Out of Time
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In the emergency room, after Miranda and I had looked at Patti’s body, a policeman handed me P’s watch in a Ziploc bag. Without thinking, I put it on. It fit perfectly. The next day I took off my watch and never wore it again. But Patti’s watch has stayed on my wrist ever since.
The watch stopped at the moment of her death, 11:20. But over the next week or so, it slowly crawled forward. Each day I would notice it was a minute or two ahead. Finally, it stopped completely, at 11:40.
Sometimes people who don’t really know me comment on it, sometimes snearingly, ‘Nice watch’.This delicate silver watch on my meaty, hairy wrist. I explain it’s my wife’s. I don’t say much more than that. I don’t really care what they think.
As far back as I can remember, I have always worn a watch, usually a waterproof one that I never need to take off, through showers and sleep. Now I ask people what time it is. Or I look around for a clock. Or I just shrug. I’m okay with being late, selfish as that can be.
I am still aware of the passage of time, but seem to be measuring it by a different rhythm. It’s less of a tick-tick-tick, time is passing relentless tattoo and more of an organic drift through the day. I look back each evening and think about what I”ve done, assess its value, wonder if this is really how I should spend what time I have left. I havent made any big decisions about that yet, but I do feel more that time is precious, that it must be savored, and that only I should decide how to mete it out. Not even a wristwatch has that right.
Greyfriars Bobby
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Our hounds were Patti’s babies. They traveled all over town with her, Tim riding in the baskey of her scooter, Joe on the platform by her feet. She would hug them close, dress them in raincoats and a little duck suit, bring them to bed, and spoil them with treats. They licked her, hugged her back and guarded her, barking whenever a stranger got too close.
People asked me if they noticed her absence.
I didnt know how to tell. It’s not like they were hanging around the door waiting for her to come home, or howling with grief. They seemed more or less the same. Except for the total breakdown in housebreaking. Horrible, squirty diarrhea. Puddles of pee all over. They were eating the same food as ever, getting lots of walks, but it was a nightmare.
I spent a few hundred dollars at the vet and put them on antibiotics. It went away, sort of but not entirely. A dog walker suggested I try organic food. At the hippy pet store, they prescribed pumpkin and squash, cans of duck and venison. I tried it all and after four weeks or so, things calmed down. When I ran out of cans of expensive handmade food, I switched them back to dry food and they have been fine ever since. Except for when we went away overnight to my mum’s house and they stayed with strangers. Again, diahrrea.
Duh, they were stressed out and this is how it manifested. No support groups or condolence cards. They just want normalcy.
Grief is a messy business. This kind can be taken care of with a mop, hot water and Mr. Clean.
Grave concerns
In the corner of my mum’s property, hidden behind the bracken, there’s a tiny pet cemetery from the 1930s. It only has two headstones, commemorating some dogs whose owners are by now in the ground as well. Patti and I discovered it soon after Mum moved into her house in the forest that surrounds it. We though it was the coolest thing ever.
We always romanticized death and its trappings; our morbid fascinations drew us together from the day we met. We delighted in the fact that Patti’s dad had driven a hearse and regularly played cards with morticians. We had Day of the Dead parties with a coffin full of corn chips our house decorated with Mexican papier mache skeletons.
We would pull the car over at any graveyard we passed, then study the graves for funny names or tombstones carved with portraits of the deceased or symbols of their hobbies — guitars or classic cars. We loved Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum for its ghoulish exhibits and Pere LaChaise cemetery in Paris where we paid our lack of respect to Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf.
Patti gave me a lovely watercolor of a cemetery to hang in my office. We collected books of death photos, horrendous images of bloated corpses in kitchen chairs and skeletal remains in the bathtub.
When Patti was a few months pregnant, we stumbled on a section of a graveyard in upstate New York fdedicated to still borns and infant deaths. She insisted on having her picture taken with wee Jack yet in utyero,
Disturbing, right? It all seems like foreshadowing, which of course it was. We always knew we’d die, but somehow micking and delighting in death seemd like a harmless prank. The closer one gets to death and contemplates one’s mortality, the Buddhists say, the less one will fear it.
It didn’t really work, at least not for me. I was always fairly anxious about my own death, even more so about Patti’s. When we had to put our dog Frank to sleep, we were both hit hard; we couldn’t even bring ourselves to claim his body, despite years of joking that when he’d die, we’d add him to our taxidermy collection.
