Slow=Know
[Seth Apter of The Altered Page is conducting a Buried Treasure hunt and encouraged bloggers to resurrect one of their favorite long ago posts. I like this one. I may put up a couple more golden oldies to follow. Then back to the normal sturm and drang of the present.]
Dear H______:
Think less. Draw more.
When you draw a thing, see it just as that. Not a head, not perspective, not crosshatching, just pure observation as if you’ve never seen it before. The more preconceptions you bring to the drawing, the shittier it will be.
Clear your mind, and start drawing what you see. Start anywhere. I tend to start in the upper left hand corner because I am right handed. I move across observing, recording, until I get to the lower left hand corner. Then I am done.
If my subject is sufficiently complex, this will take me a half hour or more. I go as slowly as I can stand to go. But I don’t know how long it is usually; my left-brain has no sense of time.
As I draw, I avoid evaluation. I avoid thinking of the purpose of the drawing. I avoid commenting on what I am drawing, even in the quality of the line. I am empty and the drawing fills me up. Drawing is meditation, not production. Drawing is entirely in the present with no attempt to create context.
Do not think about style. Add shadows as you see them. But better to avoid shadows all together and stay engaged with the contours of things. When you have done that for months, even years, then add shadows and crosshatching (My pal, d.price has been drawing for a dozen years. Only on his trip to New York last week did he decide to start concentrating on the effects of light. He still almost never uses color). For now, none of that is important. What matters is to see deeply and let your hand respond.
And if you start at huge length before you draw, you risk becoming bored, or forming mental notes, theories, ideas about what you are seeing. The reason to let your hand and pen take over is to shut the hell up, silence the internal voice, the endless chattering of the mind, the distractions, the pointless pontificating that insists on meaning for the meaningless. The moment does not need meaning or context. It just is.
Drawing is about reaching for pure being. Not making pretty pictures to put in frames and on websites. The world doesn’t need more pictures. It needs peace and connection. It needs people who can accept reality and don’t feel compelled to control their environments. If you can look at a boot, at a rotting apple, at car’s worn tire, at an old man’s foot, and see it for what it is, without value or judgement, can see the beauty and particularity of the thing, you will find peace. You will avoid being covetous. You will be happy with what you have. You will accept others more readily, will see the sunshine on a cloudy day.
Life is a wonderful business, though fools blow up London tube stations and sell each other crap and waste time with gossip about movie stars. If you can draw, you will always have a place to go that is beautiful and honest and true. As you sit in an airport you will find pleasure in the folds of a crumpled lunch bag. As you bide your time in a doctor’s waiting room, you will find peace in the arrangement of the shadows on the wall. Even without putting ink on paper, you will be able to slip in to Drawing Mind.
The point is not what your lines look like or how accurate your crosshatching might be.
The point is not the drawings on the page or the pages in the book.
The point is not the opinions of others who love/hate/ignore those lines you made on the page.
The point is not the money you make selling your work to galleries or publishers.
The point of practicing your craft is not to rise in the rankings of those who draw. It’s not to have your style dominate (sorry, Dan!).
The point is to more easily gain access to the moment, to the deeper more peaceful recesses of your Self.
The point is to live as well and as fully as you can today, right now, whether your pen is in your hand or not.
The point is to See and to Be.
Your pal,
Danny
[Originally published on: Jul 7, 2005 @ 8:58]
Immortality
click image to enlarge
It is so nice that more of my friends have discovered drawing in the past three months, many of them people I would never have imagined would have the time and interest to pick up a pen. It may be coincidental or it may be a newly discovered awareness that life is short and one ought to try all the things one dreamt of while one has the chance.
I also like to think that Patti’s example inspired my friends to explore their creativity. She was an endlessly creative person, always making something out of something else. She made creativity seem fun and a natural part of life, not scary or intimidating or prey to judgment. I think our friends are reminded of that when they think of her as intensely as we have this past season. They remembered how she was always a flurry of creative energy and were somehow moved to keep that spirit alive.
She would be happy that this is her legacy — inspiring people to come into their own creatively and to take risks in order to discover what they can do. It’s a wonderful gift to pass on and it is infectious, spreading to more and more people as they see what their friends can do.
