable fund raising tool to help people in need. Just as walkathons and marathons raise money through individual pledges, I think we can use drawing as a way to motivate people to give. For now, Patti and I have been calling it "Drawn Together" (though I think there's a cartoon show by that name).

Here's one thing we could all do together:

We are going to put together a drawing outing at the Rubin Museum of Art, the only museum devoted to Himalayan Art. On Friday evening, February 3rd, any one who wants to can join us and draw some of the amazing treasures there. We'll get to socialize, share our journals and our love of drawing. But this time we will have a cause too.
As I'm sure you know, the people of Northern Pakistan and Kashmir, people of the Himalayan region, have been devastated by the recent earthquake and now with the onset of winter are in terrible peril. We can make a difference by raising money to buy them blankets. A dollar will buy a blanket that could provide much-needed comfort and protection. Five dollars will provide all a family needs to weather the bitter winter. Five bucks. The price of a couple if people could arrange sponsors who would pledge to give say, a dollar for each drawing their sponsored draw-er did on the sketchcrawl. Do ten drawings and ten people get blankets. I think I may also be able to get the museum to pledge our admission prices to the fund too.
At the end of the day, we will have a wonderful experience: we'll see great art, we'll make our own art, we'll hang out with other like-minded people, and we'll help folks in real need. Maybe it would be possible to set up a parallel effort in other cities. The LA County Museum of Art has a South Asian art collection. So does the Art Institute of Chicago. Or maybe people could just gather at an Indian restaurant and share lunch and draw. Or order in some curry and sit at home and draw from photos from a digital collection like this one.
I am not by nature a particularly generous or philanthropic person. I am just a New York ad guy, let's face it. But somehow, after Katrina and Iraq and Pakistan and Karl Rove and all that has happened this past year, I am feeling this need to do something bigger than my little selfish life well up inside me. I expect that I won't be particularly good at it at first and that my ego and my usual tendencies will muddy the waters, but it feels like a resolution I can stick with longer than a low carb diet or a gym regime or a pledge to stop biting my nails. We'll see.
Stay tuned.