When Ninny, my mother’s mother died, I took it okay initially; she’d left us long before in haze of Alzheimer’s. But I was one of her pall bearers, carrying her shrouded body on a stretcher to a hole in Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, her bony foot thumping against my hand with each step. We slid her into the hole, in what I thought would be a gesture akin to planting one of her beloved rose bushes, but it was hollow and scary and reeked of eternal void.
When my sister lost her husband, after just a year of marriage, I tried to be the strong one. We sat with Brian’s body face down on the couch for much of the day, then through yet another Irish wake, then an unrecognizable funeral. It was unimaginable that he was gone, but my sister somehow persevered, and even blossomed in the years that followed.
When my beloved mother-in-law, Phyllis, died in her living room after an endless death match with lung cancer, Patti was in attendance, holding her hand through the last agonizing days. That memory scarred her, Death shoving its loathsome face in hers, and steeling her somehow for the inevitable. Patti knew she would die one day and never wanted to go through such hell, she told me, but now she wasn’t scared of anything. Anything.
We stopped mocking Death as we grew older. It was no longer a country on the other side of the world but slowly crept over the horizon. We could see it now, the new home of twenty or more of the people who’d attended our wedding, some old, some gay, some just unlucky. It was getting familiar, inevitable, and much less of a joke.
Today, at least, I don’t fear it, not nearly as I did just a season ago. I have less to lose here in the land of the living. I still love life, don’t get me wrong, but for today, it has less to offer.
Pennies from heaven
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We had so many traditions, some stemming back to when we first met, 24 years ago, on 6.16.1986.
616 was always an important number to us. It was also the date of our wedding on 6.16.1991, in the place we’d met five years before to the day. We usually called each other every day at 6:16 PM. We marked all the times that our restaurant bill would add up to some variation of the number. It still comes up; I ordered something from Amazon last weekend. Shipping & Handling: $6.16. It was a funny thing to look for but we knew it was just a long chain of coincidences. Superstition was just a fun pattern, a way to connect, like playing I Spy.
Wednesday was 6.16 again. As I have every year, I went to 18 W. 18 Street where we met and wed. This year I went with my sister, Miranda, Patti’s maid of honor. Over the years, what was once a restaurant, then another, and another, is now a children’s books shop. Where we stood to be joined till death did us part, there’s now a cupcake counter. The cupcakes are made by the Cupcake Café. When Patti had her subway accident, she was on her way to pick up a cake from the Cupcake Café. She never made it, ending up instead in St Vincent’s Hospital (where she was declared death 14 years later, a week before the hospital was closed down forever). Two weeks later she missed going to 18 W.18 St on 6.16 for the very first time. This year she missed it again. Coincidence upon coincidence, but sadly proof of nothing.
I am reading The Lovely Bones. It makes me sad and I don’t know why I keep turning the pages. Susie Salmon watches her family (and the man who murdered her) from the after life. She follows their actions and their thoughts, hovering over and around them. She feels their pain, wishes she could contact them, but she is just a little girl forever more, beyond their reach. She believes that she’s in Heaven but to me it often seems like Hell.
I wish I could believe in ghosts or angels or spirits. People write to me to tell me that Patti is in Heaven, or watching over us, or waiting for us, or sitting with God, or one with the Universe, or waiting to be resurrected …. It would be so nice to think that she is hanging out with her mother and my grandmother in some wonderful place, and that we will join her soon and be with her forever.
I know you may be able to believe that and, believe me, I have tried to believe it too. Tried and failed. I can’t believe it, I can’t feel it, I can’t even imagine it. There is not even a flicker of doubt in my mind that Patti is no more and exists only in our memories and thoughts and in the cookie jar in my study.
Despite that, Patti does live on.
Just like my grandmother will always exist in the way I make beds, or can’t stand seeing dirty laundry on the floor, or the way I spread cream cheese on toast, or tend my garden. So I don’t need Patti to hover around my head or wear wings and play a harp or leave me five dollar bills neatly folded in fours. I don’t need to light candles for her or say Kaddish. I just need to hold her in my mind. if not my arms, and try to enjoy each day like she did. It’s a simple goal, a little trite, but easy to believe in. Even for an old skeptic like me.
What’s past is prologue
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It’s funny how decisions Patti made, sometimes long ago, impact my daily life. Like the back-ordered blouse that was just delivered by UPS and sits on her desk unopened. Or the brand-new wheelchair she ordered to replace her 12 year-old clunker — a beautiful titanium work of art with flowers laser-etched on the tubing. It was on the truck to be sent to her on the day she died and, amidst the funeral arrangements, I remembered it and we managed to cancel the shipment.
