At 5:30 in the morning, the light in Phoenix comes in almost horizontal, and the wall by the start of the Biltmore Circle takes it full in the face.

It’s a long whitewashed retaining wall around somebody’s compound, with ornamental spouts for carrying off rain that hardly ever comes. Bougainvillea spills over it in a couple of places.

On my hundredth trip past it, I stopped and stood there a while, feeling like I’d been there before.

I knew it, the way you know your bedroom in the dark.

It took me a beat to place it from where. Lahore. 1969.

There was a wall like that on the street running up to my grandparents’ front gate. Raw whitewash, longer than this one, and behind it a dusty paddock with a single bullock standing under a gnarled tree and a couple of loafing crows. I haven’t been there in fifty years.

My mother sent me to Lahore when I was eight and a half. My sister had just been born, Mum was finishing a PhD in Australia and living with the man who’d become her third husband, and it was, as they say, a lot.

So I was put on a plane.

My grandparents were doctors and ran their practice out of the front of the house. I called them Gran and Ninny.

There was a driver from Peshawar who took me to school in the morning and collected me after lunch. A head bearer named Shamsu. A gardener I called Mali. A cook. A sweeper who worked his way around the house and yard all day. Patients coming and going through the surgery. Two boys about my age, Nimu and Papa, who played cricket with me in the afternoons, and a foul-tempered dachshund named Nicky who played with nobody.

Everybody called me chota sahib. Little sir. Which, at nine, is an excellent thing to be called.

By then I’d already lived in London, Canberra and Pittsburgh, and I’d get through a dozen more schools before I was done. But Lahore was the place I thought of as home. I’d been coming here since I was two.

Once I’d noticed the wall in Phoenix, I started paying attention to everything else that seemed familiar. Bougainvillea, frangipani, oleander. Crows squabbling at dawn. Doves cooing. Lizards doing pushups on a hot wall. There were jackals yipping beyond the gum trees. Here we have coyotes.

Mynah birds sat on the power lines in Lahore. Nimu told me that if you caught one and fed it raisins you could teach it to talk, and we spent most of a summer on that project without ever getting a word in reply. Here I’ve got mockingbirds working through a set list of other birds’ material at four in the morning a.m. I wonder if they like raisins.

The most powerful, visceral memories flood me on summer nights as I step through the patio doors. Out of the air conditioning into an atmosphere that’s still ninety-five degrees, amber sodium light, humidity, cicadas and crickets sawing away. That is Lahore. That is precisely Lahore, and I am nine on my grandparents’ back terrace.

Then there’re the monsoons. In Lahore, the rain would flood the front garden in about four minutes, and Nicky and I would tear through the puddles, exhilarated and wild. When the storms finally broke on my first July in Phoenix, and I felt that smell of wet dust and creosote coming up off the ground, it was a perfume as familiar as Ninny’s Chanel No. 5.

I started Googling.

Lahore sits at 31.5 degrees north. Phoenix at 33.4. The same belt around the planet, the same sun angle, the same length of day, the same appalling summers. That belt has a name, the subtropical ridge, a ring of descending dry air, wringing out the clouds and leaving deserts underneath wherever it settles. The Sonoran is one of them. So are the dry plains outside Lahore.

Neither city would exist without canals — the Hohokam dug theirs here a thousand years before us; Shah Jahan started Lahore’s in 1639. And both cities got the same midcentury-modern treatment in the sixties: low flat-roofed houses, carports, breeze block, picture windows onto the garden. Gulberg, where my grandparents lived, was master-planned in the 1950s and in old photographs looks uncannily like Arcadia.

Dig straight down through Phoenix, and you’d surface in the Indian Ocean, spluttering four thousand miles short of Lahore. Fine. There is still a directish line running through the middle of the earth and the middle of my life, and it’s off by a bit, like most things.

I didn’t pick either place.

When I was eight, I was put on a plane because the grown-ups’ arrangements had come apart. When I was fifty-nine, JJ and I flew out West for a visit, and COVID slammed the door behind us, and we never went home to New York.

Both times I landed somewhere I hadn’t chosen, with no vote in the matter, in the middle of a general collapse of the way things had been.

And both times the place turned out to be kind to me. The one stretch of my childhood when I felt safe and looked after has been quietly reissued, in a different language, at the far end of the earth, right when I needed it a second time.

JJ grew up here and doesn’t see any of it. I’ll say something about the light on a wall, and she’ll look at the wall and see a wall. The people I’ve met from Lahore don’t see it either, because they never got the Arizona half. There’s nobody walking around with this particular overlay but me.

Maybe you’ve got one too. Some ordinary place or thing you run into that flicks you back to a place you can’t get to anymore. I’d love to know what sets yours off.

Mine’s a wall. 5:30, before it gets hot.

Your pal,

Danny

When I was 15 or so, I was pretty into studying French. I had this fantasy about going to Paris. I wanted to sit at a café table and read Camus. I wanted to be mistaken for Jean-Paul Belmondo. So I put in a lot of time learning irregular verbs and memorizing vocabulary lists.

It was hard work, but I pushed myself, and the summer before junior year, I got to travel alone to France and live with a family in the Loire Valley and polish my parlez vous. I even went to Paris, sat in the front row of the Moulin Rouge, and ordered a tall glass of underage champagne.

Unlike a normal American boy, I never took Driver’s Ed in high school.

I couldn’t be bothered to take lessons until I was out of college and had a girlfriend who didn’t think it was cute that I didn’t have a car. So I bought a 1965 Ford Fairlane for $800 and practiced parking in the Safeway lot. It was hard work, but I pushed myself and after a few attempts finally passed my road test and could make out in the backseat.

In high school, I used to do a fair amount of doodling in the margins of my notebooks. I drew cartoon faces and filled pages with spirals and checkerboards and shaded cubes. Then a friend showed me the beautiful sketchbooks of Frank Frazetta and Robert Crumb and Burne Hogarth, and I decided it was time to learn to actually draw properly. It was hard work but I pushed myself because I really wanted to draw like they did and possibly wow my friends.

There are all kinds of reasons we first pick up skills.

But there comes a point when we need something deeper. When we’ve mastered the essentials and are finally ready to really see where they can take us. Often these goals are far more important than where we started, and identifying them keeps us going.

In time, I could say whatever was on my mind in French without stopping to wrestle with the declensions and irregular verbs. I kept on getting more comfortable behind the wheel till I could drive anywhere while talking on the phone, doing a crossword, and plucking my nose hairs. I’ve driven back and forth across the continent, no longer to impress a girl but just to see what’s out there, to push further toward the unknown, to seek adventure and new horizons.

I’ve found the same unselfconscious transcendence with art. I don’t draw all the time just to improve my skills or to look cool in front of pimply pubescents.

I do it because it helps give my life meaning. The more my skills advance, the further I can take them and learn new things about the world and me.

It’s not easy to get past the self-conscious stage of learning a new skill. It can be hard work, and we need to push ourselves hard. The force behind that push is the bigger goal you set yourself.

You have to ask yourself questions. Why do you really want to learn this? What could you do with it? Where could you take it?

The basics, the requirements of schooling, are no longer the point. Now you have a glowing horizon to head towards, now you have things you want to say, and now you finally have the confidence to say them.

Becoming an artist is a lifelong journey, strewn with pitfalls and struggles and unexpected delights. It’s important to find your reason to give you the stick-to-itiveness to slog through the hard work and on into the mist, trusting your purpose and the value of your quest.

This can prove tough. The monkey will mutter that this is a waste of time or that I won’t be able to do it and should just quit instead.

But when I know my why and start to wade towards it, art gives me deep satisfaction, makes my life richer, and every day matter.

A bientôt,

Danny

P.S. I want to thank everyone who has clicked the “Buy Me a Coffee” button to support my work. Caffeine fuels these essays and I couldnt do it without you. Here’s some coffee I had in Vietnam just for you:

They each wore a heavy leather utility belt with a flashlight, handcuffs, mace, a Taser, a notebook, a radio, a nightstick, a big handgun, extra rounds, and who knows what else. Each officer sat stiffly erect — under their uniforms, their torsos were girded in thick bulletproof vests.

When their meal was done, one officer reached for the bill — but it slipped out of his grip and fluttered to the floor. He leaned over, grunting, to pick it up.

Straining and cursing, he couldn’t bend in the middle to reach it. The gun, the vest, all the clobber had him strapped down and inflexible.

Eventually, a waitress saw his predicament and darted down to lightly pick up the bill and replace it in front of him.

Life has forced me to armor up.

As I endure traumas, disasters, mistakes, I have layered on defenses to protect me from what might happen again. I put on arrogance, cynicism, “expertise.” I spoke from my head and locked down my heart.

But many of my shields are redundant, obsolete, and stifling. As they say in the Pentagon, I am always preparing to fight the last war.

And the more I struggle to be fully protected, locked and loaded, the weaker I grow under all that Kevlar.

