Letter

I’ve been plundering how-to-draw books for phrases and diagrams to collage. It feels right because it fits with the book I’ve been working on and also because it’s a thing I’ve thought about forever and ever: can art be taught?

I believe you can train a chimp to render a “realistic” likeness, but is that art? In the times before radio, TV, and smartphones, many people who made enough money to spare the time sketched and painted. It was a common hobby of the educated classes. Did any of those people consider themselves artists? Probably only the ones with bruised egos and other insecurities. It would be like a kid in a park shooting baskets believing himself ready for the NBA.

But for drawing, those times are long gone. People take up running or cosplay or polyamory in their free time. They don’t pick up a pencil or brush.

I had several art teachers growing up, but none of them taught me to render in the methodical step-by-step manner of the how-to book or TV show. Some would occasionally reveal tips or tricks or shortcuts, but these inevitably failed to work for me, either because of my ineptitude or my contrary nature. I had to stupidly learn things by constantly failing. In contrast, the books I’ve been cutting up always have an upbeat, cheerful tone. I know in my bones that has nothing to do with art.

The last time I tried to quit art was in high school. I hung out in the gym playing hoops for weeks but rarely got picked for teams and made no new friends. Soon after, I gave in and got the sketchbook back out. It wasn’t a choice made for happiness or even enjoyment, but for a kind of survival. I knew instinctively that if I didn’t go back to drawing there’d be no reason to keep living.

This may all sound melodramatic and extreme, I know. Art is supposed to bring pleasure and ease and I hope very much that now and then something I’ve made does that for someone else. But as I cut up diagrams and chapter headings from the drawing books, I’m struck by how little any of what is described has to do with my experiences. The goals of these exercises is not to justify one’s reason to live. A drawing how-to book like that would sell very few copies.

Last year, when I taught a couple college drawing classes, I found myself holding my tongue a lot. I could sense that almost none of my students would make a life of art after watching them half-ass drawings of cubes, cones, and bodies. If any of them had asked, I would have told them that the way I knew I had to give my life to this is I was cornered and felt there was no other way out. Not what most kids want to hear in an elective taken most likely for an easy A.

I haven’t done the research to find out whether anyone buys how-to-draw books these days. There are several companies that still market paint-by-numbers kits and you can watch days of Bob Ross shows on YouTube. Prior to the plague, paint-and-drink emporia dotted the city’s storefronts. But aside from kitsch value or unusual mating rituals, does anyone believe any of these methods could make them artists?

With NFTs and record-setting auction prices, perhaps kids will see becoming an artist as a way to get rich quick. Maybe I’ll write a how-to book just for them.

[You Are My Closest Friend]

[Was reminded of this piece I’d illustrated a couple years back, written by an ex-Marine living in Kyiv, for obvious reasons. I have no original thoughts or insights into the daily horror my birth-country is inflicting on their neighbor, aside from the hope that the next person who finds out where I’m from isn’t surprised——as most are——when I tell them I’ve never been back or ever had the desire to.]

The puzzle is on a high shelf of a dead artist’s studio. I’m in her apartment with a friend, picking over unused art supplies. Her nephew invited us to take whatever we want. I have a pile of watercolor paper, brushes, a Pelikan watercolor set, an ancient mat cutter. Faced with so much stuff, it’s hard to know what to take and what to leave. There’s something obscene about scavenging this way, but it beats the scrap heep. To the nephew, this room full of things is just an obstacle to getting the apartment sold.

What catches my eye in the closet is de Kooning’s Gotham News. It’s a great painting from 1955. I don’t even see that it’s a jigsaw puzzle till I reach up for it and take it out into the light. I joke to my friend about taking it and put it back in the closet. A few minutes later though, I pick it up again and put it with my pile.

Weeks pass. Gotham sits in its box, leaning against the studio table’s leg. Up above it on the surface, some of the dead artist’s things have merged with my own. Soon I won’t be able to tell what was hers and what’s mine. We all just use these things for a time before it’s someone else’s turn.

