I just finished meditating in the garden. It’s something I started doing a few weeks ago under the advice of my new therapist, Jane.

I plug in my AirPods and listen to a guide who tells me to pay attention to my breathing. To pay attention to my body parts from scalp to hoof. And when I am settled, the disembodied voice in my ears paints pictures of how I can see my reality in brighter terms.

The monkey in my head encroaches. Thoughts of chores and wars interrupt my revery, but I am learning to gently push them aside and settle back on my breathing.

I have tried doing this whole thing before, but with little success.

I end up telling myself it’s having no effect, or it’s woo-woo, or that I’m just not a meditation person. But I understand now that it’s hard to form a habit unless I have a meaningful goal to aim for. Now I have one — to manage my anxiety — and meditation helps me first quiet my body’s reaction to my agitation and only then to quiet my mind. I am working to turn off a reflexive response that I have cultivated most of my life. I have finally come to accept that I can’t abide it for my remaining days. At long last, I deserve peace.

Drawing can be meditative. I can focus on my subject and slowly move around its contours, calmly looking and seeing landmarks which I record with my pen. With each mark, I can sink deeper into a flow state.

But it doesn’t always work that way. There are interruptions. There are ideas. And there are judgments.

When I was born, I was a sheet of crisp white paper. Pristine. But soon marks were made on me. Some were light pencil, others ballpoint, and some permanent marker. I was creased and crumpled. Careless, dirty fingers smudged me.

Over the years, I’ve tried to smooth my page. I took an eraser and managed to rub away some of the words and images. I turned over the page and took a warm iron to the folds.

Some lines bled through from the past, seemingly permanent. Many faded.

But I can never remove all my dog ears and rumples. Even if they are smoothed over and again, they still leave evidence of the ancient damage, faint irregularities and creases, bumps and lumps.

No matter how often I reexamine the source of those early marks, they never vanish completely. They still shape me. Seemingly inescapable. My reactions are deeply grooved into me, my knees yet jerk.

At this stage of my life, I recognize how much my past has made me. But I also see how I can take this wrinkled sheet of paper and write afresh upon it. I can focus on this breath of right now. I can draw this line slowly and confidently. I can still feel the fears for the future and the regrets of the past, but then turn away to listen to the quail on the wall, watch the cloud above, smell the gardenia blossoming, and breathe in, hold it, then slowly let it out.

Your pal,

Danny

PS I made this yesterday:

She wanted to know what the style is called because she has taken a lot of art lessons and they all apparently have labels that describe what it is, what school of art they belong to, I guess.

I swallowed hard.

Someone was finally calling my bluff.

They were onto the fact that I’m not a real artist, let alone a real art teacher.

I wrote the following to explain my way out of this corner. I hope I don’t sound too defensive.

Dear R_:

I don’t think of what I do as a way of drawing but as a way of living.

I use drawing to gain a greater appreciation of my life, to look at things around me longer and harder than I normally would, and to help me to be more present and appreciative of what my life contains.

I try to slow myself down when I draw and connect to my feelings about the moment.

I’ve been doing this for three decades now, so I like to reshuffle the deck periodically, to make sure I’m not getting jaded by developing a style and approach that somehow automates and dulls the experience.

To that end, I study other artists, and they influence me for a while until that influence just becomes part of me.

I change up my materials to reawaken my awareness to a new sense of unfamiliarity and discomfort, which helps me keep the experience fresh.

Generally, I just pick stuff up as I go along and consider the whole thing an adventure.

And it’s an adventure that I want to encourage other people to go on too, either with me or on their own. It’s done so much for me that I can’t help being a missionary for drawing, but I don’t have a real answer as to how you personally should do it best or what your art should look like.

I don’t intend to teach anyone a specific style of art making, but rather to encourage them, through exposure to lots of different artists and ideas and materials, to come up with an approach that engages and suits them.