For years I wrote essays that told people what to do to be successful creatives. I positioned myself as a successful and all-knowing coach, and dispensed advice, tips, and earnest pep talks.

I never felt entirely comfortable with this posture, but it made me appear successful, strong, and in command.

Then a year or two ago, I decided I would slip off this armor of authority and just share my own experiences. I would stop lecturing and just tell you what I’ve been through, what I feel, what I wrestle with.

In the end, that’s really the only thing I’m an expert in.

When I am willing to expose myself to danger, I get stronger and more flexible, more resilient and brave. The more I allow myself to be vulnerable, the more helpful I become and the lighter I feel.

My art isn’t about being right or innovative or a genius.

It’s just about me with my gut hanging out.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Lots of people have been buying my new book, Unpublishable (click here to get yours too). Thank you! If you’d like to go one step further, please leave a nice review on Amazon. My 13-year-old self really appreciates it.

Danny

But most of this writing has never been read by anyone but me.

I always wanted to be a writer. I loved creating people and worlds that never existed, turning some vague notion into a character or a scenario that reveals itself as you write it. Every author I read dropped a bit of influence into the cauldron — P.G. Wodehouse and Henry Miller, Robert Benchley and James Ellroy, Hunter Thompson and Enid Blyton, all cribbed shamelessly. Some of the stories are funny. Some are tragic. Some cut off mid-sentence. Some went through a dozen drafts.

Back when I was writing as a teenager and in my 20s, there was no internet, no social media, and self-publishing was considered vanity. It seemed the only way to have a book with my name on its spine was to somehow figure out the game of publishing.

There was a fat annual book called Writer’s Market. I’d take it out of the library, copy addresses of publishers, run my stories off on the office copier, and mail them out in manila envelopes. Weeks later, my self-addressed stamped envelope would come back with a pristine copy of my manuscript and a form rejection. I did this dozens of times. Then I stopped.

The writing ended up in the box.

I had teachers who believed in me — Ms. McIlnay in ninth grade, Don Knies after her. I applied to a creative writing course taught by Joyce Carol Oates. She didn’t think my work belonged there. I wrote a play at 22 that came close to Broadway — Kevin Bacon wanted the lead — and then it collapsed under its own ambition, and I became a copywriter instead of a playwright.

Over the next few years, I guess I just gave up on the idea of being a fiction writer.

I started blogging in 2003, and journaling and essays are where the effort has gone ever since. That, and advertising copy —I’ve written so many print and television ads, and that’s where my writing flourished.

Underneath it, though, I’d decided I was a failure as a fiction writer. None of those stories got out of the box. No agent, no publisher, no shelf at the local bookstore.

I figured I was missing some key ingredient.

Eventually I did get published — a dozen or so books over the years, and lately I’ve been my own publisher, releasing essay collections for subscribers. But that cardboard box sat in my garage in Arizona for six years, gathering desert dust. I still see it in my dreams. And then I decided it was time. I hauled it into the studio and cracked it open.

There was good stuff in there.

I decided it was time to give that ten-year-old, that twenty-year-old, his own name on a spine. I’d print at least one copy and put it on the shelf next to the others. Proudly.

I sorted through the manuscripts and picked about thirty — funny, sad, insane, derivative, all of them my children. Or maybe my grandchildren at this point. Most were typed and paper-clipped. Some handwritten in pencil, crossed out, scribbled over, notes in the margin. I decided not to rewrite a word of the original voice. I’d only fix typos, spelling, punctuation. A real book.

My plan was to make a book that seemed like it had been published in the mid-90s, around the time when I stopped writing stories. The book 25-year-old me dreamed of holding, author photo on the back, a blurb or two from someone official-sounding on the cover. Figuring out what a 1995 short story collection actually looked like took a trip to my favorite second-hand bookstore, hunting through old paperbacks for the right font and page layout.

I designed a few covers, tried a few titles. I keep coming back to Unpublishable — a word that showed up more than once in my rejection letters. I like the idea of it: guess what, this unpublishable thing is being published. A wink to the kid who got the form letters.

I’ve written a short introduction for each story, a little context before you go in. Honestly, there are some I don’t remember writing at all, and since none of the manuscripts were dated, I’ve had to guess when. Doesn’t matter much. There are no scholars of my work — though if some misguided PhD candidate ever wants to carbon-date the paper, the box is right there in the garage.

You can see Unpublishable for sale here. In paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

See the real book!

If you buy a copy, I hope you enjoy the book. Maybe it’ll get you thinking about your relationship to your own past selves. Is there a project you started long ago that lost steam and ended up in the attic? Are you still living by some outdated verdict on yourself that’s quietly setting the limits on your creative life? Look back at it again — objectively, charitably — and think about what you could do with it now, with all the tools and opportunities available to you that didn’t exist back then.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. I made a film about my process of turning this box into a book. Watch it here:

A blank page is a lot of nothing, and nothing can be daunting because nothing can lead anywhere. Every drawing I’ve never made is sitting there at once, all of them possible. That’s what can intimidate me — the sheer weight of all the ways I could go wrong.

A slow, deep breath, and I let go. All that nothing is just freedom, another word for nothing left to lose. Nobody tells me what to draw. Nobody’s grading it. A whole page of I-don’t-have-to.

So I make a mark. My pen drops onto the upper left, it doesn’t much matter where. A little speck of ink. And the terror of the blank page flicks off, because there’s no blank page anymore. There’s just a page with one mark on it, and the squeak of a second mark begging to join it.

The first mark anchors me, but it doesn’t lock the door. Sure, I could lay down a faint pencil ghost of the whole tree first, if I’m feeling unsure, and adjust as I go — rough out major shapes, then layer a bolder line on top of a timid one, let the second round of decisions fix the first. Or I can just skip the planning stage and jump in, confidently laying down the contour of a single branch and see what it suggests comes next.

Typically, I skip the plan. I draw that one branch and let the next one grow off it. The leaves sprout out of the branches. The tree unfurls a line at a time, and it feels like taking dictation.

There’s no one way to grow a tree — or to draw one. The more I look, the more I see its individuality. My one job is to shed my preconceptions and slow way down. To take the time to know this tree from its friends, to look for the woodpecker scars and desert winds that sculpted this tree. This elm has thrown its weight to the left, pulling away from its neighbor’s shade. One branch is withered, its leaves browning. I can see where the flood-irrigation water flowed by which way the tree roots grew.

Now the tree fills the page — but still in just two dimensions. So I go back in to find the third, thanks to the fourth. The more time I spend watching and recording, the deeper and truer the drawing becomes. I find shadows to deepen and edges to refine. A fuzzy shape turns into the junction of three branches, ten leaves, a dozen twigs.

And as I push my way into the leaves, I lift off the ground.

That’s the part I do this for. The flow. The committee in my head — the one that narrates and worries and keeps score — has gone back to the house. I don’t notice it leaving. I just look up eventually and realize it’s been gone a while, and I’ve been happy. Calm, wide awake, not judging a thing. Each problem the drawing hands me opens into three or four decent answers instead of one wrong one.

The only question left is the dumb one. How do I know when it’s done? What if I go too far and wreck it?

I’ve learned not to care. It’s just the flow clocking out — a tap on the shoulder that says I’ve reached a place where I could stop, if I want. Not that I have to.

Because I’m fairly sure I can’t wreck it. Not really. I could keep finding things to add until I’d filled the whole page with solid black ink, and as long as the current’s still running — from the tree, through my eyes, down my arm, onto the paper — it isn’t ruined. It’s just still going. The journey’s the thing; the page is just a creased map of where we’ve been.

Or I stop because the tea’s gone cold and there’s a call I have to take, and I can close the book on a half-drawn tree and go back to my desk. That’s allowed too.

It’s like taking a walk. Some mornings I circle a few blocks, then home, dogs emptied, breakfast calling. Some mornings I walk around the Biltmore circle, then loop out along the canal, heading west without a deadline, five miles out before I turn around. The turnaround doesn’t spoil the walk, and where I started doesn’t get to decide where I stop. They’re just the two ends of a path I was on for a while.

I cap the pen, close the book. And I’m a little more here than I was an hour ago.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S.: This is the last time I’m going to mention what I think is the best workshop I’ve made so far: Tempera Flowers. If you hurry, you can probably still squeeze in, but we’re going to be kicking off at 9 am tomorrow morning. If you can’t make it live, you can still watch the recording, but if you don’t sign up, all you’ll have left to do is kick yourself.

Sign up now

Officially, it’s a behind-the-scenes video for the members of our YouTube channel. But really it’s just me — in the studio, or out in the garden — going back over the week and thinking out loud about everything I’ve been making: videos, essays, drawings, paintings, ideas. What I’m excited about, what I’ve struggled with, what I’ve figured out, what’s going on in my life that’s feeding the work, and what I want to try next.

That video isn’t the only journal I keep. Every night, when I climb into bed, I pull out my phone and write down what I did that day, what I felt, and what I made, with a couple of photos to go along with it. An ongoing record of a life spent making things.

