As a small child, I would rearrange the books on my little bedroom bookcase by color and height, alphabetizing authors, titles, subjects — a four-foot librarian. A book has always been a place for me, more than just an object. A place of adventure, discovery, and safety. I can do anything inside a book and never worry about the consequences. Be a pirate, a wolf, an astronaut, a king. I would walk down the street reading, lost in my book, transported, bumping into trash cans and grown-ups’...
10 days ago • 2 min read
Jenny and I have been watching a 4-part TV show called "Life After Life," based on a book we read several years ago by Kate Atkinson. The TV show is as wonderful and thought-provoking as the book. It's the story of a woman who dies again and again only to be reborn in the same time and place with a chance to do it all over again. Despite being killed by her own umbilical cord, by drowning, falling out of a window, a pandemic, a murderous husband, and many other slings and arrows, she returns...
17 days ago • 3 min read
When I was born, my name was Daniel Gregory. Before I was out of diapers, I was known as "Danny." Sometimes when my mother was trying to seduce me into doing something I was reluctant to do, she would call me "Dan." And of course, in any legal circumstance, going through passport control or signing up for a credit card, I was "Daniel." I had fantasies of being arrested because I'd called myself Danny, two bald scowling cops in a small room grilling me on why I was an impostor going by an...
24 days ago • 3 min read
When I was 16, I went to the Rhode Island School of Design summer program. I arrived as a pretty insufferable and opinionated know-it-all — no doubt the reason my mother was eager to let me run off to Providence for a couple of glorious months of art classes and unsupervised dorm life. One week, our design teacher gave us a tough assignment: use up an entire #2 pencil to create a single drawing. The next day, the classroom walls were lined with the results: sheets of paper grimy with...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
At the west end of our garden, we have three enormous Chinese elms. They tower some thirty feet, a little cafe table and chairs tucked in their shade. A month ago, the tree on the right began to pump out fresh spring leaves. When my pugs and I strolled our street, we saw that the neighbor's elms were all getting leafy, too. But our other two elms remained skeletal, as naked as they'd been since fall began. I looked up at their bare branches and started to worry. What's going on with them? Are...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
There’s a photo I saw recently of a Model T Ford parked in the middle of a dusty Kansas field. Its back wheels are jacked up off the ground, a rope looped around the axle, and trailing off toward some kind of agricultural contraption. The car isn’t driving. It’s threshing wheat. When Henry Ford designed the Model T, he probably didn’t think of it as a grain mill. But that’s what happens when a tool gets into the hands of people who don’t just want to own it—they want to use it. Twist it, hack...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Sometimes when I go to the gym, I have to really drag my ass there. I am tired, low energy, whiny, wincing at the idea of exerting myself again. But I always leave revitalized, reenergized, and glad I came. Always. It's a predictable amnesia—my body forgets yesterday's post-workout high the moment today's effort looms. My studio is the same sort of place. There are times I avoid it. Or use it to watch YouTube videos and answer emails. An office, not a workshop. But these days, I’m going...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Let me admit something that I worry is a little duplicitous. Last week, I was working on a YouTube video, and I began it by showing some examples from my sketchbooks. The examples that I selected were the ones that looked the most photorealistic. I wanted to give viewers the sense that, hey, I actually know how to draw. I feel I have to establish my own bona fides before I can give people advice about drawing. But the reality is that those examples that I have of my ability to make accurate,...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
My sister said flying was totally safe. She’d just come back from Disneyland and had no problem. “I just wiped the seat down, the armrest, nothing happened. Don’t worry about it.” Jenny was worried. Worried that we could be stranded forever and never be able to come home. That seemed way overly dramatic to me. Besides, we’d already paid a lot of money for the Airbnb. We had to go. So we went. The sunrise over JFK airport was the most insane I’d ever seen. Vermillion, peach, violet, the skies...
2 months ago • 4 min read