A night I’ll never forget
Last night we had the most extraordinary memorial tribute to Patti. There were over 200 people attending and people had to wait outside to get in. There was singing and story telling and orchids and roses and the most love I have felt in my life.
My joke with the many friends who helped to plan the evening was that we should have a party so fantastic that Patti would be really mad she wasn’t there. The evening was that and much more … and Patti did attend — her spirit was very much alive all night.
Jack and I talked when we’d come home and both felt the same thing: that the horrible void we’ve had since last Thursday has been replaced by a peaceful knowledge that we are going to be alright because so many, many people loved Patti and us and will always be there for us, making sure we don’t go off the rails.
Thank you everyone who was there and to the many others who sent us messages of peace and support. We are very fortunate.
Sucking and idling
I like to draw complicated machinery in the streets. If buildings are my landscapes, trucks are my wildlife.
I drew this critter hurriedly and from my uptown balcony. Just as I finished, it pulled in its trunk, stowed its cones, and ambled off. But I got the drawing, which didn’t suck.
One of the more perilous portions of my trek to the office each morning is crossing the cobbled stone stretch of 14th Street in the heart of the Meat Packing district. There’s loads of construction, sidewalks are missing, detours abound and there are missing stop signs and traffic lights. I just had time to get the basic bits of this rig before its driver clambored back aboard and sailed away on the dense river of morning traffic.
Slo-Mo
I think, therefore I am. And yet to truly be, I have to control, even stifle that part of me that thinks and thinks and thinks. It’s important, particularly when life gets overwhelming, to take time to just be in the moment.
I’ve never been able to shut down through a program of meditation; the voices of boredom soon intrude on my tranquility. But when I’m drawing, that yammering voice of worry and criticism starts to disengage from my mind and then float away. Time slows, then stops. After twenty minutes or so, I come back to reality — refreshed, clear, my buttocks still asleep.
But I’ve found other ways to slow down.
I walk to work most days, covering the two and a half miles in thirty five minutes. I generally wind through Greenwich Village, then up through the meat packing district and along the river. I don’t encounter much traffic and the landscape is varied and interesting: 19th century brownstones and warehouses, taxi garages, car washes, art galleries, empty lots, some gentrified conversions. For a year or so, I wore my headphones en route and listened to music, books on tape or NPR podcasts. But recently I began leaving my iPod at home and slowed my pace down a bit. Now I spend my traveling time just listening to the morning. I find the time to think through ideas, to make connections, to be.
When I’m overly busy, my perspective gets so distorted. My loved ones become distractions. My pleasures become chores. I just want to get through things so I can work my way down the list.
Our turtle Mo-hammed is a low-maintenance creature. We feed him in the morning and clean out his tank once a week. Under the wrong circumstances, I ask myself (or worse, Patti and Jack) why do we have this creature in our kitchen in his heavy fetid tank of water, making more work for poor, burdened me. But when I come to my senses*, I take pleasure in feeding him dozens of little tablets of food one at a time or watching him walk around the kitchen counter, exploring. His striped skin is so beautiful. His shell like a horn of thumbprints, symmetrical and yet funky and organic. Pick him up when he wants to keep going on and he’ll emit a little hiss, like a cat or a radiator.
Walking with Joe through the park can be a perspective shift — if I let it. What’s it like to see the world from 12 inches, to note every previous dog’s markings, to yearn for every discarded chicken bone and bagel stub? I observe the politics of the dog run. A new dog enters and the pack’s pecking order needs to be re-calibrated. Every butt must be re-sniffed. Each dog must decide if he’ll submit or try to dominate the rest. The power struggles tend to be bloodless and quick. Dogs thrust their chests out or expose their genitals. Many encounter include a period of assessment, a brief standoff, during which each party stares and vibrates and finally chooses his place. Or, has it chosen for him. Studying and flowing with these basic interactions makes me feel at peace and in harmony. If only office politics were so clear and simple.
Drawing with my boy, cuddling with my wife, weeding my garden, folding laundry, staring out the window, sunbathing with my hound, flossing, drinking tea… the day is full of opportunities to stop and be. I never regret the time spent being thoughtless. I need to think of more ways to do it.
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*“Come to my senses.” I just instinctively typed in that phrase and yet it seems so exactly right. I spend a lot of time away from my senses, in a revery or an imagined depiction of the what the world is really like. Being in the here and now means brushing away the fabricated veil, dealing only with what actually is (or at least what my senses really seem to be experiencing, Neo).
TCL: Supplementary Material, IV: Andrea
I first met Andrea Scher through her blog, Superhero Journal. Within days of roaming through her posts, I was hooked. Being hooked meant more than just loving her photos and learning so much from her wisdom and compassion. It meant that I became a customer when I bought one of her beautiful necklaces for Patti. Andrea’s blog is certainly not designed to be a crass storefront but the more immersed one becomes in her sense of style and her appreciation of every day, the more you trust her and want to own a piece of her.