And then there’s the third thing, which I do every few months. I visit my archives.

I have shelves of sketchbooks and boxes of drawings and stacks of old writing that go all the way back to my childhood. They’re in my studio and out in the garage, on hard drives and up in the cloud, and my phone holds scans of just about every drawing I’ve made in the past quarter century.

Every so often, I go wading through all of it. I pull out old essays and reread the comments people left. I flip through the books I’ve written. I run a finger down the long list of ideas I still haven’t gotten to. I even dig through the bins of art supplies and rescue some good tool that slid to the back and got forgotten.

Now, why would a grown man spend a perfectly good afternoon rummaging around in his own back catalog?

Because making art is a solitary business, and I’ve come to accept an inconvenient truth about myself: I’m a worse judge of my work the closer I am to having made it. The psychologists even have a name for it — construal level theory. The further away something gets, in time or in distance, the more calmly and clearly you can see it.

The drawing I finished this morning, I can barely stand to look at. The one from 2014, I can see plain as day.

So my review is where I get to be my own coach. I take the long view. I go looking for the throughlines — the slender threads running between this week’s essay, this week’s drawings, and some half-thought I scribbled down years ago. I look back at the days when the work flowed and ask myself what was going on there, and how I can get back to it. And I find the times it seized up and ask why I chucked it all.

It’s also, frankly, where I got to steal. Not from Hockney or Crumb — from myself. I dig up an idea I once abandoned and see whether there’s any juice left to squeeze out of it. Usually there is. I’ve picked up so many new skills since I quit on it that Earlier Me and Current Me can finally collaborate: he had the idea, I’ve finally got the chops, and between us we get the thing done.

This is why I don’t throw away the work I hate on the day I make it. Right then, I’m the worst possible judge of it — tired, sour, standing much too close. So instead of tossing it, I stuff it in a book or a box and let it marinate. It’s all fodder and fertilizer for the future.

I could hire a coach. I could sign up for a course. And sometimes I do. But the teacher I keep learning the most from is the one who’s been keeping my hours all along — every earlier version of me, filed away on the shelves and up in the cloud and, yes, in a battered cardboard box out in the garage, waiting for me to come find him.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Speaking of learning from myself: I spent the past two years teaching myself to make vibrant paintings with tempera paint sticks, mostly because I couldn’t find anyone else to teach me. When I sat down to review what I’d learned, I found a whole set of techniques I’d developed — so I organized and codified them into something I could pass on. If you’d like to make some gorgeous technicolor art with me, I’m running a new Tempera Flowers workshop next weekend, Saturday, July 18th. Click here to learn more.

P.P.S. And if you’d like to see those weekly behind-the-scenes videos, click here to find out how.

Never begin drawing.

Never begin making stuff.

Never begin pursuing any sort of passion for fear of not being able to do it incredibly well. Nothing you do will be good enough even for you.

Why bother if you can’t be great?

A variation is fiddliness. Constant reappraisal, erasing, tweaking, reconsidering. Taking your drawing into Photoshop and cleaning it up, coloring it, recoloring it, sharing ten versions of it, asking for comments, on and on, never done, never good enough.

I love James Lord’s book on Giacometti, in which he describes sitting for a portrait in the artist’s studio for weeks while the artist paints it over and over, only stopping when his gallery owner shows up and forcibly drags it away from him.

The book has reproductions of each day’s work and, honestly, he could have stopped after a day and had a decent painting, but he goes on for ages, always dissatisfied, putting himself down, rethinking the idea, scraping it down again and again.

Giacometti was the same with his sculptures, paring them down so they kept getting thinner and thinner until they were barely there.

Maybe his perfectionism made him great. Or just Swiss.

One of the problems with perfectionism is that you think you can see the destination before you embark on the journey.  You believe that you can plan it all out in advance, and that nothing else will intrude and change the outcome you have in your mind.

But, first of all, the world doesn’t work that way.

Unless you are doing something extremely simple and banal, something you can actually hold in your brain all at once, the world will invariably intrude and change your well-laid plans. You aren’t a fortune teller.  You don’t have a time machine.

And, secondly, you should welcome that intrusion.

The accidents, mistakes, serendipities, and ink splatters that the universe throws in your path make your work and your life more interesting.

Perfection isn’t organic. It can be constipated and lifeless.

Meanwhile, if you are waiting to make stuff because you haven’t got the perfect pen or book or subject or teacher — get over it.

We all make crap every day. If we didn’t, we’d die. Or at least be really cranky.

Your imperfect pal,

Danny

PS BTW, I just found out that Stanley Tucci directed a movie about this story.

There’s a documentary, too.

Rather than spend our holiday breathing smoke and waiting to be charbroiled, we canceled our stay. Instead of enjoying the red rocks and the magical vibrations of Sedona, we are going to staycation, which means cleaning out some cupboards, shredding some old bank statements, powerwashing the patio, going to the movies, getting a massage, and eating out.

This is not the first time. We manage to have at least one vacation a year blow up in our faces. In fact, the whole reason we live in Phoenix is due to a vacation that went south, stranding us in Palm Springs at the outbreak of Covid. The year before that, we planned a month in Amsterdam — a heat wave drove the mercury over 100, and the first tornado ever ravaged some canal boats on our street. And there have been countless other trips we’ve had to cancel at the last minute due to illness or family or work or global catastrophe.

We should be spokesmen for travel insurance.

But despite karmic interventions beyond our control, there’s another obstacle — me. I have grown increasingly ambivalent about holidays, and I need to talk about why.

When I was younger, I loved vacationing. We would go to the Caribbean almost every Christmas, lie by the pool, read books, and sip piña coladas, then come back to the frozen city with a healthy tan. We went to Europe, to a villa in Tuscany, Paris and Prague, to London, Rome and Vienna. And I traveled so much for work, to every corner of the world, making commercials for American Express, Chevron, Chase and IBM. (There’s nothing like all-expense business trips to exotic locales.)

So what changed?

Well, certainly Covid made us leery of airports and planes full of coughing strangers.

Plus, my home is so cozy. I have a pool of my own with an outside beer fridge. I have an acre of lawn rimmed by pomegranates and Mexican primroses. And I have my studio, full of projects and art supplies, computers and napping pugs. The homebody in my head asks (whines) why we have to trade all this for a cramped hotel room and exorbitant room service.

Fine, I admit it. I’ve become an agoraphobic old grouch.

But I’m also thinking about the permanent vacation that looms ahead.

More and more of my friends are retiring. They now have plenty of time to go on road trips in campers and become pests to their grandchildren and take cruises down the Danube and develop plantar fasciitis on the pickleball court and tendonitis on the golf course and talk endlessly about their colonoscopies and their cardiologists, their miniscii and their moles.

Both my parents retired in their 50s. My mother got involved with local environmental groups and her public radio station, spent a lot of time on her garden, and the rest of it bossing tradesmen and children around. My father spent his last decades copying the paintings of Great Masters in a spare bathroom at the back of his house. I don’t know what else he did, but it may have involved computers and beer.

But me, I don’t think I can retire, because honestly I have no idea what I would do.

I don’t play any sports, and I rarely watch any. I don’t think I could drive one of those huge motorhomes, and I doubt that Jenny would let me. I enjoy going to the hardware store, but I don’t know what to do with most of the stuff they sell there. When I’ve tried to fix stuff in the garden, our landscapers have usually had to correct it the next week. We have a piano, but I suspect I’m tone deaf. I quite like to cook, but Jenny likes to cook more, and she prefers to do it alone. I can bake bread, but I shouldn’t eat that much of it.

What I have left is drawing and writing and making videos — and that’s already my job. I usually start working at about 6:30 in the morning. I break for lunch. Sometimes I take a half-hour nap. Then I work until 4 or sometimes 6.

If I retired, would I have to give up this newsletter and my YouTube channel and Sketchbook Skool and writing books? Or would I just keep doing the same thing and just not call it my job anymore?

Beats me.

Your pal,
Danny

P.S.: Speaking of having lots of fun making art, I have a new workshop called Tempera Flowers. I’ve taken everything I’ve learned in the last couple of years of working with this incredibly vibrant, expressive (and inexpensive) medium, and I’ve consolidated it into a three-hour workshop, which I’ll be teaching on July 18. If you want to learn more about it and consider joining me, click here.

Learn More about Tempera Flowers

P.P.S: We’re going to France for a vacation at the end of July. 🤞

Our family’s first phone machine. And the fact that you could dial your own phone machine from a payphone and get your messages.

Dial a Joke.

Dialing a number to find out the official time.

Phone tables with a shelf for the phone book and an ashtray.

Collect calls.

Phone booths with doors.

Two kids I knew had their own phone in their room. Whenever we had sleepovers, we would make prank phone calls. There was no caller ID, but then they introduced *69 and our victims could call us back.

Looking up our number in the phonebook was thrilling, like minor fame

Yellow Pages

Little black books.

