Do you draw pictures in restaurants? I do. I have a sketchbook with me to use if I am alone. I draw while waiting for the food to arrive, usually while having a beer or glass of wine. Or, even better, I draw on paper tablecloths when they are available. I did the drawing above in a first-class joint called Buttermilk Channel in Carroll Gardens. There were four of us, a family dinner. Not only is the food and the beer (I had Kelso Pilsner) exceptional but Buttermilk Channel Restaurant also has brown craft paper tablecloths. Craft paper has plenty of tooth, if you know the term. And, even better, when the waitress saw that I was drawing with a pen, she brought some crayons which, she said, they kept for kids. She added that when she was a little girl, her father would always draw something in crayon on her lunch bag. And, so, this being Brooklyn and everyone knows how wild Brooklyn is, I did a bunch of dance scenes along with some ponies and a dragon or two. It’s what I call “the usual stuff.” The waitress got a nice tip and (How could I say “no?”) roughly one half of the drawings that I made between courses. In short, my waitress friend was a little kid again for a moment. And, so was I although in my case it is a constant not a “for a moment” thing. BTW, Carroll Gardens is a great neighborhood and Buttermilk Channel is a great place for dinner, especially if you get there early enough not to have to wait for a table.

As we stood in front of a large Kandinsky at the beginning of MoMA’s “Inventing Abstraction, 1910 – 1925 show, a pal of mine said that he could not figure out how Kandinsky knew when a picture was finished. It can sometimes be hard to know. Sometimes it’s obvious; sometimes it is time for dinner and sometimes friends advise, “Stop before you screw it up.” The charcoal on toned gesso above is a case in point. When doing an oil, I typically prepare the surface with a toned gesso (rather than plain white gesso). It gives a picture a certain unifying tonality. And, I lay the whole thing out in charcoal, using a big, fat stick of the stuff. As I lay out the design in charcoal, I use my fingers or a stump to do some shading. The idea is that, if I paint very thinly, the charcoal drawing underneath will show through in a sort of ghostly way. I learned to do this by reading about how Titian worked. Anyway, when I was done with the charcoal under-drawing and getting ready to paint in the case at hand, several friends said that the picture was done, to step away from it, keep my hands where they are visible and drop that brush. So, I gave the work a good spraying with fix and here it is, done and done. Sometimes you need to be told when enough is enough.

This work is anything but recent. And, for that I apologize. It is a big oil, 30 by 50 inches. That’s big for me anyway. It was done before I knew any better, some 40 years ago. The foundation is a non-tempered, one-fourth inch Masonite sheet, with the smooth side abraded with rough steel wool (for better tooth.) This board is glued to a wooden cradle made with 1×2 pine stock. The business side was first given a couple of coats of Liquitex Gesso and then various areas were built up with heavy gesso medium to make a three-dimensional surface. I got this idea from an artist who lived at Westbeth a kind of art colony which includes apartments, studios and exhibition space in the West Village. I don’t recall his name but his pictures were truly three dimensional. Anyway, once everything had dried, I added more regular Liquitex Gesso to give a moon-like, smooth matte finish. Then, I started in with the oils. A lot of Alizarin Crimson and probably some Naples Yellow both mixed with some Venice Turpentine and a touch of cobalt drier. So far, the thing has been rock solid. Later, I did some additional, more abstract works using the same technique. Shortly after completing them, the need to pay attention to the day job took precedent and I focused on smaller pen and inks and pastels. The thing about oils is that they are a full-time job that require more time and attention than a day job, except that unfortunately they don’t always pay as well. And, certainly not as steadily, a key issue when a young family is involved. Despite all that, the idea of three shapes, figures, faces or whatever keeps coming back up in my fine art work. Sometimes there are five figures, but usually three. Did one just the other day.

I have been filling sketchbooks for more years than I want to admit. Suffice it to say, there is a shelf in my workroom which is 38 inches long with over 40 books in it and another which contains maybe another ten books or so. There are approximately 65 drawings in each book. I just finished the latest book the other day. This is the last drawing in it. I do these books when I am “on the road,” on planes, trains or just sitting in a waiting room somewhere. I never took these drawings too seriously although I always put some care and attention into them. But, I always cared enough to name each book and work out a catalog system. That got more sophisticated when computers came in, some 20 years ago. The last book I finished is named “Spectral.” The one before it is called “Satyr.” The current one is named “Splice.” Some books contain more or less coherent subject matter, like a graphic novel (Think Max Ernst’s “Semaine de Bonté but nothing so explicit as Chris Ware’s stuff.) Some are just a compendium of drawings with some sort of loose theme. I am taking these drawings more seriously now. They seem to have commercial value which surprises me. The moral of this story: don’t throw away or devalue your work. You never know.

Lighting Up The World

Today is my birthday and I did a little cartoon to memorialize it. I think that I am a lot younger than I look and feel. But, the truth is that I ain’t young anymore and the older I get the odder I get. It is fine. Strangers who see me drawing stuff while I ride a train or wait in an airport feel free to look on and talk which is both embarrassing and fine. The deal is that if you do work that you like, you’ve got no choice. You must keep doing it. I once worked in a job I hated, did it for years and while I was occasionally good at it, I admired those who loved it and knew that I would never be as good as them at it. So now, I thank my lucky stars that I am past all that and do the work that I was always meant to do, scribbling and doodling one way or another, morning until night. And, everyday, I can’t wait to do more of it.

The cartoon was done with a Wacom pad using Corel’s Painter 12.