As we corresponded, I learned that Andrea had spent several years as a gift product designer/book production manager working with SARK, a woman I admire a great deal for the enthusiastic inspiration in her lovely colorful books. SARK is another good example of someone whose creative spirit reaches in many directions, and someone who has made a decent living not through galleries or mainstream marketing but by designing her own sort of company, her own sort of way of making a creative living.
So many people seem to want to know about alternate paths to creative self-sufficiency beyond the Major-Hollywood-Studio, Major-Publisher, Major-Label-fantasy-that-will-probably-never-come-true-as-one-imagines-it sort of thing. The Internet and one’s own imagination seem to offer so many opportunities and Andrea seems to be plumbing many of them. She is a talented photographer and painter, she designs and sells a great line of jewelry and t-shirts . Last year she was trained as a life coach and started a practice, working with creative people all over the world. She plans to focus more and more on the coaching in the coming years.
Andrea and I spent some face time in San Francisco, where I stayed in a lovely little guest house on Balmy Alley, surrounded by incredible murals. Here the gist of what she told me then:
ANDREA: “I was reminded today of an important turning point in my creative life. A woman wrote to me and asked, “How do you keep your confidence up (without letting it dissipate) to keep living your creative dream?”
What came to mind is something a friend of mine told me years ago. I was saying something self-deprecating and insecure about my artwork and he turned to me and said, “When are you going to take it for granted that you are a talented artist? When are you going to stop trying to prove it? Assume it. Take it for granted and imagine what you could create from that place…”
My whole life changed that day.
I finally saw how much energy I was putting into becoming an artist. I thought I had to somehow earn the title, that there was some special magic attached to it. I thought I had to be plucked from the crowd, that someone from the outside (who? I have no idea) would say to me, NOW. You are good enough.
What a bunch of crap.
I think the label of “artist” is loaded and has a strange sort of baggage attached to it. People say, “I’m not an artist! I can barely draw a straight line” and I always cringe when I hear this. What’s so interesting about a straight line anyway?
It is not an exclusive club, this artist thing. It’s just a bunch of people who like to play, to make things, to dream up ideas, to color, to sing, to build, to string words together. Don’t we all? I think it helps to remove the labels.
Another part of keeping my confidence up has been learning to honor and trust my own unique way of doing things. I have to make peace over and over again with the fact that I run my business differently than others. I invent it every single day. It is very intuitive for me. I don’t read books about business, I don’t have a business plan, I don’t use spreadsheets and I don’t have a marketing program. To most, this is highly disorganized and BAD. (There is an evil voice in my head that reminds me of this all the time.)
Your dreams are living, growing things. There will be times when you think, “This is never going to work! What the hell am I thinking? Who am I to do this anyway?” And then a few days later you will get a call from someone who wants to hire you to design their CD cover or shoot their wedding or DJ their party and although you are tempted to say, “Me? Are you crazy? You should probably call someone more qualified.” You will instead grin, nod your head graciously and say, “Great. I would be happy to do that.”
Living your dream doesn’t mean you are always confident. It just means that you keep on going…”
Things I do to make money from my work:
1. Sell off of my web site SuperheroDesigns.com Sell my jewelry online on my web site.
2. Urban Fairs Attend retail shows such as craft fairs, trunk shows and small “urban fairs” such as Feria Urbana.
3. Home shows Small home shows at your house or at a friend’s are a great and really fun way to get your work out there. You can invite other artists to join you as well! Because they will be inviting their list of clients just like you will be, everyone wins. This is a great way to expand your client base. There are also people organizing home trunk shows professionally, such as Relish at Home.
4. Corporate trunk shows A newer venue for me is the corporate office trunk show. A friend who works at a big magazine publisher in town proposed a holiday trunk show at their office. I set up my wares in the boardroom during the lunch hour and employees stopped by to shop for holiday gifts. I was delighted at how much money I made in one delicious hour!
5. Sell my work off my body. When I first started my business, I was sure to wear a really fabulous (and new, hot-off-the-press) necklace when I went out on the town. Inevitably, someone would comment on it and I would tell them that I actually made it and that they could purchase it right off my neck. (I also had a small inventory in my bag to show them as well) This worked for me on many occasions!
For more, read this recent article by Andrea called “Superhero Guide to Designing a Creative Business” and this profile on GirlAtPlay.
Jack’s deck
Of all sports, I think I like the aesthetics of skateboarding best. I like the graceful gymnastics of top level boarders. I like the come-as-you-are aesthetics of their (un-)uniforms. I like the exhuberant thrashing and driving basslines of their music. And I like the synergies between skateboarding and graphic design that seems as old as the sport is. Skateboarding magazines, logos, and deck designs have been around for decades. Maybe it’s a SoCal thing, just like car customization, another grass roots aesthetic movement.