Rolodex. If you were really important, you might have more than one.

Filofax. My mother got one when I was in high school, and it seemed like the most grown-up, organized thing. I craved one, and then I got one for my birthday.

Electric typewriters with a night cover. Carbon paper. Onion skin paper. Round typewriter eraser with a brush. Liquid Paper correction fluid. Mimeographs.

Making textbook covers out of brown grocery bags.

Pink phone message pads

Manila Interoffice envelopes

S&H Green stamps

Aerograms

Subway tokens. Gum machine on the subway platform

Miss Turnstiles. A campaign that ran in the subways when I was in high school. Each month they would feature a photograph and brief biography of a young woman. Fortunately, they didn’t give their address or phone number.

Pulsar watch. The first digital watch I ever saw, circa 1975. When he pushed a button on the side, the time would appear in red numbers on its black screen. My step-uncle Don Kahan, a Chicago lawyer, was the first one I knew to have one.

My stepfather got our first calculator and the first thing we learned was that if you typed in 07734 and turn the calculator upside down, it said hello. It was considered cheating to use it for homework.

I got my first cassette player in 7th grade. I heard what my voice sounded like for the first time. The only tape I had was the one that came with it, a recording of Fur Elise by Beethoven. I played it till it broke. I can never listen to Fur Elise ever again.

My friend Tommy got a Sony Walkman, and for the first time I heard music through headphones while walking down the street. It was mind-blowing. Everything became a movie.

Listening to a new record while standing in a booth in the store.

Buying 45 rpm singles with the thing that went in the hole. Girls kept them in a special mini suitcase.

Every record store had a Sheet Music section.

Readers Digest. TV Guide. Parade magazine. Popular Mechanics. National Geographic. Time and Newsweek. Life and Look.

Morning and Evening newspapers.

T-shirts without slogans or logos.

Departments stores. Abraham and Strauss. Korvettes. Gimbels. Woolworths. Macys.

No book chains or box stores or baristas or Thai food or sourdough or craft beer or weed dispensaries or nail salons or Pilates or wood oven pizza.

No kid had a camera.

1-hour photo

Smoking in bars and restaurants and the office and on the subway and in hospitals. Cigarettes cost a dollar a pack.

Smoking sections on planes and ashtrays in the armrests.

Canoe, Brut. The whistling sailor with the dufflebag in Old Spice commercials

Vitalis

BrylCream

Men’s hair spray. The Dry Look from Gillette. TV commercials: The Wet Head is Dead

A little dab’ll do ya

Right Guard. Mennen. Raise your hand if you’re sure.

Manly, but I like it too.

I bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan and never let you forget you’re a man.

Jock straps.

Mandatory showers in gym class

Swanson TV dinners

Minute Maid concentrated orange juice

El Paso taco kit

Orange Julius

Baskin-Robbins Pink Bubble Gum, Rocky Road, Pralines and Cream.

Dannon was the only yogurt brand. Commercials said it was eaten by 100-year-old Russians.

How do you handle a Hungry Man?

Mr Whipple

Plop plop fizz fizz

Dentures. Dentugrip.

Martha Rae for Polident.

Lena Horne for Sanka.

Joe DiMaggio for Mr Coffee.

Phil Rizzuto for the Money Store

Joe Namath for pantyhose.

Ricardo Montalbán and rich Corinthian leather.

Do you know me? Don’t leave home without it. Diners Club. Charge cards.

Commercials for the Ritz Thrift Shop fur store on 57th Street. “You don’t need a million to look like a million.”

L’Eggs.

Sticks of gum in a pack. Bazooka. Black Jack gum.

Paper match books with Famous Artist School tests: “Can you draw the pirate?”

Esso folding maps

Cans with pull tabs that you’d drop back into the drink

Ad on the backs of comics. X-ray specs. Sea Monkeys. 100 toy soldiers in a footlocker. Charles Atlas. Sell seeds and win prizes.

I signed up to sell shoes door-to-door. My mother forbade it.

Wind-up watches.

Saturday morning cartoons.

Sunday morning TV was soooo boring: church and news.

Zoom was a TV show. So was the Electric Company.

Our first Betamax recorder when everyone else got a VHS.

Recording TV shows over and over on used tapes. There were no video stores.

Reading the covers of records while listening to them.

Reading cereal boxes while eating them.

K-tel record collection commercials on TV — a constant scroll of the songs, with the one being played in yellow. No one ever orders them. Or Franklin Mint collectible plates.

Book of the Month Clubs.

TVs without remotes. Hanger antennas.

Watching the Honeymooners, The Odd Couple, Good Times, Sanford and Son, James at 15.

Sunday morning. Abbott and Costello. How many movies did they make?

When staying home sick: Mr Ed, The Mothers-In-Law, Green Acres. Punctuated with lots of commercials to learn air conditioner repair and truck driving,

National anthem on TV meant the end of broadcast day

Test pattern.

What do you remember?

Your pal,

Danny

But in reality I’m a rule follower, begrudgingly but nonetheless obedient.

I stop on yellow, I floss daily, I rarely kick dogs. But most of the rules in my life are ones I set myself.

Case in point: The Ten Commandments of Art Making.

I. Thou shalt not draw with a pencil. This is the holiest of my commandments, the one rule to rule them all. Pencil lines can fade, smudge, and most importantly, be erased. Always draw it in ink.

It’s a law that has served me well. It helped me develop confidence in my line because whatever I drew remained there indelibly on the paper. I couldn’t approximate, hem, haw, or shilly-shally. Those black lines are forever, which means I reflexively pause to consider for a moment before I start to draw, making a commitment before I make a mark.

I’ve passed this rule down for decades, inscribing it in books, in lectures, in videos. I’ve backhanded many a whining beginner, terrified of an ordinary ballpoint pen. I get up in their face like a drill sergeant, demanding they toughen up and uncap their pens.

And yet.

I own pencils. I own erasers. And I’m finally willing to admit I’ve used both.

Last year, I committed to 31 days of Inktober, creating full-page illustrations completely out of my imagination. Composing the pages required a lot of thumbnailing and rearranging. I discovered how wonderful it is to be able to do a light pencil sketch and then erase and rearrange bits. The results were still wonky, but the armature of graphite gave me the confidence I needed.

Nonetheless, especially for beginners, this, the cardinal rule, is still pretty much inviolable, sacrosanct, written in ink.

Do as I say. Not as I do.

II. Thou shalt not draw from photos. Draw from reality whenever possible. Cameras see with one eye and flatten reality so it’s easier to transfer onto a two-dimensional page. When I draw from three-dimensional reality, I have to do that work myself. It’s harder, but it inclines me to make decisions on my own and study my subject all the harder. Most reference photographs are the work of someone else, a photographer who decided the framing, composition, palette, and focus.

These days, a lot of my drawing is based on reference photographs. That started as a necessary evil during the pandemic, when I began doing a lot of live streaming and needed to share my reference with people on YouTube.

But whenever possible, I like to sit in front of my subject, reposition myself to get the perfect angle, close one eye, then the other, measure with an outstretched thumb, and only then begin to draw.

This is another rule that I think is an extremely good idea, especially for beginners, who need to learn to make these decisions for themselves.

III. Thou shalt not start a new sketchbook if the current one isn’t full. The first dozen or two sketchbooks I kept were completely consecutive and chronological. Cracking open a fresh sketchbook was a reward for having finished the previous one.

This rule meant I was stuck with the dimensions and paper type of the current sketchbook. This turned out to be pretty helpful. Even if I wanted to try something different, I had to continue working within the confines I’d set until I was done. That kept me focused and working on the particular challenges the sketchbook posed.

I couldn’t just walk away from the problem. I had to keep trying to solve it.

Over the last couple of decades, there have been so many new options when it comes to sketchbooks: all sorts of shapes, sizes, colors, and paper types. Rather than hitting my head against the edges of the particular book I was working in, I’ve come to see all these options as tools to suit what I’m doing. If I feel like working with watercolor one day, a dip pen the next, colored pencils, alcohol markers, gouache … I don’t have to wait until the current book is filled. I can experiment with toned paper, square paper, hard press and cold, bristol, a larger size, or a smaller one.

I now have shelves of sketchbooks that are not completely filled and are not sequentially numbered. They have allowed me to experiment and play, and relaxing this particular rule has helped me grow.

That said, I still advise beginners to stay the straight and narrow until they have a decent stack of completely-filled sketchbooks under their belts. (Which sounds uncomfortable. Don’t carry stacks of sketchbooks under your belt.)

IV. Thou shalt not frame your art. You won’t find many of my drawings and paintings hanging on the walls of my house and, if they are, they’re probably held up with thumbtacks.

It’s not that I don’t like my art or think it looks good on the wall. It’s more that I don’t like the feeling of creating something that will be decorative and out of context.