We work hard to give our lives some meaning, to do well by others, to have values and standards that can endure. We teach our children things that can survive beyond our lifetimes, we set examples that make a mark. That’s true immortality.
I come from a fairly small family, generations with just a child or three in each family, many of them grown estranged. As we’ve lost touch, we’ve lost meaning too and the lessons and examples of our lives have dissipated in the fog. I know my great-grandmother became senile, stripped off her nightgown and danced on the dining table. I don’t know much more about her than that. But her daughter, my grandmother Ninny, inculcated my sister and me with a certain set of higher standards — that one sets the table with cloth napkins, that one makes one’s bed each morning, that one should strive to have a nice garden and to listen to Mozart and Bach. It’s funny that she lived for some eight decades and that her legacy is this small list of small things. I think that would surprise and maybe disappoint her. My grandfather taught me some things by his example but more things to avoid. He was fastidious and controlling and grew older without growing wiser. I think in the end one can learn as much from bad examples than good; the things to avoid have lots of resonance.
I have no idea what impression I shall make on the the world. Or how long it will last. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, as I’ll be dust and gone. Encouraging others to make things seems like a nice testament to one’s life and I am proud to have been married to a woman who inspired it. Her love of beauty and self-expression will continue to ring out like ripples in the ocean for quite some time. And perhaps by reading these words about her, you too will be moved to make a drawing or a cake or a dress and share it with others who will be inspired to do something nice and creative of their own. Please think of Patti when you do.
Hangin with nekkid folks
Jack and I took up life drawing a couple of months ago. Virtually every Tuesday we go to a basement in Soho and spend two or three hours drawing a model or two. When the weather is freezing and we are bored with drawing things in our apartment or in photo books, it’s nice to have something new and challenging to sketch. But there are all sorts of drawbacks too.
The process has forced me to break my habit of drawing only in ink in small books. I now have a huge sketch pad and boxes of graphite sticks and conte crayons and a new appreciation for erasable media.The whole process is very different form my usual process; sort of student-y and contrived and academic, with lots of negative associations about right and wrong ways to do things. Maybe it’s putting me back into a beginner’s mind, but the worse sort of self-conscious feelings of ineptitude rather than a fresh tabula rasa.
Drawing from life forces one to think about drawing quite differently. The human body is so familiar and so strange; one can detect any flaw in the proportions of a drawing immediately and yet it is hard to know intuitively how to draw the curve of a calf or the length of a forearm. There is no substitute for simple, intense observation.
The drawings end up having little value to me. They are not observations from life really and the subjects themselves have no meaning to me. I find much more emotion in my drawings of apples or chair legs in my home than in these studies.
Watch this video tour of some of my life drawings and you’ll sense the critical way in which I look at them. I dont know if we’ll keep doing this when the weather gets warmer, it’s really up to Jack who seems to enjoy the experience ( not surprising — he’s a fifteen year-old boy who gets to sit with his dad and stare at naked bodies all evening) but often ends up getting bored after a couple of hours and ends up drawing just details of bodies or staring into space. He is extremely good at drawing under these circumstance ; even though he’s the youngest person in the room by a mile, his drawings are usually among the best.
I’d also like to recommend Walt Taylor’s self-published book “Naked People and the people who draw them“which has been very inspirational and shown me how far I have yet to go. I urge you to check out the book, buy it, and support an extraordinary and unheralded artist.
My landscape book
Here’s a little guided video tour through one of the sketchbooks I’ve been working on. All landscapes, all ink, all extra-awesome.
And if they flew by too quick, here are some snaps.
Off the (Red) Hook
"Greco Concrete" by Danny. India and sumi ink, watercolor.
Butch, Tom, Jack and I had a great drawing trip this weekend. Here’s a little film from the excursion:
And if you liked that film, you’ll love this one Tom made the week before. Dig the dancing!
Self Distortraits
As I flip through my last few journals, I see that I am more and more drawn to drawing faces. Maybe that’s just a function of winter — when the weather is warm I can go out and plunk down on the sidewalk somewhere and draw landscapes, buildings, dogs being curbed. When the weather is inhospitable, I sit at my dining table and after I’ve drawn every object in the room, I flip through magazines and start drawing faces.