I like the interruption of these messages from her, her mind working in the past and appearing in the present, like the bulbs she planted last Fall that popped up in late March after she was gone, and announced the first days of Spring, her favorite season.
There remains other unfinished business to attend to. Last week, I managed to throw out ten years of old Martha Stewart magazines but I can’t yet bring myself to go through her closets and share her clothes with strangers. One day I shall, maybe soon. I know I can part with old t-shirts and stockings, tubes of moisturizer and bottles of pills, but I must hold on to the most Patti of her posessions – I imagine giving Patti’s Chanel necklace to Jack’s wife one day or bequeathing his daughters my grandmother’s hand-painted powder box, the one that Patti kept by her sink. Things don’t really matter but the memories they contain always will.
The crying game
I made this Hokusai-influenced journal entry a couple of weeks ago, but the same sort of wave has hit me a couple of time since. Its clout is overwhelming and the emotion it dredges up is so non-specific, a crippling blow to the solar plexus, a kick to the scrotum. It’s not like the sort of grief that has a word or a thought or an image at its core; it’s just total and blanketing. It hits and suffocates, then recedes, then hits a second time, then mercifully passes all together.
I am so not used to crying. It’s something I was good at when I was little, like running or cartwheels or jumping off the top bunk. Now, as a grown-ass man, I am horribly out of shape as a cryer. It’s as bad as vomiting or marathon sneezing in the way it grips me and fills my head with uninvited fluids, bulging my eyes and forcing ridiculous noises out of my mouth. What a mess.
In some ways, it’s very welcome. Because I worry about how resilient I am, how able I am to function, there is something welcoming about collapsing, knowing that I am not utterly compartmentalized and blinded by denial. These thundering paroxysms of emotion provide perspective, reminding me that I can travel forward but may have occasionally to stop and pay the piper. I can handle it.
It can be a bit scary for Jack, I think, and I try to shield it from him when I can. But he seeks me out, puts a consoling arm around my shoulder, bringes me a glass of water. Then I pull myself back together and we go out for pancakes.
Staying in touch
Sometimes when I’d wake up in the middle of the night, Patti beside me, I’d wonder if she was breathing. I’d put my ear close, hear nothing, then nudge her to see if she was still alive. She’d stir and I’d exhale. Sometimes she’d wake all the way up and we’d talk. I never felt that bad about rousing her; she had the gift of falling right back to sleep. Sometimes I’d put my arm around her, feel her by me, and wonder what it would have been like if she hadn’t stirred, if she’d gone in her sleep. I’d try on that hollow feeling. But I really had no idea.
A lot of people miss Patti. They send me emails to tell me. They send her emails too. I miss her, of course I do. But I also miss my life, the way it was, so steady — built layer upon layer like a giant oak, habit wrapped around habit, assumption encircling assumption. For nearly a quarter of a century, we built this life and, when Patti’s ended, so did mine. My life was like the second twin tower. It collapsed right after the first one fell.
Now I have a different life. It’s a pretty good one, despite what I would have thought as I lay with my arm around my sleeping love. It has moments of sadness, deep holes in the road, but it has a lot of beauty too. I love my son, my mum, my sister, my hounds. I have so many good friends and the generous support of people I’ve never met. To a large extent, they help me fill in those moments of darkness, help me decide what garbage bags to buy or what to have for dinner. They will talk to me on the phone for hours when I need them, will indulge my nonsense, will cook me rice and beans. But they can’t fill in all the gaps.
Jack and I are resilient. We get on with it. But no one else puts notes in our pockets or brings us ice cream or keeps our every doodle in a file like PL did.
I’d love to chat on the phone with you as I walk to work, Pat, just once. I’d like you to reach out in the dark and stroke what’s left of my hair. I’d even like you to just tell me it’s okay to cry. But failing that, I will remember as well as I can what it was like to put my arm around you, even as I walk down the road alone, and I will treasure every day I have, rather than lying worried in the night.
My new life will be bright. Because you light it.
Old spuds and new duds.
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This is really devolving. God only knows why I am being so revealing these days, airing my ill-fitting laundry to the world on this blog. I should really just tell you about my dip pens and the quality of the binding on this book. Instead I’m writing about my new fantasies of myself as suave and debonair on the one hand and hoarding old potatoes on the other. Sad, really.