I strongly believe in being a sketchbook artist, and that means I work in a book that can be held in your hands and looked at page after page. I think that experience creates an entire world that the viewer enters as they turn the pages, a chronological sequence of images that relate to the ones that precede and follow it. It’s very different from making a drawing to hang above the toilet.

This is a rule I apply only to myself and don’t expect anybody else to follow it. It has helped me keep my art personal and authentic.

V. Thou shalt not sell your art. I’ve never entered a show or put my work in a gallery (partly because no one’s ever asked). I feel my art is connected to me, the output of my own personal process, and turning it into a product seems out of sync with that. I just couldn’t imagine some stranger paying money to take one of my journal pages and put it in their home.

That being said, I have done illustrations for magazines, newspapers, websites, and, of course, more than 20 books of my own and others’. But it’s my least favorite way to make art, and I always feel like it puts me back to my old days in advertising with clients and work orders, a completely different process from what I make for myself.

VI. Thou shalt not use an eraser. As a follower of the Church of Wonkiness, I love seeing the process of my drawing on the page, the palimpsest. Mistakes, ink splatters, redrawn lines, are all part of my aesthetic. Mistakes are proof of humanity, of accessibility, of authenticity. So many of my favorite artists feel the same way. We don’t try to be perfect. We’re willing instead to be true.

However, I love my Pentel Presto white-out pen.

I’m not trying to hide that I use it, and I’m not trying to obscure my mistakes, but sometimes a big blunder can be annoying and get in the way of some other purpose in making the drawing. It’s okay to patch over a section of a drawing that you’re not happy with or paint it out with white gouache or even (shudder) use an eraser.

I think flexibility with this rule is a sign of my developing maturity. As long as I’m not being dishonest in my process, it’s perfectly fine. To erase is human.

VII. Thou shalt not make digital art. I think this stems back to an earlier time when drawing on a computer meant using Illustrator and drawing with a mouse. A lot of people dislike digital art and when I made my course, “How to Be an iPad Artist,” I felt compelled to keep saying that I also thought digital art was cold, sterile, or ugly, but that the iPad was changing my tune.

When I first started using Procreate, my inclination was to try to reproduce how I worked in my sketchbook, so I tried to simulate watercolor, textured paper, and writing with a dip pen. After that proved to be a hopeless pursuit, I had to admit that this is a medium with its own aesthetics. Rather than fighting it, I began to lean into bright colors, layers, smooth lines, and all the experimental techniques I was discovering. I use my iPad every day now, and the art I make on it is as much me as anything made on paper. In some ways I like working this way even better. After all, I can’t play Miles Davis on my sketchbook.

VIII. Thou shalt not use gouache. I love watercolor — the poetry of layering glazes, the soft edges, the organic effects of pooling water. Gouache seemed ham-fisted by comparison, the blunt tool of fabric designers and 1950s illustrators. (I actually love a lot of 1950s illustrators, so this wasn’t particularly fair.) It was one of those knee-jerk rules that probably came from the tube of white gouache that lurks in every watercolor set. Mixing in opaque white felt like cheating — like putting ketchup on eggs.

Over the last year or so I’ve been painting with gouache fairly regularly. In some respects it harkens back to painting with acrylics as I used to when I was a kid, but without the slightly plastic feeling that acrylic has for me. I love the matte, chalky effect of a thick layer. Painting with opacity and mixing colors is a completely different skill than glazing. It’s not worse, it’s just different.

IX. Thou shalt not use synthetic brushes. Synthetic brushes used to be absolutely awful. They were slippery, they didn’t hold water, and they really intruded on the experience of luscious glazing with watercolor.

One of the miracles of the 21st century is how far the science of brush-making has come. Honestly, not only do I now use synthetic brushes, I prefer them to my Series 7 Winsor Newton Kolinsky sable brush. I also prefer not butchering innocent animals to hack off their tails.

X. Art has no rules. Yeah, I totally still believe this one. Rules suck.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. I just made one of my favorite videos in a really long time, and it’s related to where a lot of these rules came from. It’s about how I first started my sketchbook practice, but it’s also about what my life was like then. For the first time ever, I am sharing some films from the time that were just wonderful to work with. I hope you enjoy it. Please leave a comment, give it a thumbs up, and subscribe.

My sister’s mother-in-law died the week before after a similar period of morphine-induced hallucinations chipped away at her dignity.

Death sucks, but by the time you reach my age, it becomes more and more a fact of life.

Sixteen years ago, soon after my first wife Patti passed away, I wrote the following blog post that I thought I would share with you again.

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 dedicated to stillborns and infant deaths. She insisted on having her picture taken with wee Jack yet in utero.

Disturbing, right?

It all seems like foreshadowing, which of course it was. We always knew we’d die, but somehow mocking and delighting in death seemed 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 a haze of Alzheimer’s. But I was one of her pallbearers, 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.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Speaking of memories, I just launched a new project that uses words and pictures to help you capture moments from your life and reflect on the past. Anyone can do it to gain more insight into their life and have fun while using the skills and art supplies you already have. It’s called Me Time, and you can learn more about it here.

Discover Me Time

In middle school, Maggie wanted to be an actress or be in musical theater. She is a natural ham with an incredible singing voice. I was excited to have another creative person in our family.

One day, I heard that she had now decided to go to law school, not Broadway. Maggie has always been pretty argumentative, so I guess that made some sense. A year later, when I brought up the law, I got blank stares. It turned out that her ambition was now to be a doctor. Since she got to Boston, she has already cycled through lawyer, surgeon, physician’s assistant, and occupational therapist — and now seems to be settling on something in psychology. Or maybe sociology.

That’s the way it should be at this age, where you flip the channels until you find something you want to settle down with.

When my son Jack was in high school, his focus was art, and he went to a high school that focused on all forms of it. His friends were actors and musicians, and when he got into the Rhode Island School of Design, it came as no surprise to anybody.

As his dad and patron, I teetered between encouraging his creativity to take any form he chose and encouraging him to do something that would pay his bills in the future. I assumed he would study graphic design, which has so many practical applications, but then he announced that he was going to major in painting. I knew that path would be a tougher one to economic independence, but I trusted him and that he would always land on his feet.

Jack has many creative skills. He is also a smart guy — organized and hardworking. When he graduated from college, he didn’t have a particular career path picked out. He landed in Los Angeles a couple of months later and became a freelancer in film production. Before long, he joined the union and spent his twenties working in sets and props. His career path seemed set.

I’d spent a lot of money on his tuition to help him be disciplined and imaginative, self-motivated and collaborative, a dreamer who can produce results. All of those seeming contradictions coalesced in a person who can step into an unclear situation and emerge with answers and results. Art school trained Jack to be a problem solver, and nondenominational problem-solving is one of the strongest skills you can have in the world today, a world in which nothing is clear, everything changes, and skills can lose their value overnight.

When I went to college, I had no idea what I would do for a living when I graduated. By the time I graduated, I still had no idea.

For me, in the late 70s, college was an opportunity to grow up, to explore, experiment, and try things out in a relatively risk-free environment. It helped me gain confidence and become a well-educated person. Whether I was studying Chaucer or Russian politics, theatre or creative writing, I used those four years to deepen and enrich myself as a person and get a sense of what was out there in the world and the things one could do. That gigantic menu was there to browse, without having to place an order at the end.

The skills I developed and the knowledge I gained were designed to help me grow as a person, not just as a worker. Sure, I had classmates who were focused on becoming engineers, architects, or investment bankers, but I emerged open to the world and ever-curious.

My path might have been easier if it had been narrowed for me, if I had a degree that was obviously applicable to a particular industry, but instead, I was a man of the world.

It served me well.

I can’t imagine how Princeton would have prepared me for what I do today, nearly half a century later, long before there was YouTube, Zoom, online courses, or email newsletters.

So much has changed since then.

Kids are trained to see their childhoods as a sort of career, full of extracurriculars that will look good on college applications. College, with its expenses and large loans, is now a fancy trade school designed to provide future security.

But the promise is hard to keep.

Young people’s futures are impossible to define. Maggie won’t leave college, get a job at a company, and stay there until she retires. She might change careers every five years. She might start her own company. Hanging a sheepskin or two or three on her wall is not the end of her education; it’s often just the beginning.

When Jack was confronted with the pandemic and then with the year-long Writers Guild strike, his career began to unravel, as did so many in the film industry. He decided to go back to school and learn visual effects and computer design. It was promised that this would lead to a career in the video game business, but within months of his taking courses, that industry began to collapse, too. There were mass layoffs as artificial intelligence replaced many jobs previously done by graduates of his technical school.

But Jack didn’t panic. He started yet another career, this time as a construction engineer.

It is something I’d never imagined for him, something I still don’t quite understand, but it’s turned out to be a great fit. He’s using so many skills he honed in college. Being an innovator, a collaborator, a manager of large, complex processes, and most importantly, a creative problem solver. The skills he developed to make paintings, then movies and TV shows, are now being put to use building a children’s hospital.

