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,...
14 days 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...
21 days ago • 4 min read
One of the last theatrical experiences I had before the pandemic has stuck with me. We went to see Gatz, a wonderful staging of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The play isn’t based on the novel. It is the novel. All 49,000 words of it, read aloud, over eight hours (including a few intermissions). All they left out were the chapter titles. Gatz was a profound experience and I’ve thought about it a lot, about what I felt as I sat in my narrow theatre seat for the better part of a Friday. The...
28 days ago • 4 min read
The roast chicken is in the oven, potatoes, and some steamed spinach. I just poured us two glasses of chardonnay. I call out, “How much time till we eat?” Jenny replies, “Twenty-five minutes.” Now what? I have some energy, but not a lot. I don’t want to exert myself anymore today. It’s Me Time, a little snack-sized serving to do something for myself. How often life serves up these little gaps in the day, time I might waste by scrolling on my phone. These are some of the things I did...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
When I was about fifteen, I developed an obsession with the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It is a wonderful place that wraps around the back of the granite walls of the Brooklyn Museum. I would take the #2 train of a Sunday and stroll its grounds in a sort of fugue. I wouldn’t see the old ladies with their walkers or the bearded hippies studying the vegetable garden or the Bangladeshi families in their Sunday best taking family photos with their Instamatics. They didn’t exist because I was...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Life is not an oil painting, sealed behind varnish and clamped in a golden frame, hanging in a white walled gallery in Chelsea, waiting to be bought by a hedge fund manager’s third wife. Life is not an edition of etchings, a long series of identical impressions. Life is not a mural, intended as a public display or the backdrop to an expensively furnished room. Life is not wallpaper. Life is not a bronze sculpture, cold, monumental, an abstracted, idealized image of a hero long forgotten. Life...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Yesterday I sat down in my studio and I thought about doing some drawing. My studio is a haven with climate control and voice-controlled lighting. I have carts full of watercolor sets and trays of colored pencils, a shelf groaning with unopened sketchbooks. It’s the perfect place to draw. And yet, I couldn't. Excuses were legion. I didn't have an inspiring idea for a subject matter. My boxes of markers and tubes of gouache just weren't firing me up. My back was a little stiff. I was...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
On the bottom shelf, under a pile of empty shopping bags in my garage, there's a big beaten-up cardboard box. On its side, in faded marker, is scrawled “writing stuff.” I'm working on a video about handwriting, and so I decided to crack open that old box and look inside for some examples of what my handwriting looked like when I was a much younger man. Inside are notebook after notebook full of stories and opening chapters and essays and journals that I wrote in the decade or so after I...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Why do you want to make art? What's in it for you? How will you feel about yourself if you are creatively productive? Do you care more about the product of your creativity or the process? Do you want to have a nice picture to hang on your wall, or do you want to have the feeling that comes from being creative? Write a paragraph or two about this. It will be a helpful reminder next time you're stuck. Here's my paragraph (because I’m me, there are three paragraphs)…¦. My why: I want to see what...
2 months ago • 2 min read