So, in short, my particular type of drawing is Danny Drawing, but my goal is to help you develop R__ Drawing, whatever that means to you.

If you insist on calling it something, how about “illustrated journaling”? That’s usually been my default when pressed, because I like diaries, and illustrated books, and maps, and diagrams, and stuff that feels like a record of the journey we’re on.

If you have a better answer, I’d love to hear it.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. If you’d like to experience what I teach, join us for my Day in Paris workshop this weekend. But hurry — you only have a few more hours to sign up.

I want to come to Paris!

Like Peter Parker, whose spidey-sense makes him alert to any danger around him, we artists feel everything.

It’s our job.

We have a deep awareness of the world around us, tuning in on every nuance. We see hidden patterns, details, emotions, sensations, and impressions that others never notice. We are deeply empathetic to other people’s feelings.

And we train ourselves to become even more sensitive. If I sit and draw a portrait, I work to notice every minute aspect of the subject, recording details they never even noticed about themselves.

It goes beyond just the visual details. We cultivate emotional depth, mining for meaning, analogy, and metaphor. We locate patterns, subtexts, and underlying structures. That’s the raw material for our work.

That perceptiveness isn’t just aimed at the outside world. It’s an inside job, too.

Being an artist means being willing to lay yourself open. To pick at scabs that others bandage with denial. To constantly probe what’s going on in our heads and our hearts. To notice how we are noticing. To dissect our feelings so we can reassemble them in the medium of our choice and share them with the world.

We need to feel how we feel to make you feel.

How often have we encountered a work of art and said, “How did you know?” That shock of recognition that makes us feel less alone, that binds us to each other, that’s one of the greatest powers of art, of music, of stand-up comedy.

But it takes a lot of understanding to bring it to life. It takes a willingness to be vulnerable, to expose what we have dug up from within, to be brave enough to put it out there, no matter the response.

Doing this work alters who we are, rewires our brains and nervous systems, thins our skin, and exposes our nerves. It takes guts.

It also makes us a pain in the ass.

Sensitive people can be a real drag to have around.

So much drama. So much neediness.

We feel emotions more intensely, to the point that we feel stressed, overwhelmed, and anxious, while others shake their heads in disbelief.

Being hyper-sensitive means we can detect hidden motives, detecting patterns before they surface for others to see.

But we’re not always right.

How often do sensitive people overreact, demanding attention, special handling, conjuring up what-if scenarios, and apocalyptic fictions around us?

Being a storyteller is a craft. Being paranoid is a curse.

We can also be obsessive. Perfectionists. Overthinkers. Indecisive. We don’t set good boundaries. We can overpromise and underdeliver.

But don’t tell us that.

Having thin skin means you can’t take criticism well.

We put ourselves out there, but then we can’t handle the response. Even well-intentioned feedback can seem like categorical rejection and betrayal. And even applause can seem suspect and double-edged, unearned, triggering imposter syndrome.

The history of art is full of supersensitives.

Van Gogh. Beethoven. Sylvia Plath. Edvard Munch. Kurt Cobain. Tennessee Williams. Anton Chekhov. Frida Kahlo. Virginia Woolf. Nick Drake. Heath Ledger. Marilyn Monroe. Robin Williams. Richard Pryor.

Many are shy, crippled with social anxiety. Many act out. Self-medicate with drugs or alcohol to dull their sensitivity. Resort to harming themselves — or worse.

Our sensitivity is an inextricable part of our wiring, a crucial component of making art. We don’t need to be ashamed or afraid of it.

I love being an artist. I’m glad I’m sensitive. It’s a gift.

And I want to be productive and happy for the rest of my years.

And less of a pain in the ass.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. If you’d like to hang out with a lot of creative people (who I promise are fun and never annoying), join my upcoming live workshop, A Day in Paris, on May 16. We’ll spend the morning turning an imaginary trip into a gorgeous piece of art and have a blast doing it. Learn more here.