I tend to draw a lot of self-portraits — not become I am so fabulously handsome but because my face is always handy, right there, wrapped around my eyes. I’ve done hundreds, none of them even remotely alike. This winter, fiddling with my computer, I started taking distorted pictures of myself with my laptop’s built-in camera, then distorting them further with dip pens and brushes and sumi ink.
They’re part of my effort to do more than just draw exactly what I see but to add some feeling to the exercise. Of course, it’s impossible for me not to inject some subjectivity into any drawing. That’s enhanced when I keep it loose and free, the flaws enhancing my point of view. But I find that when I start with something that’s unfamiliar, like the bulges and twists the computer puts into my face, I tend to pay more careful attention, take nothing for granted, create something that looks like a photo in the degree of detail; and yet feel free to push the lines further and add more sweeping grotesqueries.
I’m done with series for now as the sun has come out and my park beckons
Portrait of the artist as a spotty, callow youth
I was fifteen. Had just rid myself of the meager mustache and the cracking voice, acquired a pussful of pimples. I was a curious combination of know-it-all and trembling violet; sure I was smarter and more tuned in than any adult but also terrified of most of my classmates, especially the girls. This was before Facebook and MySpace, and our only TV was a small black and white unit in my parents’ bedroom. So I had plenty of time on my hands, plenty of opportunity to write stories, build models, read “grownup” novels, and make art.
Recently I came across a sleeve of slides in a box in a drawer. I haven’t seen the images or the originals in decades but they are still so familiar. I worked pretty long and hard on these paintings, balancing stretched canvases on my bedside chair or struggling with the compressor and airbrush that always clogged and spat up on my nascent work.
I think I was very self-conscious about the coolness of these images and how daring they might seem to my peers. I liked to think of myself as an artist, but there were much better artists than me, like my pal, Eric Drooker, or the super cool Ed Weiss. Still, I managed to get drawings in the school paper (this became easier when I became the editor) and the school yearbook. The big painting of the foot hung in our school library for a while. It looked like it was crashing through the ceiling onto the heads of unsuspecting readers.
(Click on one of the thumbnails to open a gallery of images)
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- “Green foot” Acrylic, 48″x48″
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- “Woodland”, airbrushed ink, 11″x17
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- “Cigarette” Acrylic, 40″x30″
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- “Nude” charcoal; 14″ x 20″
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- “Lady” acrylic on wood, 6″x30″
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- “Nude” acrylic, 36″x 24″
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- “Door” acrylic, 18″x12″
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- “Bus stop” ink and pencil, 12″x9″
Childhood memories
(click images to magnify)When I was a boy, I travelled a great deal. My family wasn’t in the Armed or Diplomatic services. I guess they were just adventurers, peripatetic wanderers, refugees, gypsies.
These are pages of random memories, without any real conclusions, just snapshots of stuff. I drew them from old family albums with a dip pen and india ink, painted them with watercolors. If you can bothered, click to enlarge the pages and read the captions.
My maternal grandparents (Gran and Ninny) were German refugees and were married in Rome. Mussolini threw them out in the mid 1930s.
Then they escaped to the part of India that became Pakistan (after World War II and Partition). My grandparents were doctors and they remained in Lahore for thirty-five years. My great-grandparents had also fled Germany and joined them in India, but later moved to Palestine. My mother (Pipsi from Püppchen or ‘little doll’ in German) and my uncle grew up in Pakistan, then went to boarding school and university in England.
I was born in London and first went to Pakistan when I was two. Of all the places I’d lived till I came to America, I always thought of Pakistan as home.
The long voyage to Lahore, via plane or ship, was always an event.
Snake charmers and bear trainers came to our house to perform for me.
Lahore was always bustling.
We moved to Pittsburgh when I was five, then Canberra, Australia when I was six.
At nine, I moved back to Pakistan alone and lived with my granparents for a year and a half.
Then we moved to a kibbutz in Israel.
I went to a public school and became fluent in Hebrew. I also got my first job, at a slaughterhouse. When I was thirteen, a week before the Yom Kipur War, we moved to Broooklyn.
