I’ve struggled with my identity as a writer and an artist and maybe you’re doing the same. Perhaps this will help....
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I’ve struggled with my identity as a writer and an artist and maybe you’re doing the same. Perhaps this will help....
Would you like to get some creative inspiration sent to you each week? Sign up to get my Friday essays. They’re thought provoking, funny, occasionally quite odd, and always free. Tell me where I should send yours by signing up at dannysessays.com.
welcome to art for only the Sketchbook Skool podcast. I'm your host, Danny Gregory. I'm the author of a dozen or so books on art and creativity. And I'm a sketchbook artist, but I've also been a so-called. Creative professional, working for clients and committees and checks. I've struggled with my identity as a writer and an artist, and maybe you're doing the same. Perhaps this will help. At six, it was universal. We all drew and painted and saying and sculpted. We were all architects and actors, puppeteers and dancers. It was innate. In natural, our creativity. I lived around the world as a child in Lahore, in London, in Pittsburgh and Canberra. I studied it St. John's elementary school and on a kibbutz. I could quickly fall in with any other kid and we'd pretend to be mountain climbers or scientists. We could build Fort set of sofa cushions, or turn a refrigerator box into a theater. I wrote and illustrated books in a school play. I played a dog that saved a family from their burning house. I had an alter ego, Roger Watford, an English Lord who smoked a pipe and carried a sword. I made parent, I made pirate maps, soak them in tea for versa. Militude I wore my Halloween costume year round 20 years later. I wore ties. I drew only when doodling on the phone, I never went to galleries or museums or playgrounds or toy shops. I watched golf on TV. I was not an artist anymore. When I was 18, I wrote a college application essay on why I felt that writing rather than drawing was the more appropriate and a useful medium of expression. For me, it came down to a simple equation. Artists starved and writing was useful. In most all aspects of business. Princeton had a painting department. I seemed that its members were. Lazy unwilling to take on a proper major or to attend a proper art school architect students. They worked notoriously long hours fulls again. At best. I heard that they ended up making 30 grand a year by 21. I'd become cynical and rigid and unimaginative. I was ready for the corporate world. I talked myself out of going to art school because I believe that the only way to make a living would be to be a commercial artist, which seemed horribly compromised. My experience working for a local paper had led me to believe that journalists were mirror observers rather than participants my friends who were ending up in investment banking. Well, they were just total sellouts three months after graduation. I fell into advertising. There was a job and it got me out of my parent's house. And the next 20 years, 30 million for the next 30 years, it was what I did. I was creative now rather than adjective. In Harpers. I read an essay that concluded creative people in advertising are artists with nothing to say. It seemed dapped. The advertising profession is divided into creatives and account people. Creatives are divided into art directors and copywriters, and I was the latter. And yet I drew more and probably better than the art directors that I worked with. I had endless opinions about the visual side of the business, but I was adamant that I was a copywriter. I would not be judged as a visual person. I was not an artist. Despite all the meetings, I sat through all the product. I moved all the concessions and compromises. I made the, the urge to make things couldn't be completely squashed. First of all, I made ads. I worked with photographers and directors and editors and composers and made these polished little 32nd turds. We all were ourselves most fervently into these productions. Being adamant about the tiniest things, a sheet of blue, the models, blouse that the placement of a comma, we would fall on our swords all the time. So intent where we to assert our creative will. This inner artist plagued me like being gay, must plague those who are still in the closet, I could jam it down that it was that it was impractical that I wasn't good enough that it was a huge waste of time. And then that creative urge would pop its head out somewhere else. I wasn't a painter though. I did paint at home, bouncing huge canvases on my dining room chairs because I wouldn't commit to having an easel, but I was not really a writer either. I stopped writing the fiction plays that I pumped out in school. In fact, when I was 23, I had wrote a play and some producers started to raise money to put it on. We did a reading and Kevin bacon played the lead and I did nothing to help. The production grew until the plans were to try to open it off Broadway at the Henry Miller theater. And then on Broadway itself, I stood by him. Eventually the plants were so big, so ambitious that they collapsed and I did nothing to revive the plane. I'm not even sure if I still have a