I couldn’t begin to catalog them all. There are so many things I’ve learned in my life.

Some I learned in school, some from reading books, but most I learned by doing, by taking risks, by failing, iterating, and improving my way to expertise.

You’d think that after all that, I’d be fearless. I’m not.

After all, I’ve become an expert, and the world sees me that way too. I don’t appear as a floundering beginner anymore, but as a supremely competent adult who has the answers and is sought out for advice.

Experts don’t like to fail. It undermines our credibility. And we have dignity to maintain as we get older. We can’t look foolish if we want to appear wise.

By the time a man reaches fifty, he’s spent decades building a reputation for competence. Young colleagues stop by his office — or his Slack — to ask how things work. His kids call him when their landlord is being unreasonable or their car makes a noise. Neighbors defer to him on baseball trades and fishing lures and lawn care and anything else he has somehow lived long enough to have an opinion about. He knows how to tip at a restaurant, how to talk to a contractor, how to read a balance sheet. The world has decided he is a person who knows things.

This is not entirely comfortable. Authority carries a certain weight — people expect you to have answers, so you learn to project confidence even when you’re improvising. But it also becomes part of how you see yourself. The identity of the competent man is seductive and hard to shed.

And nothing threatens it quite like being a beginner at something.

I notice this particularly in men — including myself. Women sign up for art classes in droves. About 85% of the students at Sketchbook Skool are women. Conferences, workshops, retreats — same story. I’ve thought a lot about why. The most likely answer is that many men would rather not be seen not knowing something. We will get lost rather than ask for directions. We will assemble furniture without the instructions and spend an extra hour doing it wrong. We will sit in silence at a dinner party while the conversation strays into territory we don’t recognize, rather than ask a question that might reveal our ignorance.

Art class is the ultimate exposure. You show up not knowing how to do something, and then you do it badly, in front of other people. You’re surrounded by strangers who may be better at it than you. There’s no jargon to hide behind, no way to make not-knowing sound like strategy. For a man who has spent decades being the one people come to with questions, that’s not a learning opportunity — that’s an identity crisis with a paintbrush.

When we stop learning, we stop growing, and when we stop growing, we start dying. But to learn, we have to be willing to fail.

A lot of this fear has earlier roots than we think. When we were kids, around fifth grade, the boy who drew better than everyone else was either admired or resented — but either way, everyone else knew where they stood. We absorbed a verdict about ourselves and our abilities, and then filed it away. “Not an art person.” Case closed.

The trouble is, we filed it away in 1979 — or whenever fifth grade was — and never re-examined it. We’ve re-examined almost everything else. Our politics, our diets, our careers, our marriages. But we accepted the art verdict at age ten and have been carrying it around ever since like a library book we forgot to return.

Psychologists talk about two kinds of intelligence — fluid and crystallized. Fluid intelligence is the raw processing power of youth: quick uptake, fast pattern recognition, the ability to absorb new information at speed. That peaks in your twenties and declines slowly from there.

Crystallized intelligence is different. It’s the accumulated weight of experience — knowing not just facts but how things connect, what matters and what doesn’t, when to trust your gut and when to ignore it. And it continues to build well into your seventies and beyond.

So the older you are, the better equipped you are to learn something like art — where so much depends not on dexterity or speed but on seeing, on patience, on the willingness to keep going when a drawing isn’t working. Failure is an option. In fact, it’s essential. You already know that most things worth doing require perseverance. You’ve proven it, many times over, in other parts of your life. You just haven’t applied it here yet.

Something else I read: neuroscience has overturned the old assumption that adult brains can’t grow new cells. They can, and they do — particularly when we engage in creative activity. The brain changes shape depending on how you use it. Drawing, painting, making anything by hand — these activities build new neural pathways, keep the mind supple, and give it something genuinely novel to chew on.

In short, taking up art at sixty is one of the better things you can do for the organ in your skull.

But forget the science for a moment. The real point is this: the older we get, the more we get out of art.