Another Sunday Drawing with Jack
(Click images to enlarge)
Back for another go at life drawing. I un-retired my dip pen and was glad of it; it’s so much more organic and expressive than the Rapidograph. I also decided to tackled the entire form and try to concentrate on values as much as accuracy.
Jack blew me away, as usual. He and his pastels muscled their way to a beautiful, surreal, Incredible Hulk sort of thing. Because he wanted to do something with the model’s blank stare, he put her in an imaginary train and drew in the view. I think he still has plans to fill in the top part of the page.
On Saturday night, Jack rushed in with this lovely portrait of the hopefully-not-next-Vice-President-of-the-United-States, Sarah Palin. I see his future in Stalinist propaganda.
A Little Portrait
Sean: ink and color pencil 7″x10″
Jack and I haven’t been to life drawing together for ages so we dropped by for a few hours of portrait drawing at the Spring Street studio. We had two models, a woman we’d drawn earlier in the year, and Sean, a little person and an interesting challenge. We both were fairly frustrated by our first few efforts but finally settled into a groove.
Jack’s pastel work is pretty great and he is aching to get into some oil painting. I can’t wait to see what he does with that medium. His drawing has leaped forward in the past few months and he is so self assured and able to concentrate like a laser.
I was a little bored with my piece — I find it hard to focus on the same drawing for over an hour and our class lasted three and a half — so I started messing around with colored pencils. It was okay. We will probably go back for another go in the next few weeks.
Oregon and Back
Jack and I just spent a week driving 1,000 miles or so (a crazy distance for New Yorkers) across Oregon and back to visit our pal, d.price. It was the first time Jack has seen the huge scale of things in the West and the first time we’ve done and dad-and-boy epic drawing trip.
My journaling skills were a little rusty. I haven’t been doing bona-fied illustrated journaling in awhile; over the past few months, I’ve been drawing various things in various books in various ways. So I decided to take a long two drawing books, one larger for ink and such, the other a smaller one made by Roz Stendahl. It’s 3 and 3/16 inches by 3 and 3/4 with Fabriano Artistico 90 lb. cold press paper, palm-sized and very handy.
We began the trip a little spasmodically as you can read above. We had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. and then double back to get Jack’s passport (which turned out to be completely unnecessary — kids under 18 don’t need ID to fly).
In Portland, we rented an SUV (a very odd vehicle for me, the non-car owner) and headed east. Jack is a very able navigator and we used the Google maps function on my Blackberry. We took our time ( on my last trip to Oregon, I got my first and very expensive speeding ticket; this time, I relied on my cruise control to keep us legal) and stopped at interesting stuff along the way. Looking for lunch, we stumbled into the Bonneville Dam and its sturgeon hatchery. We learned about fish ladders and saw the most enormous fishies ever — critters a dozen feet long placidly floated past the hatchery window like prehistoric aquatic cattle. As its near the end of their trail, replicas of Lewis and Clark’s journals were also on display.
We found lunch at the politically incorrect CharBurger and then continued east.
The weather had been overcast and intermittently rainy since we’d left Portland but midday things started to heat up.We were pretty knackered from the long day and decided to make camp midway, pulling into Pendleton to find a motel. We decided to look for one where we could swim and ended up at the Travelers’ Inn which boasted a pool with the dimensions and sanitary status of a New York urinal. After paying for the night, we discovered our room was similarly fragrant; clearly the former resident had developed some sort of kidney disorder and was forced to use the thick shag rug as a bedpan.
Eschewing a dip and a nap but still anxious to escape the rain, Jack and I headed to the town cinema. A triplex, it proved to be sparsely attended. In fact, we were the only audience for the 4:40 show of ‘Tropic Thunder’, the sole patrons of all three screens. We returned to the Inn and found our next door neighbors were burning hot dogs on a propane grill outside our door.
Early the next morning, we had a hearty breakfast ( we miss Patti!) and finished the last leg of the journey. We pulled into Joseph and met up with D.Price. Dan gave Jack a tour of his meadow, pointing out the various tiny buildings he has built by hand.
There’s the studio where he writes and prints his magazines.
The sweat lodge where we would spend evenings having mystical conversations then plunging into the river.
The Kiva, Dan’s hobbit house. Inside it’s about seven feet wide in diameter, wooden walls, carpeted, low ceiling with a sky light, snug as a bug.