I tell my niece not to stress too much about which direction to take in her studies. She doesn’t need to expect clarity on exactly what she will do with her degree. The future is so unpredictable now that she can afford to be flexible. What matters most is being curious, being open, and, of course, working hard.

I tell Maggie that no matter how much knowledge she picks up in the classroom, no matter what skills she’s taught, everything is going to shift and evolve. The guts she had to step onto a stage at nine and belt out a song to a room full of strangers might turn out to be as useful as what she studied for her bio final last week.

Your pal,

Danny

I just finished meditating in the garden. It’s something I started doing a few weeks ago under the advice of my new therapist, Jane.

I plug in my AirPods and listen to a guide who tells me to pay attention to my breathing. To pay attention to my body parts from scalp to hoof. And when I am settled, the disembodied voice in my ears paints pictures of how I can see my reality in brighter terms.

The monkey in my head encroaches. Thoughts of chores and wars interrupt my revery, but I am learning to gently push them aside and settle back on my breathing.

I have tried doing this whole thing before, but with little success.

I end up telling myself it’s having no effect, or it’s woo-woo, or that I’m just not a meditation person. But I understand now that it’s hard to form a habit unless I have a meaningful goal to aim for. Now I have one — to manage my anxiety — and meditation helps me first quiet my body’s reaction to my agitation and only then to quiet my mind. I am working to turn off a reflexive response that I have cultivated most of my life. I have finally come to accept that I can’t abide it for my remaining days. At long last, I deserve peace.

Drawing can be meditative. I can focus on my subject and slowly move around its contours, calmly looking and seeing landmarks which I record with my pen. With each mark, I can sink deeper into a flow state.

But it doesn’t always work that way. There are interruptions. There are ideas. And there are judgments.

When I was born, I was a sheet of crisp white paper. Pristine. But soon marks were made on me. Some were light pencil, others ballpoint, and some permanent marker. I was creased and crumpled. Careless, dirty fingers smudged me.

Over the years, I’ve tried to smooth my page. I took an eraser and managed to rub away some of the words and images. I turned over the page and took a warm iron to the folds.

Some lines bled through from the past, seemingly permanent. Many faded.

But I can never remove all my dog ears and rumples. Even if they are smoothed over and again, they still leave evidence of the ancient damage, faint irregularities and creases, bumps and lumps.

No matter how often I reexamine the source of those early marks, they never vanish completely. They still shape me. Seemingly inescapable. My reactions are deeply grooved into me, my knees yet jerk.

At this stage of my life, I recognize how much my past has made me. But I also see how I can take this wrinkled sheet of paper and write afresh upon it. I can focus on this breath of right now. I can draw this line slowly and confidently. I can still feel the fears for the future and the regrets of the past, but then turn away to listen to the quail on the wall, watch the cloud above, smell the gardenia blossoming, and breathe in, hold it, then slowly let it out.

Your pal,

Danny

PS I made this yesterday:

She wanted to know what the style is called because she has taken a lot of art lessons and they all apparently have labels that describe what it is, what school of art they belong to, I guess.

I swallowed hard.

Someone was finally calling my bluff.

They were onto the fact that I’m not a real artist, let alone a real art teacher.

I wrote the following to explain my way out of this corner. I hope I don’t sound too defensive.

Dear R_:

I don’t think of what I do as a way of drawing but as a way of living.

I use drawing to gain a greater appreciation of my life, to look at things around me longer and harder than I normally would, and to help me to be more present and appreciative of what my life contains.

I try to slow myself down when I draw and connect to my feelings about the moment.

I’ve been doing this for three decades now, so I like to reshuffle the deck periodically, to make sure I’m not getting jaded by developing a style and approach that somehow automates and dulls the experience.

To that end, I study other artists, and they influence me for a while until that influence just becomes part of me.

I change up my materials to reawaken my awareness to a new sense of unfamiliarity and discomfort, which helps me keep the experience fresh.

Generally, I just pick stuff up as I go along and consider the whole thing an adventure.

And it’s an adventure that I want to encourage other people to go on too, either with me or on their own. It’s done so much for me that I can’t help being a missionary for drawing, but I don’t have a real answer as to how you personally should do it best or what your art should look like.

I don’t intend to teach anyone a specific style of art making, but rather to encourage them, through exposure to lots of different artists and ideas and materials, to come up with an approach that engages and suits them.

So, in short, my particular type of drawing is Danny Drawing, but my goal is to help you develop R__ Drawing, whatever that means to you.

If you insist on calling it something, how about “illustrated journaling”? That’s usually been my default when pressed, because I like diaries, and illustrated books, and maps, and diagrams, and stuff that feels like a record of the journey we’re on.

If you have a better answer, I’d love to hear it.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. If you’d like to experience what I teach, join us for my Day in Paris workshop this weekend. But hurry — you only have a few more hours to sign up.

I want to come to Paris!

Like Peter Parker, whose spidey-sense makes him alert to any danger around him, we artists feel everything.

It’s our job.

We have a deep awareness of the world around us, tuning in on every nuance. We see hidden patterns, details, emotions, sensations, and impressions that others never notice. We are deeply empathetic to other people’s feelings.

And we train ourselves to become even more sensitive. If I sit and draw a portrait, I work to notice every minute aspect of the subject, recording details they never even noticed about themselves.

It goes beyond just the visual details. We cultivate emotional depth, mining for meaning, analogy, and metaphor. We locate patterns, subtexts, and underlying structures. That’s the raw material for our work.

That perceptiveness isn’t just aimed at the outside world. It’s an inside job, too.

Being an artist means being willing to lay yourself open. To pick at scabs that others bandage with denial. To constantly probe what’s going on in our heads and our hearts. To notice how we are noticing. To dissect our feelings so we can reassemble them in the medium of our choice and share them with the world.

We need to feel how we feel to make you feel.

How often have we encountered a work of art and said, “How did you know?” That shock of recognition that makes us feel less alone, that binds us to each other, that’s one of the greatest powers of art, of music, of stand-up comedy.

But it takes a lot of understanding to bring it to life. It takes a willingness to be vulnerable, to expose what we have dug up from within, to be brave enough to put it out there, no matter the response.

Doing this work alters who we are, rewires our brains and nervous systems, thins our skin, and exposes our nerves. It takes guts.

It also makes us a pain in the ass.

Sensitive people can be a real drag to have around.

So much drama. So much neediness.

We feel emotions more intensely, to the point that we feel stressed, overwhelmed, and anxious, while others shake their heads in disbelief.

Being hyper-sensitive means we can detect hidden motives, detecting patterns before they surface for others to see.

But we’re not always right.

How often do sensitive people overreact, demanding attention, special handling, conjuring up what-if scenarios, and apocalyptic fictions around us?

Being a storyteller is a craft. Being paranoid is a curse.

We can also be obsessive. Perfectionists. Overthinkers. Indecisive. We don’t set good boundaries. We can overpromise and underdeliver.

But don’t tell us that.

Having thin skin means you can’t take criticism well.

We put ourselves out there, but then we can’t handle the response. Even well-intentioned feedback can seem like categorical rejection and betrayal. And even applause can seem suspect and double-edged, unearned, triggering imposter syndrome.

The history of art is full of supersensitives.

Van Gogh. Beethoven. Sylvia Plath. Edvard Munch. Kurt Cobain. Tennessee Williams. Anton Chekhov. Frida Kahlo. Virginia Woolf. Nick Drake. Heath Ledger. Marilyn Monroe. Robin Williams. Richard Pryor.

Many are shy, crippled with social anxiety. Many act out. Self-medicate with drugs or alcohol to dull their sensitivity. Resort to harming themselves — or worse.

Our sensitivity is an inextricable part of our wiring, a crucial component of making art. We don’t need to be ashamed or afraid of it.

I love being an artist. I’m glad I’m sensitive. It’s a gift.

And I want to be productive and happy for the rest of my years.

And less of a pain in the ass.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. If you’d like to hang out with a lot of creative people (who I promise are fun and never annoying), join my upcoming live workshop, A Day in Paris, on May 16. We’ll spend the morning turning an imaginary trip into a gorgeous piece of art and have a blast doing it. Learn more here.

I couldn’t begin to catalog them all. There are so many things I’ve learned in my life.

Some I learned in school, some from reading books, but most I learned by doing, by taking risks, by failing, iterating, and improving my way to expertise.

You’d think that after all that, I’d be fearless. I’m not.

After all, I’ve become an expert, and the world sees me that way too. I don’t appear as a floundering beginner anymore, but as a supremely competent adult who has the answers and is sought out for advice.

Experts don’t like to fail. It undermines our credibility. And we have dignity to maintain as we get older. We can’t look foolish if we want to appear wise.

By the time a man reaches fifty, he’s spent decades building a reputation for competence. Young colleagues stop by his office — or his Slack — to ask how things work. His kids call him when their landlord is being unreasonable or their car makes a noise. Neighbors defer to him on baseball trades and fishing lures and lawn care and anything else he has somehow lived long enough to have an opinion about. He knows how to tip at a restaurant, how to talk to a contractor, how to read a balance sheet. The world has decided he is a person who knows things.

