Ravel's Birthday

I listen to music while I draw. A lot of Bill Evans and quieter, subtler jazz music like that, but also classical music. Among my favorite classical composers I put Maurice Ravel very near the top. Art requires nuance and Ravel is all nuance, subtle variations, nothing obvious or insistent or clichéd or overly sentimental. I've spent years removing these things from my art and listening to Ravel and others like him has helped. Here is a drawing I did from a photograph of Ravel.

My Museum Life

I spent a month at the Minneapolis Institute of Art last year as artist-in-residence, in their library. The idea man behind the residency was Jay Peterson, of Coffeehouse Press, someone I'd known several years as my neighborhood bookseller. (My favorite places are bookstores and libraries.) So I went to the museum and spent days in their library of old art books. Stealing, mostly. I get my best ideas looking at art, and what better place than a museum? I gave a lecture after the residency. A kind of show and tell. That was over a year ago. Now, suddenly, the museum is 100 years old, and I feel as if I'd grown up in it. (To celebrate the milestone my friends at Pentagram did a brand makeover. It's now Mia.)

When the museum decided to do a centenary book, Brian Donahue (who designs the Macalester College magazine) kindly asked me to draw something for the cover, and Jeff Johnson (my editor from when I was writing for Minnesota Monthly) asked me to write a chapter. Fun projects.  Brian used the cover art on the title page too.

Here’s the opening page of the essay. I illustrated a couple of my essay spreads with art I’d done during my time there, explaining the process of art, which is mostly osmosis. Illustrating this book was sort of like returning the art I stole from them, or the ideas I stole, transmuted into something strange and new, but old.

Enjoy, but don't touch.

How Not To Cut

I woke up Monday morning to an assignment from the NYTimes. One of those neat little drawings that draw the reader's eye to the letters on the editorial page. Maybe this is why they are called drawings.

The subject was the one on everyone's mind: the draconian sequester cuts––it's unusual when two of the three words describing the issue of the day are words nobody uses much and most people couldn't define for you. We have half the country enthused (to the point where they should maybe go lie down) about cutting federal spending. What's interesting is the people most rabid about cutting are the ones whose lives and whose districts would be most negatively affected. Here's where we enter the realm of unintended consequences. ("Honestly, doctor, I didn't realize I shouldn't cut that branch closer to the trunk than the point where I was sitting on it.") It's the Red Districts that receive most of the federal dollars and they also, conveniently, pay less in taxes than they receive. There is a Snopesian cleverness about this which I almost admire. But it is hard to squeeze all of these thoughts into a drawing the size of your thumb. So, as always happens, I resorted to metaphor. And there is actually a thumb in the metaphor, although it isn't the thumb which the budget cutter is about to sever.

Point is, we don't always think about deeds and consequences. Sometimes wars cost money. Sometimes poisoning the air winds up poisoning the people who breathe it. Sometimes cutting federal spending during a severe economic downturn ends up cutting the only spending that's happening. At which point the economy begins to lose any semblance of a pulse.

Republicans and rich people like to give advice to the poor about thrift, but only poor people know thrift.  They are experts at it. The Republican gasbags (there are Dem gasbags too) like to preach the morality of spending cuts "to save our children". They preach austerity while driving large cars and owning twelve homes. Forcing austerity measures on an economy during a recession is like starving your children to protect their inheritance. Which sounds stupid, but to rich people it's actually smart, because after the children of the poor starve, their money carefully unspent will remain in banks where the rich can go on playing with it. I enjoy drawing pictures describing damnfoolishness like this.

(I would like to thank Ben Shahn and Ludwig Bemelmans and a few others who taught me how to draw hands and papercutters.)

From the Sketchbook-an Old Bookstore

I did this drawing over the weekend from an old photograph of Foyles, the London bookstore. The largest, but not my favorite. My favorite haunt for books in London is a small side street called Cecil Court. It's off Charing Cross Road.

Roma

When it's cold and gray here in Minneapolis it sometimes helps to spend a little time drawing a warmer, sunnier place. Somewhere I've been, in this case Rome, my favorite neighborhood of the old city between Piazza Navona and the Pantheon. I can almost smell the motorino fumes.

What's On Your Mind, Part II

I have an exercise I do sometimes, to get my brain moving, to get the ideas from my head to my hand to my pencil. I draw a face. I draw an oval, or I draw the arrangement of features. Why are they always arranged the same, like a place setting? There's no law about that, so I rearrange the furniture, put the ear where the nose usually is, or insert a spoon or an automobile in its place. What is it saying to me? Usually nothing, but it opens a door to resemblances that we train ourselves to ignore. Rule-breaking is the first rule of art. The world isn't two dimensional but the paper is. The offbeat equations we make don't need to be outright surreal to be interesting. The brain is who we are, so why not draw it into that space? Is he asleep, or thinking, or dead? Sometimes the best drawing is inconclusive.

Coffee

I've always loved the smell of coffee. It's hard to find a cup of coffee that tastes as good as it smells. I enjoy a cup once in a while, but not when I have art to do; it makes my hand too impulsive, the movement too abrupt, a bit jittery. It would be interesting to do before and after drawings of the same thing, one before a cup of coffee and one after.

I learned to love coffee years ago when I was attending English Departmental meetings and that was low-bred percolator coffee, hardly better than church coffee, although I like church coffee too. Minnesota Lutheran church coffee. (I could write a serious article about it; it's seriously underappreciated. Presbyterian coffee is good too. I don't think I've ever tasted Methodist.)

Anyway, this is a drawing I did last night while waiting for dinner. I looked around the kitchen for something to draw and realized I'd never drawn this pot. Nice shape. Function and form.

A Handbag?

The question in the subject line, as you all know, is a quote from Oscar Wilde. The inflection is key, but the handbag, the purse, the clutch, is laden with metaphor and meaning. "The public purse" sounds almost dirty. Before our minds wander too far, consider the simple lines, the elegant balance, the small detail. I may be biased, but I think the drawn line has more allure than a photograph. Like an innuendo, it gets in under the radar, and plants notions in your head. Amidst all the advertising clutter, a drawing gets remembered. Here endeth the lesson.

June Sky

It's one of those perfect days in June and I moved my studio onto the screen porch for the morning. There have been some strange gyres and bumps this past week but today is quiet and pleasant and the clouds in the sky are the kind that don't worry anyone. Today is plain all right. I am busy drawing, waiting for the next big project, working on some writing I'd set aside, doing what I do well.