My boy, Jack, turned 11 last week. He has given himself a fine birthday present this year by painting the underside of his board with a group portrait of his favorite cartoon characters in various states of debauchery. Jack worked fairly long and hard on this piece, drawing the design, then transferring it onto the board by scribbling pencil on the back of his drawing, then carefully painting the whole thing in acrylics and then polyurethaning the whole thing to preserve it against New York puddles. Our pal, Tom Kane, provided technical advice and encouragement.
When we went to the skateboard store to get trucks and wheels, the staff was incredulous that this little kid had created such a great board. Now Jack is busy scratching and scraping his masterpiece on the rough asphalt of Washington Square Park.
Notes on notes
Doing my homework for color theory class this week, I discovered I had made the sort of thing I had always admired. It’s a great feeling , to look at your own work, and say, “Hey, that’s how you do that!” and see that you just did. The thing I made was not just a watercolor of an orange – but a page with little swatches of color and handwritten notations that, as a composition, captured the process I went through in making the picture.
There’s a fair amount of carelessness in the whole thing which evokes the way I was working but there’s also a progression that shows how I was learning and experimenting.
This is the tip of the iceberg of what I am realizing is my aesthetic.
I have always been very drawn to notebooks and diaries and I see now that this is primarily because of the way they look. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Gerald Durrell and wanted to be a naturalist or a vet. I also loved drawing maps and making books. Perhaps that’s where this taste for logs and sketches and latin names first began.
I remember going to an exhibition of diaries at the Morgan Library a few years ago and there was a huge book that contained a captain’s log, kept in the 18th century. The book was open to a spread that contained a painted map surrounded by spidery calligraphy. I could feel the voyage in those two pages, the creaking of the ship at night as the captain filled in his log and drew the map.
Field manuals kept by botanists and naturalists also have this palimpsest aesthetic; that’s part of why I love the work of Richard Bell, Roz Stendahl and Hannah Hinchman. Not just a report on nature but nature itself invading the report, smudges and fingerprints, taped-down specimens, random thoughts inspired by the moment, teeny gestural sketches surrounding a carefully rendered drawing. My old pal, Walton Ford, does this to a T, making enormous, spectacular watercolors that evoke 19th century explorers and are meticulously rendered. His work has put me to shame since we met at sixteen.
I am in full sympathy with Bill Gates for paying as much as he did for Leonardo’s Codex, not just because it contains the discoveries of one of the greatest minds to ever ride around on human shoulders but because of how beautiful it as, the sepia drawings, the mirror handwriting, the thick parchment pages.
When I was in college, I knew a rather crafty fellow named Brody Neuenschwander who was pursuing a course of independent study, hand grinding his on pigments and illuminating manuscripts. I’m not sure where such a major ultimately lead him, though he did do the calligraphy in a few Peter Greenaway movies, but what a wonderful way to spend your time.
I have always liked Peter Beard’s diaries; for a couple of years he had his work on display in SoHo and we went many times to look through his huge diaries, filled with photocollages and the phone numbers of his famous friends. I also love architects� plans, those perfect sketches, wonderfully strange lettering, elevations and notes and marginalia. You can feel the ideas unfolding. And skritchy scratchy dip pens like the ones Ralph Steadman uses, spraying inkblots all over the words.
(I’ve never been that much of a fan of Nick Bancock’s work. I find his stories muddled but worse of all, it’s all artificial and seems like much of it was computer generated to simulate real letters and postmarks and the like).
I have a big collection of old diaries, ought at flea markets and on eBay and best of them, particularly the travelogues, have this layered, lived-in feelings that is wonderful. The same goes for collections of old letters, stacked and tied with faded ribbon.
Of course, computers threaten this aesthetic. Biologists and naturalists, explorers and cartographers use laptops now and everything is rendered on the web. Fat chance that there will be musty piles of old servers found behind cobwebs or that this blog will be enshrined in a dusty vitrine some day.
Cataloging colors
What does it take to name a color? Manufacturers do it every day for their own convenience. It helps them keep track of what they’re making and how it’s selling and distinguishes one season from another. Apparently, it also makes colors more desirable, forming associations between random hues and exotic places and objects and values and flavors and anything else that might help sell.
Still, there’s something presumptuous about assigning a title to a particular color, like naming a star or a species or a mountain. Who gave Old Navy that right? And what a sloppy job they do too, giving very different colors the same name or vice versa. Crayola and Pantone are a lot better at it.
All this cavalier designation helps to compromise what we see. The names are meaningless because the relationship between the names and the colors are so inconsistent. These blues aren’t the same when they are printed in our catalogs, or on our computers screens, or dyed into yarn, or worn in sunlight, or washed ten times.
What matters in the end is not these ill-fitted names but the fact that we recognize and appreciate the many hues we see all around us, that we don’t become desensitized through commerce’s clumsiness and yen to market everything under the sun, and start to mistrust the incredible abilities of our eyes and brains. When we try to shoehorn colors into chip and swatches, we diminish our environment and blind ourselves, just a little bit more, to the infinite subtlety and wonder of the universe.