This is not entirely comfortable. Authority carries a certain weight — people expect you to have answers, so you learn to project confidence even when you’re improvising. But it also becomes part of how you see yourself. The identity of the competent man is seductive and hard to shed.

And nothing threatens it quite like being a beginner at something.

I notice this particularly in men — including myself. Women sign up for art classes in droves. About 85% of the students at Sketchbook Skool are women. Conferences, workshops, retreats — same story. I’ve thought a lot about why. The most likely answer is that many men would rather not be seen not knowing something. We will get lost rather than ask for directions. We will assemble furniture without the instructions and spend an extra hour doing it wrong. We will sit in silence at a dinner party while the conversation strays into territory we don’t recognize, rather than ask a question that might reveal our ignorance.

Art class is the ultimate exposure. You show up not knowing how to do something, and then you do it badly, in front of other people. You’re surrounded by strangers who may be better at it than you. There’s no jargon to hide behind, no way to make not-knowing sound like strategy. For a man who has spent decades being the one people come to with questions, that’s not a learning opportunity — that’s an identity crisis with a paintbrush.

When we stop learning, we stop growing, and when we stop growing, we start dying. But to learn, we have to be willing to fail.

A lot of this fear has earlier roots than we think. When we were kids, around fifth grade, the boy who drew better than everyone else was either admired or resented — but either way, everyone else knew where they stood. We absorbed a verdict about ourselves and our abilities, and then filed it away. “Not an art person.” Case closed.

The trouble is, we filed it away in 1979 — or whenever fifth grade was — and never re-examined it. We’ve re-examined almost everything else. Our politics, our diets, our careers, our marriages. But we accepted the art verdict at age ten and have been carrying it around ever since like a library book we forgot to return.

Psychologists talk about two kinds of intelligence — fluid and crystallized. Fluid intelligence is the raw processing power of youth: quick uptake, fast pattern recognition, the ability to absorb new information at speed. That peaks in your twenties and declines slowly from there.

Crystallized intelligence is different. It’s the accumulated weight of experience — knowing not just facts but how things connect, what matters and what doesn’t, when to trust your gut and when to ignore it. And it continues to build well into your seventies and beyond.

So the older you are, the better equipped you are to learn something like art — where so much depends not on dexterity or speed but on seeing, on patience, on the willingness to keep going when a drawing isn’t working. Failure is an option. In fact, it’s essential. You already know that most things worth doing require perseverance. You’ve proven it, many times over, in other parts of your life. You just haven’t applied it here yet.

Something else I read: neuroscience has overturned the old assumption that adult brains can’t grow new cells. They can, and they do — particularly when we engage in creative activity. The brain changes shape depending on how you use it. Drawing, painting, making anything by hand — these activities build new neural pathways, keep the mind supple, and give it something genuinely novel to chew on.

In short, taking up art at sixty is one of the better things you can do for the organ in your skull.

But forget the science for a moment. The real point is this: the older we get, the more we get out of art.

When you’re young and busy, you draw, and what you produce feels thin, hurried, an afternoon’s entertainment to impress your friends by drawing a rock star or a comic book superhero. When you’re older, and you sit down with a sketchbook and actually look — at the coffee cup, the street, the face of someone you love — you start to see what you have. The years accumulate in what you notice. The things you’ve learned to pay attention to show up on the sketchbook page. And you’re not doing it just to get a grade or meet a deadline, but to gain the quiet, private satisfaction of having made something true to you.

To start, you don’t need a class, just a pen and something to draw on.

But if a class helps you get started — if seeing other beginners fumble alongside you makes the fumbling easier — then take one. The people in the class are not there to judge you. They’re there because they’re in exactly the same boat, a little nervous, a little hopeful, wondering whether they can do this.

Most of them can. So can you.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. It took me twelve years to finally finish my latest video. Back in 2014, Jenny and I drove from Los Angeles to New York City — 3,717 miles, ten days — and I drew and watercolored the entire trip as we went. The footage and the journals sat on a hard drive ever since. Last week, I finally put it all together. Click to watch it on YouTube

Both of these techniques dramatically improved the kinds of drawings I could make, but they also carried a social penalty. You never wanted someone to say, “Did you trace this?” That was the ultimate humiliation. As a result, I either avoided using these tools or I lied about them and hid the truth.

We also had an art teacher who could draw a perfect circle freehand. Everybody thought that was incredibly cool. That somehow morphed into a belief that you were never allowed to use a compass to draw a circle or a ruler to draw a straight line in art class. If someone spotted a tiny pinprick on your page that revealed you’d used a compass, you were an art pariah.

In middle school, we started learning how to do research papers. We were warned not to use the encyclopedia if a teacher suspected we had copied an essay from Encyclopedia Britannica. If that happened, you got called out in broad strokes of her red pen. You were supposed to read real books, consult primary sources, and use footnotes. Woe to the kid who plagiarized or lied about his sources.

Maybe middle schoolers are just crafty little thieves and liars. It seemed like we were being handed a lot of rules about not cheating, thieving, lying or leaving the toilet lid up, and most of those lessons were invaluable. They kept us fairly honest, and they taught us a lot of ways to get away with things by hiding our true process.

My grandmother was a fussbudget and a purist about most things. She taught me that tea bags were unacceptable and that you had to use loose tea. She believed you should never eat frozen food of any kind, and that canned soup and vegetables were not even fit to feed dogs. She was a snob, but she also had a cook and several servants, so she could afford to be picky. Later, when she retired and had to cook for herself and my grandfather, she became a big fan of convenience foods and instant coffee.

For much of my youth, I held on to lots of purist notions too. If I’d been older, I probably would have booed Dylan when he went electric. If I’d been born in this century, I’d collect vinyl records, VHS tapes, and make my own pickles.

Art was no different.

For years, I was an absolutist about drawing from real life. I would draw shoes and toilets and piles of dirty dishes, but I would never draw from photographs. I had this idea that that was some sort of cheating. I’d explain it by saying that drawing from 3-dimensional objects is a much better educational experience and results in more authentic drawings. And I absolutely believe that’s still true. But there are lots of things that simply aren’t readily available to be looked at and drawn, things like rhinoceroses and Notre Dame, willow trees and naked models.

So I’ve come to believe that photo reference is, kind of, an acceptable thing. But it was only during the pandemic, when I was doing daily livestreams on YouTube and had to share my subject matter with thousands of other people while I drew, that I started to rely on photographic reference to fill many pages of my sketchbook.

After we all got our vaccines, I found another reason to draw from photographs. I now live in Phoenix, AZ, and, no insult intended, but New York just had an awful lot more cool things to draw, and it was a lot easier to just walk over and draw them. In Phoenix, it’s very hot, the buildings are by and large undistinguished, and nobody walks anywhere, so, while I could spend a lot of time sitting and drawing in my air-conditioned car, I’m perfectly fine with pulling up some images on my computer when I need something to draw.

Oh, and even though I was a purist about only drawing with a pen, I use a pencil now and again, and I own several erasers.

Sorry, but it’s taken me a while to finally figure out that art isn’t about slavishly following rules; it’s about constantly finding new ones to break.

Throughout history, artists have led the way in adopting new technologies. We have always sought better, faster, and easier ways to create. Part of that is because we’re interested in new things and new ways to work, but it’s also an economic necessity. If an artist can use technology to speed up the process, we can make more art and more money.

In his book, Secret Knowledge, David Hockney describes how he covered a wall in his studio with images arranged chronologically and saw vividly that around 1420 something changed. Art looked different. Overnight, artists could suddenly draw better, capturing people and perspective far more accurately. The common wisdom in the art history world was that suddenly, people just figured out how to draw well. As a practicing artist, Hockney knew there had to be more to this.

As he describes in the book (and in the documentary you can watch on YouTube), people were using cameras — even in the 15th century. They used lenses and mirrors to project images of people and places onto canvases, then traced and painted them.

With the help of physicists, lens makers, and historical documents, he makes an ironclad case that many artists whose work looks like photographs were actually using secret knowledge to achieve incredible results.

And why don’t we know this? Why do we think that Jan van Eyck, Caravaggio, Vermeer, and so many other important artists were magically talented artists when they were actually using these tools? And does this diminish their accomplishments?

Hockney provides a simple explanation: these were trade secrets. Even their assistants often didn’t know how they achieved these results. It gave them an edge in a world where speed and realism meant higher commissions.

But, as Hockney points out, the lenses, mirrors, and cameras didn’t make the art. The artists did, using tools to help bring their vision to life. The Secret Knowledge does not rob these masters of their originality or expressive power. They had extraordinary skills, a blend of talent, ingenuity, experience, and decades of hard work.

People have always felt that artists needed to suffer. That, if their work doesn’t come from sweat and tears and trauma, it isn’t ‘true art’. That, if you see how the magician does the trick, it loses its power.