Alright, I will reveal that I am inappropriately proud of those paintings of taters. And of how many shades of purple I was able to mix with just two bottles of watercolor.
Now if I can only find a sharp tuxedo. Or a leather jumpsuit. Something that won’t show ink stains…
Missing Hoofy
I was blessed with an enormous outpouring of sympathy and support in the first few weeks after Patti’s death. Equally mercifully, that tide pulled back in the ensuing months and now most people have receded from my sphere. It was all too heavy, seeing a look of deep concern on the faces of every person who I ran into on the street, and I felt like a sponge absorbing everyone’s grief over and again. That sounds sort of shitty and selfish but it’s been tough enough sorting out my own feelings.
The grieving process is a hard one to unravel or predict. Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief aren’t terribly helpful, too orderly and well-defined; there’s just no rhyme or reason to how I feel most of the time. Denial is an easy refuge, just getting on with life until the dam breaks and I am forced to deal with my emotions. I also worry at times that I am too okay, that I am too level-headed, but then my deeper feelings find a way to worm to the surface and reassert the enormity of what’s happened.Yuk.
An aside: One of Patti’s many nicknames was ‘Hoofy’ for her occasionally clumsy ways. This is a drawing of a necklace I gave her years ago, a collection of silver feet and hoofs. She loved it and wore it a lot. It makes me wonder: will I ever know anyone else whose tastes, weird and particular, are so in tune with mine? Who else could appreciate and encourage my taxidermy collecting, my medical textbooks, my love of sardines on toast? How do you replace a one-of-a-kind treasure?
Waisting Away
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One of the inevitabilities of being married and middle-aged is the gradual spread of one’s waistband. A souvenir of all those evenings when Patti would bring me a bowl of ice cream on the couch or we’d eat off each others’ plates like Jack and Mrs. Spratt.
Now our pantry is bare-ish. Jack and I shop on Sunday afternoon, buying just enough to provide cold cuts and fruit for his lunches, cereal for my breakfast, a few other meager things. I shop most days on the way home from work, buying whatever I will cook that night, always a salad, maybe a steak or chicken breast for him, some veggie or fish thing for me. My favorite word these days, Jack complains, is ‘Spartan‘.
Despite these complaints of deprivation, we are both healthy and rarely hungry. I am amazed at how much less I want to eat. It began in those first horrible weeks in late March, when I simply lost my appetite altogether. But once that passed, I found food wasn’t especially comforting, and instead I preferred the gym I had just joined. For the first time in ages, I love pedaling madly on a bike or throwing barbells around. I also find I have the time. When Patti was alive, I so often felt that time spent on myself was time taken away from her (a perspective she vigorously opposed, but to no avail). Now I have the time and control of my agenda to indulge myself in new ways. Fortunately, so far, most of them are healthy.
My newly instituted regime is also a reflection of a new assessment of my age, of how many years I have left. I’d always assumed that Patti and I would march into the grave holding hands and I had no especial interest in outliving her. Now, however, because I will continue on this march with no one to lean on, I feel I should be as vigorous as I can be. Both my parents are healthy and robust in their 70s and my grandfather just died at 98. Chances are I will be around to choose apples, tap melons, lift dumbbells and fill sketchbooks for a little bit longer.
In the meantime, I need new trousers and a shorter belt.
The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step
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Jack and I have always shared certain things: pens, a love of R. Crumb, a disdain for Dane Cook. Now we have a new and more complex relationship, one that can be annoying and claustrophobic some times, rich and vital at others. We are roommates, creative collaborators, dinner companions, advisors, and dad and son. And there’s no Mom to act as a buffer, filter, and cooler head.
It can be tough living with a teenager who doesn’t realize he is shedding clothes all over the house or drinking the last of the juice. I’m sure it’s just as tough for Jack living with a cantankerous, soppy weirdo. Despite our differences, we are managing okay, crafting a new sort of life in our man cave, surrounded by chip packages and dachshunds.
Most recently, we’ve taken to sharing a pair of blue shoes that we both coveted. It’s been a true compromise as the shoes are a little small for Jack, a little large for me. The experience has proven useful, teaching us what it’s like to walk in each others’ shoes.
Cleaning up our act
My relationship with my journal is like that with a family member or a friend I’ve known since childhood. Sometimes we are distant, formal, perfunctory, obliged. But when I really need my journal, it is there with open pages, ready to hold me as tightly as I hold it. These days, I need it more than ever, and I am more intense, more candid than usual, as I scrawl across its pages.