Here’s my impression of what it looks like inside.
Dan has a little shower room, with a gravity shower. River water is loaded into the cistern by the bucketload and then heated electrically.
Later, we were joined by Ryan White from Portland. He is a soil engineer who also likes to draw and camp. Jack and I spent the first night in tents and then we and Dan sopped places each night so we all had different sleeping experiences.
We drive around Joseph, stopping to draw. Here are pack horses that climb up the mountain trails that surround the town.
The lake is lovely and huge, filled with boats but few swimmers. Last week it was over 100 degrees but the rain has arrived and cooled everything dramatically.
Dan’s a master of improvisation and craft. He turns old bikes into fence rails, and recycles driftwood, paving stones, and old wooden signs.
Jack checks out the gallery walls of the outhouse.
Dan had some court business with his ex-wife and then we went back to drawing.
Jack’s drawing has been transformed in the past six months, since he fell in love with drawing from life. His summer arts camp helped him develop the most amazing ability to concentrate. While Dan would dash off a drawing in minutes, Jack could sit in full meditation for an hour, until he was forced to abandon his drawing midway and come with the annoying grownups. Here’s a bunch of the drawings he made on our trip.
I’m admittedly biased, but I think he’s scary good.
Dan spent years living in a teepee like this, back when dinosaurs roamed Joseph.
One of the wonderful thing about hanging out with a bunch of fellow artists, is the opportunity to compare visions. Here for example are the ways we all approached a bunch of old tractors we found in Enterprise, OR.
Personally, if I had to spend more than a couple of days in a small town like Joseph, I would blow my brains our from boredom. However, there are endless lovely things to draw there, as there are in every corner of the world.
A tornado whacked this barn a while back. Rather than fix it, the owners are waiting for Ron Paul.
One of our projects in Oregon was to help d.price to set up an online version of his ‘zine, Moonlight Chronicles. The first few pages are up and I urge you to visit his new site regularly for updates. He will continue to publish on paper but is scaling back to minimize the environmental impact of tree killing. If you like his work as much as I do, consider buying some back issues (or even the first 50 in a lovely hand-painted box).
Our drawings of an old train were constantly interrupted by the fact that the crew moved it up and down the rails.
So instead, I put some coins on the rail and the train squished them flat:
At week’s end, we drove back across Oregon. It was a super trip — one we plan to make a regular summer tradition.
I guess normal men do this sort of thing regularly, except they go fishing or hunting or play golf. We weirdoes prefer to just sit around, pen in hand, seizing the moment.
P.S. For this and probably future posts, I shall be putting my images on flicker where you can see them larger (just click on the blog image you like and it will take you to the flickr page). I have also posted a couple of hundred other pictures up there from our trip.
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Update
I have not been posting. But I have been drawing. I began a new larger (8.5″ x 11.5″) book and committed to only drawing in black and white. Because of the size of the book, I keep it at home and work on drawings from pictures I have found or taken.
A Personal Journey from 6H to 6B
It may seem hard to believe, upon looking at my current bloated form, but there was a time, years ago, when I went to the gym and lifted weights every day. Seven days a week for over a year, I reported to the gym every morning at 7 a.m. to strain and sweat. I had no Schwarzeneggerian ambitions, no need to pump myself up and strut around the neighborhood, rippling and flexing. No, instead I was driven by a certain degree of self-awareness.
I determined that if I gave myself any wiggle room, I would break my habit. I had to be iron-clad in my commitment in order to persevere. I’m a creative person and I knew that I would easily come up with all sorts of imaginative excuses for quitting so I vowed to deny myself any sort of exit and, rain or shine, I would be at the gym doors at 7 a.m. and do my best to combat gravity.
After several months, my sister noticed the change in my belt size and asked if she could join my Spartan regime. For a while, she showed up daily and grunted and strained at my side. Then, one February morning as I awoke in the dark and listened to the sleet hammering against the window, my sister phoned and suggested that it might be okay to skip a day. In a moment of long regretted weakness, I agreed and rolled back under the blankets.
I never went back to the gym.