There is also a myth that artists are a special breed apart, bestowed with some kind of divine gift. We need to believe that Michelangelo painted the entire Sistine Chapel on his own (two coats!). So we ignore all those nameless apprentices who painted backgrounds for Rafael and da Vinci and so many geniuses who followed. Similarly, we never know about all the trade secrets each atelier jealously guarded.

When people complain about AI stealing artists’ work, I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m skeptical. The fact is, artists and photographers have always had their work stolen by unscrupulous people. And artists have always borrowed other artists’ work, often without credit.

Andy Warhol cheated all the time. He made photo stats of pages from the Daily News and screen printed them onto canvas or projected and traced them. Roy Lichtenstein copied comics. Van Gogh copied Japanese woodcuts. Bacon copied Muybridge. And every artist, no matter how great, stands on the shoulders of the ones who precede him.

And all the artists who never cheated? They were just never caught.

I think people who aren’t artists are more troubled by the idea of artists cheating than other artists are. Photography, the airbrush, paint in tubes, Procreate, and even the “maulstick” (a stick to steady the hand) were all once called cheating.

Artists know that it’s just part of the job. Art isn’t the Olympics. There is no “standard equipment.” Use what works.

Maybe one day, AI will be able to draw as inaccurately and wonkily as I do. Maybe it’ll even be able to paint with gouache and tempera sticks. Even if some future model of artificial intelligence could duplicate every page in every one of my sketchbooks, there’d really be no point.

It will never be “Danny generated.”

For me, the process of making art is what matters, not the result. The feeling of sitting and staring at an old shoe, a sandwich, or some dirty laundry. The sensation of a Lamy Safari nib scratching across a page of Vellum Bristol. Of a sable brush skating across the surface of a creamy pan of cad yellow. And of 65 years of experience and emotions, ideas and dreams, joys and fears guiding the movement of these digits of flesh and bone. I don’t think any technology will be able to simulate that experience. And even if it could, why bother? I already have a device that does it sitting between my ears.

I’m done with ‘Secret Knowledge’ in my own studio. I’m putting away the shame of the middle-schooler who hid his tracing paper, because Jan van Eyck didn’t feel guilty, and neither should I.

Your pal,

Danny

And I don’t mean the wall where everything looks terrible and you want to quit. That one usually pops up within a few days of starting to draw and it’s almost cozy in comparison, because at least you know what the problem is.

No, the wall I’m talking about is the one where you open a sketchbook from six months ago, lay it next to what you drew this week, and you genuinely cannot tell the difference. Same types of lines, same problems with hands or noses or perspective or mixing colors, same degree of progress.

Oh, you’ve been working. You’ve been showing up. But nothing seems to be developing anymore.

That’s a plateau. And it seems to stretch, flat and unvarying, out to the vanishing point you can’t seem to quite understand.

And the monkey — your inner critic that’s always looking for evidence that you should give up — the monkey loves this moment. “See? This is as far as you’re gonna get. This is just who you are. Mediocre.”

So let’s talk about what the heck is going on and what we are supposed to do about it.

Your brain is a pattern-recognition machine. When you’re learning something new it’s working hard. Building new connections, burning energy, making mistakes, figuring things out. That effort has a feeling to it — the feeling of getting better.

And then at some point your brain gets efficient at doing the things, drawing, driving, baking bread. It files away what it’s learned. The things that used to take enormous concentration — seeing negative space, getting proportions roughly right, not death-gripping the pen — all of that becomes automatic. Your brain has basically said: got it, sorted, what’s next?

Which is great, except that “what’s next” is your job to provide. And if you don’t give new instructions, the brain just keeps running the same efficient programs. Same drawings. Same results. Same wall.

The plateau isn’t a sign that you’ve reached the end of the road. It’s just your brain on cruise control.

The obvious response to a plateau is to work harder. Draw more. Practice more. Push through.

Makes sense. That’s what worked before. So when progress stalls, doing more of the same feels like the right answer.

But doing more actually makes it worse. Your brain is already efficient at what you’ve been practicing. More repetition just deepens the groove you’re already in. You’ll get very, very good at exactly what you already know, and nothing else will move.

I work out twice a week with Jenn, my trainer. Every month, she gives me a completely new program — different equipment, different focus. “This month, we’re working on hip mobility. These exercises work together to build balance and strength.” And I show up Monday, and there’s a whole new set of things I can’t do properly yet.

Sometimes she’ll have me do an exercise where I couldn’t possibly use the weight I’ve been lifting. New movement pattern, different muscles, have to start lighter. It feels like going backward.

But as Jenn explains it, I haven’t lost what I used to be able to do, I’m just starting at the bottom of something new. We’re targeting different muscles, and now those new muscles are growing. New connections are getting made. And when I go back to the original exercise, I’m stronger than I was before. What felt like a setback was actually the whole point.

Drawing works the same way. This will feel counterintuitive, so trust me for a sec: to get past a plateau, you have to temporarily go back to being bad at something.

Not bad at everything. Just bad at something new. Anything.

We sometimes hit a plateau because we know better. Our expectations of what we think we should be able to do becomes a real burden. You know what a good drawing should look like, and you keep trying to make that drawing, and you never go anywhere new because new means uncertain and uncertain means the monkey wins.

Give yourself ten pages — or a week, or a month — where the only rule is that you’re in your discomfort zone. No showing anyone. No standards. No posting to social media with self-derisive comments. Just experiments that take you into new territory.

There are lots of ways to try this. A different medium you haven’t used. A constraint that takes away your usual tools — draw only in one color for a month, or give yourself three minutes per drawing and stop there, regardless, or draw everything with your left hand for a week. Your usual drawing muscles won’t help you. You’ll have to build new ones.

Pick an artist whose art makes you slightly uncomfortable or confused. Spend a week with their work. Try to steal just one thing about how they see. Do it for a little while, and you’ll be sowing seeds that will show up in your work months later in unexpected ways. You’ll be looser. You’ll be more confident. You’ll be doing something different and you’ll have bulldozed over that hump.

A plateau is only invisible progress.

So pick up the lighter weight, lift it from a different angle. Challenge yourself to be a beginner again, to be bad again, to be different, to wander off the beaten path, into the weeds and find another upward route. Trust yourself to grow.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. If you want to try something new on May 16, join me in Paris. Kinda. I’m doing a live online workshop called “A Day in Paris,” and we’ll be seeing all the sites and creating a big illustrated journal spread capturing it all, and you can do it right from home. Get off the plateau and come to Paree with me. Find out more here.

Tell me more, mon ami!

When I tell myself I have a week to write something, I’ll dither. I’ll procrastinate. I’ll rewrite the same paragraph five times, and doubt slithers in. But the moment I say “you have ten minutes, starting now,” I’m off and running. I stop thinking about whether it’s perfect.

I just think, and the thinking becomes the thing.

We have this myth that real art requires real time—long, uninterrupted blocks where we can disappear into the work. Big beautiful stretches of nothing but us and the blank page.

Weekend workshops, sabbaticals, cabins in the woods.

And maybe that’s true for some people. But I’ve found the opposite. Most of the good work I’ve done came in the little spaces between other things. Five minutes waiting for coffee. The walk to the car. Notes jotted down while brushing my teeth. I’ve written a dozen books this way, and every one of them was built from moments I almost didn’t count as real time.

Whether it’s a restricted palette of three colored pencils or ten minutes on the clock, the boundary creates a direct line to the end. There’s no room for overthinking.

If I break my working day into little slots—thirty minutes for this, twenty for that—and I’m intentional about what goes in each one, my days become rich instead of vanishing between my fingers. It doesn’t all have to be “work” in the sense of output. Fifteen minutes learning something new. Twenty-five minutes napping. Thirty minutes with a book and not my phone.

I’m choosing what happens in the in-between spaces instead of letting them evaporate into nothing. The enemy is long chunks of undifferentiated time, hours with no shape. That’s where procrastination lives, where the small voice tells me that conditions need to be perfect before I can begin.

The other half of this is environment. When I sit down to draw, the materials I need are there at hand in a little IKEA cart. Not dried- up tubes of paint lost in a dusty closet that require archaeology to dig up. I have a list of essay topics I could write on. I have a bunch of ideas for drawing projects. I don’t have to stare at the wall, wondering what I’m supposed to do. The work is already prepared. The thinking has been done.

And sometimes I’ll just say, I’m going to spend 20 minutes drawing random things I pull up on Google Images. It doesn’t have to be a big project, just the fun of making something new.

So if you are in a constant quest for time, let me remind you — you already have it. You have the five minutes before a meeting. You have the walk to the car. You have the margins. Stop waiting for the perfect moment and start using the moments you have. Give yourself constraints. Fill the small spaces. Prepare your tools. And then watch what happens.

The work can be smaller than you think. And it can still add up to big things.

Okay, I’m walking up my driveway now, and my 10 minutes are up. See you next week.

Your pal,

Danny