I would like to share some of these pages with you but they are heavy going and so I will doll them out a spread or two at a time over a number of days. If you like what you see, come back soon and I’ll have posted more.
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Here’s where I began. By cleaning up my apartment, on my hands — dismissing the cleaning ladies who had scrubbed my toilets ever since I could afford them — reclaiming what is mine, filth and all. It is part of a process I’ve embraced, of forming a new relationship with the everyday, taking full responsibilty for every aspect of my life.
Being married means sharing the good, the bad, the important, the mundane. Patti and I leaned on each other in a thousand ways: she would shop, I would cook. I would bring home checks, she would pay bills. She kept up with our friends, I worked late. It was a deep symbiosis developed over 23 and 7/8 years — which unravelled in a heartbeat.
So now I am forced to reappraise all of the decisions we made as a team. Many of them can wait: is that the right shelf to store the wine glasses on? Do we need all of these dish towels? Should we live in New York? Others assert themselves and demand resolution. One by one, I pick them off; making lists, adding bleach, filling my weekends with chores.
Every choice is made in consultation with Patti’s ghost, with serious consideration of what she intended, what she thought I wanted, of how to stay true to her spirit, yet accomodate our changed reality. Sometimes it’s terribly sad. Often, it’s a form of companionship that keeps her in my heart, in my pantry, in my thoughts as I doze off.
It’s daunting, it’s doable, it’s underway.
Back from Beantown
Jack and I took a brief break from New York with 75 hours or so in Boston. Neither of us had ever spent time there before —though with the torrential Nor’Easter dumping all over New England, I’m not sure we saw it at its best. We trained up there, stayed in Cambridge and managed to see Harvard (infinitely inferior to my alma mater, of course), its art and natural history museums, then visited the Institue of Contemporary Art and the Science Museum. We saw some movies, had some nice meals, played cards,talked, and drew in our journals. I broke out my watercolors for the first time in ages, and Jack bore down on his dip pen.
It was a refreshing break after a very sad week, giving us some distance and perspective, as well as a chance to start our lives as a smaller family. Drawing was a relief to both of us, a feeling that we were making something out of the nothingness, and seeing a new place with fresh eyes. Our journal pages will be a landmark for us, the first fresh pages we are turning over, with many blank ones ahead to fill.
One thing I hadn’t anticipated: Patti was always the first person to read my journal pages after I finished them. Somewhere in Boston, it occurred to me that I write for her to read and that she wouldn’t read them, ever again. But then I realized I will always write for her, she will always be my favorite reader.
Sketchbook #3
Here’s another video tour of one of my early sketchbooks. Old #3 was one of the first I handbound, nice heavy bond pages in a marbleized paper shell, courtesy of my recent classes at the Center for Book Arts. I was forcing myself to work in narrow confines back then — just line and a couple of warm grey brush markers to add tone. It’s interesting to me to see how my technique developed through the course of this partiucalar book and I was clearly itching for more media by book’s end.
(Those of you troubled by the quality of my last video will be glad to know that after much trial and error, I have developed a good video setup that is easier to watch and listen to. I hope it makes a difference.)
Incidentally, I had a lovely time in Portland this week, chatting with attendees of the Art and Soul creativity conference and then giving a 90 minute talk on how and why I developed my drawing habit. I was amazed and delighted at how many people showed up armed with dogeared copies of my books and I was flattered that so many insisted I pose with them and have my picture taken. They threatened to invite me to next year’s conference in Virginia and I parried by threatening to come.
Death Valley Sketchbook
A decade ago, I did a week-long drawing trip through Nevada and parts of California with my pal, D.Price. The sketchbook I kept (only my 7th to that point) was the first step in my publishing career. When I shared it with an editor at City & Co., who liked it so much she asked me to assemble a book of my journals. Ultimately, though I ended up placing that book with Princeton Architectural Press (Everyday Matters), it was so nice to have someone interested in my work and this concentrated drawing trip was the kick-off point.
I was flipping through the original journal today and thought I’d make a little video tour. It’s also notable as several other firsts — one of my first hand-bound books, one of the first times I made a dedicated journal for one trip, and one of the first times I experimented with watercolors.
The film I made ended up being eleven minutes long, so I cut it into two episodes. You can see them both there.