Ball point pens are not just for doodling anymore. That’s the word from the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT, where they have an exhibit of ball point works as part of their currently running “Extreme Drawing” show. Is this news from the cutting edge of what it is all about in the art world? If it is, it may be the first time in my life that I have been at that cutting edge. Usually “cutting edge” for me means I need a haircut. I have been drawing with ball point pens for years, but admittedly rarely for “serious drawing.” I began to take the medium more seriously when I came across a show by Ikeda Tatsuo who uses ball point along with watercolor to do fantasy commentaries of contemporary life. And, while I now draw regularly and “seriously” with ball point, I started doing so originally as a defense against crashingly boring meetings that I was forced to endure as the price for dealing with a “day job” that I could barely stand. Far better to draw with a ball point pen, I reasoned, than to stab yourself with one when you need to work for a deceitful, self-aggrandizing clown. The drawing above is a case in point. It was during a two day seminar the content of which was forgotten as soon as it was over. Those days are thankfully behind me now. But, I still do the drawings.

The trouble with turning out a lot of work is that you forget stuff. I just discovered that I forgot a whole sketch book full of work that I did not more than two or three years ago. This book has some 47 drawings, all in pen and ink with the majority also incorporating watercolor. I hadn’t forgotten that I had this book but I definitely forgot what was in it. They are the usual grotesque subject matter that I cannot stop myself from doing when I am working for my own account and just having fun. The above work is a case in point. It is as the title indicates the 34th drawing in the book. We do not want to meet such a creature at night. I don’t have nightmares about creatures like this. Nor do I have hallucinations. And, I have never enjoyed sessions with a psychiatrist, at least not as a patient. Perhaps I should. The fact is, however, drawings of things horrid or grotesque is nothing new. Take a look at Gorey, Kubin, Doré, Ernst, Redon, Goya (whose darkest works adorned his dining room walls of all things) and then go way back to the Renaissance with Buonarroti’s dragons and before that to the gargoyles of the Dark Ages. Anyway, since I unearthed this book, I am going to be posting more of its more bizarre contents, if only so that I won’t forget that I did them.

I have been slowly filling a sketch book called “Spectral” for months. This is the latest. I only work on this notebook when I am waiting for or riding on a train or a plane. And, half the time, I have to admit that, rather than draw, if it is late in the day, I get a bit weary and doze off. But, when I am drawing, I get a lot of reaction from people who give a look at what I am doing. These reactions range from a very quick peek and then a look away, pretending that they weren’t interested to a general comment (“Interesting,” “Are you an artist?” “How long does it take to finish one of those?”). In a few instances, there’s a long conversation. Most people have never seen a professional artist draw a picture. So they ask how pictures are done and are amazed when I give them a tour of color and composition. Few realize how complicated it all is. Some get a bit bent out of shape about the subject matter: “why not draw some flowers rather than those odd creatures? “ Anyway, this is one of my “Life on Mars” pictures. I have been drawing stuff like this in odd moments for more years than I am going to admit here (beyond saying that I am an old geezer) and have been getting reactions and answering questions for about the same amount of time. It is nice to share and if I can get someone to think a bit about what they are seeing. Some like what I do and some don’t. But, just about everyone has a reaction. And, that’s the whole idea.

This is some guy lounging outside in mid-town New York City or maybe on a bench in Central Park near 5th and 60th. I don’t recall. I don’t know who he is and he doesn’t look like this, at least not much anyway. And, he definitely did not have his shirt off. The day was relatively warm but not that warm. We have had a cold spring so far. But, I made a quick sketch of him without him catching on and took it back with me. Then, I got a panel out and did a charcoal drawing based on the sketch, sprayed to charcoal with Blair workable fixative, made a couple of additions and gave it one more coat of fix. Then, I painted very thinly, using a dilute solution of Grumbacher Pale Drying Oil. This is an old trick: you paint thinly so that the charcoal under-drawing shows through as rather odd shadows. Was I troubled that the painting bears little or no resemblance to the original model, beyond the overall pose and maybe the way his eyes are set? Not a bit. I prefer a very limited palette: Ultramarine, Venetian Red, Naples Yellow for the case at hand. The brushwork is more reflective of German Expressionism (Beckmann, Kubin, Kirchner, the Blau Ritter gang and all those guys) than anything else. Any time you think that a painting has to be connected to reality, you are asking for trouble. It is not what a painting is. A painting isn’t a copy of reality. It is a reflection of that reality, streamed through and distorted by whatever is in the painter’s head, at least that’s how I think it is. In my case, the reality always goes in one ear and out the other without making much of an impression.

This is from what I am beginning to think of as an ongoing series of paintings, tentatively called “Zombie Paintings.” It started with some left-over paint and a quick painting, done without much “malice aforethought.” Everyone who saw it, though, had a reaction: some laughed; some scratched their head; some just made a face and walked away. Reaction, any reaction, either good or bad, is what you look for in this business. So, I thought maybe I should do some more of what I initially thought was something of a lark. The colors I had used in that original Zombie Painting were Cadmium Orange and Ultramarine which together and separately can be made into some very creepy, brownish-greenish shades. This picture, “Dragon Bird,” is the latest in the series. I added Venetian Red and Permanent Green into the mix. A bunch of friends and colleagues, on seeing it, spontaneously said, “Ah, another zombie painting.” Yes, it is and it looks like it is going to be a series, a group of painting on a common theme that more or less look alike. This one is small, 11 by 14 done on a prepared gesso surface. The gesso is tinted with yellow oxide. Since the picture is thinly painted, that yellow-ish tone shows through.