I haven’t worked a jigsaw puzzle since I was a kid. I look at the box and wonder what possessed me to bring it home. Then, one day, I dump all the pieces on the carpet and sit down on the floor to see if I can sort them. A couple mostly frustrating hours later, I realize I’ll get nowhere down there on my ass. My back hurts from leaning over. My elbow keeps falling asleep. I gather the whole mess back into its box and start over on a table.

The hard part about a de Kooning jigsaw puzzle is there’s no representational shortcuts. No faces, trees, or houses. No cars or planes; just marks and colors. My first strategy is to sort all like colors together. It doesn’t really work because there are few discrete areas in the painting; everything flows into everything else.

I work the thing for days as a break from work. Sometimes I barely make any progress, other times it’s as steady as dominoes. One night I get so wrapped up in it I lose track of time and cancel plans I’d looked forward to all day.

As it gets closer to filling up, I wonder what I’ll get a puzzle of next. Then I realize that if I do that, there will soon be no time to do anything else. Best that this de Kooning be the first and last. It wouldn’t be the same to just buy one in a store or, worse yet, just click a button online. It wouldn’t mean the same thing Gotham News does.

Like a remake calculated to cash in on a surprise hit. A strange thing to think about a puzzle that was likely printed at least a few hundred times, but mine’s the only one that lived in that dead artist’s closet. I’ll think about her everytime I look at Gotham News now. I’ll glue the completed thing to a board and hang it somewhere in the house.

It’ll stay there until someone is invited here to take my things away.

I was commissioned to make a couple illustrations for a terrible piece of writing. This happens. It’s part of the deal. I don’t have to endorse or approve or even tolerate the word salad that accompanies my pictures. Sometimes I’m even the author of said salad.

There are ways to make the process worthwhile that have nothing to do with the original intent of the thing. Maybe a geographical location that can spur an image search. Some photos of a river in Oregon and test out a watercolor set I got from the house of an older artist who’d passed away. The resulting painting has little to do with the overwrought essay it’s meant to enhance but feels like it was worth doing in a modest way anyhow. When I send it in, the editor who hired me seems happy, so I’ve done my job and can put the whole thing out of my mind.

I listen to interviews with writers or true-crime stories as I work. Oftentimes, I completely forget what the thing I’m making is even for. Good thing that there’s no pop quiz on the nominal reason for doing what I’m doing. I’d flunk for sure. In many cases, I don’t even have any text to reference. Just names of people and places. Maybe some reference photos. A lot of flying blind involved.

Another recently completed job is thirty-five portraits of characters in a forthcoming book I haven’t read. The writer sent me their names——all Russian——and some lo-res reference photos. Drawing faces comes so naturally now that I don’t have to question much about the owners of those faces. I recognized a couple of the people in the photos but when I asked the writer whether it was important to get a good likeness of them, he said they were just archetypes. I’ll share those with you once that book is published. I’m curious how my work will be used.

I used charcoal for the first time in awhile to design a poster featuring more portraits. Chicago writers this time. Unlike the Russian portraits or the landscape watercolors, I’m in charge of most of the elements of the poster composition. I just have to include the verbiage given by the organization that hired me and make it more or less legible. They trust me to handle the rest. This frees me to rummage in the cobwebby corners of the toolbox for long-neglected implements. A box of vine and compressed charcoal, in this case.

But rather than doing the whole thing on one piece of paper as I would have even a few years ago, I drew the portraits separately, then took a couple more big pieces of paper to draw out the text. I scanned them all in, then played around in Photoshop until they looked wrong together in just the right way. The collage thing has invaded almost everything I do now.

It’s a load off to do work for other people because it’s so much less responsibility. They get me to make a record cover or poster or book illustration for their thing and, if they’re satisfied with what I’ve done, I rarely think of it again. I don’t have to sell it, store it, or wonder what people will think of it. It’s rarely that clean and simple when it’s something no one else asked for.

I can never be free of it the way I can when it’s for someone else.

[I previewed some films in this week’s Chicago European Union Festival——including one of the best movies about childhood I’ve ever seen——and Mallory and I talk about The Box.]