This is a scarily pathological story, I know. I think I have mellowed since those muscle bound years and am a little less inflexible in my commitment to developing myself. However, recently, in a moment of self-assessment, I had to ask myself if I was truly as committed to creative freedom as I claim to be in my writing here and in my books. Am I really open to anything? And why, when I give others advice, do I assume that they need the same short leash I do? I am afraid that I hand out far too many ultimata and that my last book, The Creative License is far too rigid and dogmatic. I wrote it assuming that it was for people who needed a friendly but unyielding guide to getting started on the road to self-expression and frankly a little ass-kicking. Since its publication some readers have balked and complained that I am hypocritical in simultaneous claiming to be a cheerleader for creative exploration while laying down all sorts of rules and systems. The thing people rail against most loudly is my insistence that they draw only with a pen rather than a pencil. I have urged this suggestion on readers time and again because it worked for me, strengthening my conviction in how I see and draw, the quality of my line, my confidence in what I am making, and more. But some people don’t like pens and resent my dogmatism.
When Roz Stendahl sent me a handmade book bound with soft, ocher Rivs BFK paper, I decided to challenge myself with a new direction, at least for the length of a single book. The paper is far too soft and absorbent for pleasurable ink drawing and so I decided to fill it with pencil drawings. I bought several boxes of Derwent pencils (12 each of Graphic, Drawing, and Graphitint), a pencil sharpener, and several types of erasers.
Erasers are a new tool for me and gave me the most cause for concern. In ten years of drawing, I have avoided equivocation; if I make an inaccurate observation and lay down a line I can’t take back, I just go with it. If the face becomes lopsided, so be it. I let the initial error mold the lines to follow, telling myself that it’s okay, it’s my style, it’s human. This is how I have always drawn; it’s an anxiety that keeps me on my toes, that is my drawing experience, like a small animal in predator-country, a little wary, senses finely attune, knowing one mistake can lead to disaster or flight into unfamiliar land.
I began with a few drawings around my house, mainly of my sleeping dogs. I started with harder pencils and drew with a light sketchy line, the same sort of pressure I use with my Rapidograph. I did some cross hatching, then added a little color from one of the Graphitints, a sort of soft, muted color pencil. I also avoided erasing, not really thinking of it most of the time. The drawing looked small, crabbed, dim and anemic.
Then I drew some pictures when we attended the Dalai Lama’s lecture in midtown. As usual, when I am listening intently, my drawings were crappy and unpleasant to make.
Then I collected some photos and began to draw portraits. Each evening after work I did a couple, getting bolder and more confident with my lines. I erased a little bit, but not much. Occasionally I would do a straight graphite sketch to note the landmarks of the face then I’d go over them with color and really lay it on.
I began to feel more free as time went by and my drawings became more aggressive though probably les accurate. I felt a little more happy, laying on more and more color, making lines that varied in strength, expressing my feelings by pushing the pencil harder and harder against the page.
After a few weeks of pencil drawings, I stopped and looked back.
I saw several things as I flipped through the pages. For one thing, there is enormous difference in the expressive qualities of different hardnesses of lead. I thought I’d like the “H” pencils for their clarity of line like my pen. However, they don’t work especially well on soft paper. They also leave a faint line that seems uncommitted. I was initially averse to the softer pencils, disliking their tendency to smudge and smear. But there is something quite satisfying about a creamy “B” pencil line gliding often paper with a little tooth; it’s almost like drawing with a lipstick.
Another revelation was the way in which I tended to express light and color. I usually work in two pretty different media: pen and watercolors. With the former, I love doing intricate crosshatching to express shadows and highlights and creating varying patterns to suggest different colors. In water coloring, I like to layer transparent paint and build up tone with many applications. With pencil, I found myself tilting back and forth between these techniques. Harder pencils led me to build up line patterns rather than varying the darkness of the image by using pressure on the lead. With softer pencils, I would layer color upon color, cross hatching one way with one hue, then another way with a different shade. I avoided smearing my lines or softening them in any way but still the effect was more painterly than linear.
Perhaps with more practice I could resolve this schism but the fact is … I really don’t want to.