copy different times. I bought myself a keyboard and set up music lessons. And each time I sabotage myself after a week missing practice and, and lessons. Cause mum, I'm so busy at work. I designed and I built the furniture for our apartment out of bird's eye maple, but then I told myself we could afford to replace it at Ikea. I got a book contract or I had a book of highly subjective, pretty funny essays about New York bars. And I wrote about 250 pages, but then my original editor left the house and my new editor wanted to make changes and I refused the book faded away, never came out. I would come home and cook hand, grinding spices, rolling out ravioli's shopping for months for the perfect knife, making a labret dishes that I would eat by myself, standing over the sink. I worked hard on what I wore scaring vintage stores for handmade suits and collecting exotic hand-painted ties and dressing and redressing myself to get the look just so someone gave me a harmonica and I kept it in the shower, or I would play it until the pipes ran cold. I saw every movie that came out hundreds a year telling myself it was part of my job and tax deductible to boot. I watched them intently, memorizing camera placements, noticing editing techniques and the names of key grips and camera assistance. I made my girlfriend elaborate handmade gifts. I wrote an illustrated books for you, an Epic poems. I convinced my boss to let me have a laser printer in my office. And then I work behind closed doors to print my books on special paper, to make slip cases and to design my own type. He says I would finesse each piece over and over readjusting the kerning, the letting too. It was perfect. I worked for months on each item, a single edition of single book. I was doing it from my love, but I didn't deal with the fact that I was doing it because I had to. Long before we became parents. I made elaborate home movies, costuming my girlfriend and driving her to interesting locations. I drove her in a car I had bought simply because it was beautiful. A 1962 mercury Monterrey. There was 18 feet long and two-tone cornflower blue and white. It was completely impractical, far too big for Manhattan. And I rarely drove it, but I polished it and I re holstered it a gleaming feast for the, I fade out. Another decade passes. I'm married, I've gained a son and 30 pounds years continue to climb. I'm the top of my field running the crave department of an Eden, but I'm suffocating. I'm under enormous pressure to make other people produce creative ideas. Money is inextricably wound up in everything. All of our efforts are judged and harshly. I slowly came to realize that I've been leading a false life for so long, and I'm not who I am pretending to be. I've been using my ability to make things purely in terms of how it will provide money. There's no joy in the process. The things I make are completely at the best of others. I'm making advertising campaigns for investment banks, for people who sell weapons systems for chemical producers and management consultants and oil companies. I'm making more money than I, and yet I feel completely bankrupt. Nothing I do is for me. I am bitter and insomniac a few years before I'd found one outlet. That meant a lot to me. I'd begun an illustrated journal and I'd become pretty good at drawing the little things that I encountered every day. I took a class in bookbinding and I learned to make my own journals and sketchbooks for awhile. It was a great escape, but then I stopped doing that too. My position is scraped rector method. Those no time for such things for the folder, all of making things that didn't contribute to the agency's bottom line or the client success. I locked away my journals. And for five years, I focused exclusively on my job, 12 hours a day. My wife grew distant, but I didn't notice I had no friends outside of work, but no time for them in any case. Whatever little burblings of creativity. I used to have that I channeled into cooking and fashion and making presence was a hundred percent channeled into servicing. It's the camel's back finally broke through my job. I started to meet some of the top graphic designers, people like Stefan Sagmeister and Woody Pirtle and Paul Sahre. And as I talked to them, I found myself admitting how much I hated what I did, how lost I felt I was supposed to be their client, but I treated them like they were my mentors. I was so envious of their lives and making all sorts of things for people working on their own projects, committing themselves to social change, turning down work. If they felt it was unethical, living on a fifth of what I was making and seeming well-rounded and complete and happy. Finally, one of them suggested that I get back to drawing in my sketchbook. And hesitantly I did. I let art back in the door and suddenly the walls started to crack. The chains started to loosen within a month. I had a new book, correct. And a few minutes later, I had a second this one to publish my illustrated journals. Before long, I had an agent and I was no longer a creative director. Instead. I was me. Thanks for joining me today. I'll dream up something new for you again next week until then I'm Danny Gregory. And this is art.