Oh, and if you like this sort of thing, let me know and I’ll do more if it. (Though I am not trying to make anything technically sophisticated with these little films, I would love to know if there’s any particular information you’d like to know about my sketchbooks). I appreciate your comments and insights.
Drawing on memories
Patti had a birthday last month, the 22nd we’ve celebrated together. When you’ve been together as long as we have, you have to think a little hard at birthdays and anniversaries and Christmas time to keep things fresh, to make sure that you can still express how much you love each other without falling back on the tried and trite.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.Anyway, this year, I decided that one of the ways I would commemorate our history together was to take our ancient home movies and transfer them onto DVDs so we could watch them over and over. We have scads of old video tapes but the cameras that recorded and played them are long defunct. In fact, we have never looked at any of them since we initially shot them – films of our first trips together, of our wedding, of Jack’s early days and so on, all moldering in shoe boxes. Now we have a dozen gleaming DVDs, a box set of our lives up to about 1997 or so. We have all watched them together over and again, particularly the ones when Jack first learned to use the potty and his first big argument with us on a trip to Nova Scotia.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.One of the more profound DVDs is the one I made when Patti had her accident and I was alone each night at home with the baby. For two months, I made videos of our daily life to take up to the hospital to show Patti that we were okay, that life was going on, that she had something to come back to. These are the hardest tapes to watch because I feel so sorry for the me that was, giving Jack a bath, rocking him to sleep, listening to music (Teddy Bear’s Picnic, The Ugly Bug’s Ball, Let’s Go Fly a KIte…) that was once so sweet and important to us but forevermore will signify the hollowness of those days.
Funnily, the more I got into drawing, the less video tape I shot. As the films peter out, my journals expand, so our whole life is recorded but just in very different media — and with very different effect. I read recently that when you look at old photos, they stir up old memories, facilitating recall. But when you look at old home movies, those images tend to actually replace your memories of the periods being recorded. When you think back on those times, your brain tends to pull up scenes from the films rather than organic (but not necessarily as reliable) memories. My mum had an 8 mm. movie camera when I was a baby and the images from those old reels are the only scenes I can remember from when I was two or three or four. Maybe nobody has much memory from that time, and mine are quite vivid, but I know they are all just scenes from one movie or another.
When I watch these old movies, I sort of vaguely remember the times when they were taken. When I look at these old videos, my experience is often of surprise. I think about how young well look, or weird my hair was, or how I seem to speak out of the side of my mouth. The experience is from outside — I am watching myself but not as myself. In fact I would venture that most of my experience is not radically different from what a total stranger or an acquaintance might think of the same footage.
The drawings in my journals, however, summon up a completely personal and intimate feeling. It’s more like a time machine than watching TV. I am in the moment, I am me now and also the me I was then.The act of drawing, painting and writing rather than just pushing a button on a machine, forms completely different sorts of memories, When I look back at a page, even one that’ s more than a decade old, I remember so much about what I was doing that day, my mood, the weather, even the smells in the air. The experience itself is deeply embedded in my head and just glancing at the drawing takes me back there.
I am so glad to have both sorts of records of my past (not to mention dozens of photo albums and zillions of digital snapshots). I can travel back to any period of my life now and see my life as a continuum. There are so many lessons to be learned by looking back and seeing where one has come from, who one has known, how one made choices, how one felt.
Creating these records, particularly the ones that consists of just some feeble drawings and a few scratchy notes, is probably one of the most important things I’ve done. That sounds odd perhaps, that recording and observing one’s life could be of the most important things one can do with it, but that is the true purpose of art — at least to me. The value of taking a step back, of putting a frame around a moment so that it can stand for a thousand other moments unrecorded, to learn from one’s mistakes and to cherish one’s blessings, to hold up one’s experience so that others can share it and learn from it, these things seem like the very purpose of art — and of life as well.
The Giant Sketchbook
Art-alternatives.com sent me the biggest sketchbook I have ever seen. It is almost 700 pp. long, weighs 8 lbs, and is quite spectacular. We made a little film to show you what an effect it had on my family.
By the end of the week, the book will be available online from Artist & Display or by calling 1 800-722-7450. It will also be sold through art stores — for the nearest one, look at the dealer locater on the site.
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Not giant enough? Check out this one!