By and large, I don’t love the way pencil drawings look. They often seem grimy and overworked, smudgy from the artist’s palms. There is a sketchy quality to soft pencil drawings that I don’t like either, a certain lack of clarity that bugs me. Oh, there are exceptions galore of course. I could mention any number of artists whose pencil drawings are masterpieces but I rarely see once I wish I’d made. I had more and more disdain for the pencil drawings I’d made. They were just ugly and weak, and I rarely found even a section of a drawing that I thought was interesting.
Last weekend, I went back to drawing with pen and ink — and what a relief it’s been. I have done dozens of careful ink drawings since, all pen with just a touch of ink brushwork on a couple of images. I felt like I do after coming home from a lousy vacation, eager to return to my familiar old armchair and enjoy a cup of tea as only Patti can make it.
I realize now that I draw as I do not because of inflexibility but because it is me. I can walk a mile in another man’s shoes but it gives me blisters. However, I am glad I took this trip through the land of Graphite. It is wonderful to unstrap the lead and splash free in pools of ink once more.
If you’d like to see selections from my experiments in pencil, visit my new Pencil book gallery
School for Evil – exploratory
Toward the end of Fall semester of my sophomore year, I found a small reading room deep within the bowels of my college library. It was called “The Somebody or Other Memorial Hunting and Fishing Library” and was almost always unoccupied. Its walls were lined with glass cases of leather bound editions of Izak Walton on angling and assorted dusty memoirs of African safaris and was furnished with a few oak table and soft-bottomed leather wing chairs It was a hidden treasure, my very own study, and the perfect place to while away the winter evenings. Like much of the school, the Hunting and Fishing library was criminally overheated and, after a day of lectures and an evening of French irregular verbs, I would often nod out against the comfortable soap-oiled embrace of the armchair.
One afternoon I awoke from a sweaty dream to discover that my sanctum sanctorum had been invaded; several other students had crept in while I was dozing. Embarrassed at being discovered in oblivion with my head thrown back and my mouth open and drooling, I pretended to have been lost in thought not the arms of Morpheus, grabbed my notebook and began to write the first thing that came to my pen.
This proved to be a story called “Under the Awning,” a funnyish and appropriately surreal tale of a man and a girl sheltering from the rain. Ten or so pages tumbled out of me in a flash and was published, unedited in the school literary magazine. Rereading it now, I am surprised by the unfamiliar voice of my deep unconscious and the carefree turns of phrase and plot it took.
Early this June, while walking up Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, an idea whacked my brain with the same sort of thunder bolt immediacy. It was a title of a novel, The School for Evil” and the essential elements of its plot. The whole thing struck me as from the clear blue — I haven’t written much fiction since I was in my twenties and the the idea was so developed already that I decided to pursue it. Over the next nine weeks or so, I wrote a couple of drafts of this 200 page novel, polishing it off by Labor Day.
Part of the idea was to write short chapters — fifty of them in all — and to illustrate each one with an ink painting. I drew the first ten or so and showed them to some friends. At the time, I thought the book was for children, probably ones a little younger than Jack, and wanted it to be a little shocking, a little brutal (think Edward Gorey, Lemony Snickety, Roald Dahl), and as funny and absurd as I could make it. I showed the drawings around to friends and the first ones were judged to be a bit scary — some people thought that was a fine thing, others felt they were too edgy for pre-teens. I took a second pass at the drawings and this time made them cartoony and a bit silly. I went on to make a couple dozen in this style.
While I rather doubt the book will ever be published, the process was very interesting and informative. Working from my imagination rather than just my experience was a refreshing change; writing fiction and then drawing made-up scenes was so far from the documentary journaling and non-fiction work I usually do and it opened new hidden doors in my head.
Brush Twice a Day
Maybe I’m my own worst enemy. Or maybe I just love being a novice. Or maybe I’m bored too easily. But if I gaze back on the course of my passage across the infinite drawing landscape, I look like a veering drunkard, swerving between POVs, pens, paper, subjects, experimenting like Dr. Hyde. When I talk to people I know who are successful professional illustrators, they seemed to have done all this experimentation back in art school and then settled on a style, a technique and a set of tools long ago, so their work is predictable and knowable — that’s what make it commercially viable. When it comes to tools and techniques, I tend to be a serial monogamist. For a while I was madly in love with drawing with grey markers and white pencils on butcher paper. Then I was passionate about using the teeniest possible Rapidograph point on watercolor paper in the smallest size Moleskine, colored with water colors. I went through a period of just doing comic strips in pencil and shades of grey ink. I have always liked the effect of rough, indifferent or spidery marks, splattered with ink, grubby, and wild. In part, that’s a necessity because I am impatient and incapable of neatness. But I like it in others too, from Ronald Searle to Francis Bacon.