Unpacking the Impressionists
Last night I woke up way too early, at 5 a.m. and ended up watching TV. PBS was broadcasting a program that dramatized the lives of the impressionists. It was like the O.C. except about 19th century French painters. Cezanne was a miserable wretch who never sold any paintings and had impregnated his peasant model and had a son whom he kept secret from his father who was forever badgering him about getting a real job.
Cezanne: But, Papa, I am redefining the relationship between color and form! Papa: Zut! Does it pay well?
Monet was embroiled in an affair with a married woman who refused to divorce her husband for Catholic reasons. Manet was dying of something throughout the episode and finally croaked. The most outstanding aspect of the show was the various artists’ looks and cool facial hair. The young Monet had a long, wild goatee and then grew and enormous bushy white beard. Renoir had John Lennon- style round dark glassses; Cezanne had a Gen-X scruffy beard and wore wild hats and berets.
Oh, and there were a few paintings tossed in for good measure.
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P.S. Apparently it’s for sale on DVD here.
Comic ‘Cavation
My approach to drawing these is a little unorthdox. I whack the page into shapes I find interesting and then just draw one thing sitting in frontof me after another. Sometimes I write down what people are saying, sometimes I make it up. Sometimes I only come up with an idea days after I’ve done the drawings, generally because the blank speech balloons are annoying the hell out of me. 
I was also a little inspired by the master, Hergé, whose Tintin comics have been tantalizing me since I was a wee one. Oh, and I drew these in a bigger watercolor moleskine. Sume ink, blah, blah, blah.
Glowing
My gray adventure continues. Do you know Ben Katchor‘s work?
I love the way the newly scrubbed and illuminated Washington Square Arch glows in the early evening light as the City falls dark.
Moby invited us over to his apartment and he and few members of his band serenaded us. It was so cool to be a few feet from such talent as it performed.
I love Banksy‘s humor and creativity. Check him out if you haven’t; I also recommend his new book. As he says,” Some people like me, some people hate me, some people don’t really care.”
Gosh darned
In this country, and many others, it is very unpopular to not believe in god. Some people are coming out and discussing this but it is the taboo topic of our time.
Even here in the Gemorrah called New York City, you can talk about any sort of sexual thing, about your body’s processes, about any intimate matter, but you can’t ever question theocracy. So I won’t.
Yes, he recovered from mouse poison and the attack of the Robotic Rat.
Fade to grey
One of the major issues with the books I like to make is that publishers hate to pay for 4-color printing. It creates a lot more complexity in the production process and drives up the cost of making the book. They then have to decide whether to absorb the cost and hope they sell enough copies to make a profit. Alternatively, they can make the cover price high enough to cover the cost but drive off a lot of readers who can’t afford $39.95 for a book. They can also force the author to cover a bigger than normal share of the cost by making his advance miniscule. It’s all economic, and as usual, it’s a drag for an artist.
One of the advantages of being a cretaive person, however, is that every obstacle is an opportunity. To that end, I have been thinking of other ways to make journals that can be reproduced without losing expression. The past few years of sharing my work on the web has allowed me to become quite adept at watercoloring and to combine pen-and-ink crosshatching with brushwork. In my portrait book, I have been using sumi ink quite regularly and for the next month or so, I ‘ll be posting images from my regular moleskine journal that I’m painting in shades of grey. I want to try to capture the energy and excitement of my watercolor box in pure tone and will be working with contrast and various sorts of brushes to capture what I am doing, seeing and feeling.
I am working in a variety of ways. I draw where and whenever the moment seizes me. Then if I have a sumi loaded waterbrush with me, I dip it into a little water cup to create various densities of tone. I mix on the palm of my hand or right on the page. I may also finish the page back at home, where I can use my big fat sable brush and official Japanese stone sumi mixing bowl.
VD+1
Yesterday was several memorable things: freezing cold, Valentine’s Day and my sister, Miranda’s 40th birthday. Today promises to be significant too as Miranda is in the hospital in Brooklyn, well-dilated and about to pop out her first child. We don’t know its gender but are very excitedly hoping we’ll meet him/her/it later today. It’ll be nice to have a new family member.
Patti is housebound these days. Even her scooter can’t make it over the drifts of snow that are piled up at every corner. Our dogs have a love/hate relationship with the snow. They love to run around in the park, cavorting and sniffing. But the salt that the local janitors spread with such abandon stings their paws and hobbles them. I carry their little sweater-clad, sausage bodies to the park and dump them onto the lawn so they can frisk about. They come home full of energy, shedding their sweaters with a shake, and madly dashing around the house.