My newest journal is big, about 8″ x 12″. Normally I would never use such a large journal because it’s too big for my scanner. Now I’ve decided not to care. Its paper is pretty crummy, too, just ordinary stuff you’d cram into a Xerox machine– the ink easily bleeds through it. And I am not using a pen — just a plastic brush which I dip in a bottle of sumi-ink. It’s a waterbrush but it’s too clogged for the reservoir handle to work properly so I dip it in a puddle of drinking water which I pour on the pavement in front of me. And instead of writing careful, ornate captions with my dip pen I just write some sort of crappy looking note with the brush on the opposite page.
As I describe all this, I wonder is it a matter of some sort of artistic self hatred that’s making me work in this slovenly way? Or am I bored? But no, I really like the feeling of freedom I get from slashing at the page in this way. The drawings have yet to reach any sort of aesthetic that I am completely pleased with but I feel nice and loose and unfettered. I don’t care if the pages are perfect ( I had been becoming so anal in my last book that I was drawing less and less, rarely having the time or mood to be so deliberate) and I like how they are warped and winkled. This may be a summer fling but it’s already forming sweet memories.
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.Jack Ckomicks
My comic drawing style is still developing. I’ve given myself three handicaps: I’m drawing small, with a brush, and from my imagination. Despite my reservations about my drawings, I do like the look of these wee moleskine pages filled with greys.
I have also set myself another task. Every day, Jack tells me some story from his day and I try to turn it into a comic. I am working to develop a Jack-like character that I can repeat frame after frames, story after story.
Comic Experiment
(Enlarged image of comic here)
I have always enjoyed reading comics. I started when I was about 7 or 8, with Disney comics and Archie and Tintin and Beano then in puberty progressed on to underground comix by Crumb and Bodé and Hernandez Bros. etc. In the last few years I have been into Seth, Ben Katchor, Jason and Kochalka.
I have never particularly enjoyed super hero or fantasy comics. I like small stories that reflect reality in an interesting way.
I am often struck by how little does happen in these stories and I wonder to what extent this is a reflection of the enormous amount of work involved in making comics. If you have to learn to draw so well and then draw so much to tell a story, do you lose the opportunity to have a life? There are so many comix about guys who have no life, no girl, no clue and I wonder if that’s a reflection of their creators’ experience or lack thereof.
Anyway, I have decided that I will work in this form for a little while, just to strech myself. It is a difficult assignement as it violates so many of the rules I have set up for drawing over the past decade or so. It means drawing from my imagination rather than from observed reality, by and large. It is also takes a certain amount of forethought and planning. And you have to be reasonably neat, or at least a lot less loose than I am.
This first comic tells the the story of a recent incident in which, while walking up 6th Avenue with my family on a Sunday afternnoon, I got a huge gash in my head from a hockey puck.
As you can see, the comic is pretty awful. It’s so tiny ( I drew it in my teeny moleskine) and cramped and ill-planned and messy. Still, for me, it sort of captures the event in a way that ‘s more satisfying than my usual approach of just drawing a puck and then surrounding it with calligraphy.
I am starting to turn the members of my family into characters that can be drawn over and again in different poses and be recognizable from frame to frame. Again, this is so dffferent from how I normally work. I am drawing in sumi-ink and working very small. My lettering virges on the indicipherable for which I apologize. Write me with strenuous complaints.
I imagine that comics aren’t your cup of tea. Still, think about them and how they could effect your own journaling. They offer a good way to use drawing to tell a story and force you into some dfficult design and drawing problems that may teach you something.
Portraits
I’ve been working on this series for a while, all in one book. They are in watercolor, pen, brush and sumi-ink. They are all drawn upside down.
I made a couple of little time-lapse films of how I drew and painted some of these portraits.
Click To Play
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.