When you’re young and busy, you draw, and what you produce feels thin, hurried, an afternoon’s entertainment to impress your friends by drawing a rock star or a comic book superhero. When you’re older, and you sit down with a sketchbook and actually look — at the coffee cup, the street, the face of someone you love — you start to see what you have. The years accumulate in what you notice. The things you’ve learned to pay attention to show up on the sketchbook page. And you’re not doing it just to get a grade or meet a deadline, but to gain the quiet, private satisfaction of having made something true to you.

To start, you don’t need a class, just a pen and something to draw on.

But if a class helps you get started — if seeing other beginners fumble alongside you makes the fumbling easier — then take one. The people in the class are not there to judge you. They’re there because they’re in exactly the same boat, a little nervous, a little hopeful, wondering whether they can do this.

Most of them can. So can you.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. It took me twelve years to finally finish my latest video. Back in 2014, Jenny and I drove from Los Angeles to New York City — 3,717 miles, ten days — and I drew and watercolored the entire trip as we went. The footage and the journals sat on a hard drive ever since. Last week, I finally put it all together. Click to watch it on YouTube

Both of these techniques dramatically improved the kinds of drawings I could make, but they also carried a social penalty. You never wanted someone to say, “Did you trace this?” That was the ultimate humiliation. As a result, I either avoided using these tools or I lied about them and hid the truth.

We also had an art teacher who could draw a perfect circle freehand. Everybody thought that was incredibly cool. That somehow morphed into a belief that you were never allowed to use a compass to draw a circle or a ruler to draw a straight line in art class. If someone spotted a tiny pinprick on your page that revealed you’d used a compass, you were an art pariah.

In middle school, we started learning how to do research papers. We were warned not to use the encyclopedia if a teacher suspected we had copied an essay from Encyclopedia Britannica. If that happened, you got called out in broad strokes of her red pen. You were supposed to read real books, consult primary sources, and use footnotes. Woe to the kid who plagiarized or lied about his sources.

Maybe middle schoolers are just crafty little thieves and liars. It seemed like we were being handed a lot of rules about not cheating, thieving, lying or leaving the toilet lid up, and most of those lessons were invaluable. They kept us fairly honest, and they taught us a lot of ways to get away with things by hiding our true process.

My grandmother was a fussbudget and a purist about most things. She taught me that tea bags were unacceptable and that you had to use loose tea. She believed you should never eat frozen food of any kind, and that canned soup and vegetables were not even fit to feed dogs. She was a snob, but she also had a cook and several servants, so she could afford to be picky. Later, when she retired and had to cook for herself and my grandfather, she became a big fan of convenience foods and instant coffee.

For much of my youth, I held on to lots of purist notions too. If I’d been older, I probably would have booed Dylan when he went electric. If I’d been born in this century, I’d collect vinyl records, VHS tapes, and make my own pickles.

Art was no different.

For years, I was an absolutist about drawing from real life. I would draw shoes and toilets and piles of dirty dishes, but I would never draw from photographs. I had this idea that that was some sort of cheating. I’d explain it by saying that drawing from 3-dimensional objects is a much better educational experience and results in more authentic drawings. And I absolutely believe that’s still true. But there are lots of things that simply aren’t readily available to be looked at and drawn, things like rhinoceroses and Notre Dame, willow trees and naked models.

So I’ve come to believe that photo reference is, kind of, an acceptable thing. But it was only during the pandemic, when I was doing daily livestreams on YouTube and had to share my subject matter with thousands of other people while I drew, that I started to rely on photographic reference to fill many pages of my sketchbook.

After we all got our vaccines, I found another reason to draw from photographs. I now live in Phoenix, AZ, and, no insult intended, but New York just had an awful lot more cool things to draw, and it was a lot easier to just walk over and draw them. In Phoenix, it’s very hot, the buildings are by and large undistinguished, and nobody walks anywhere, so, while I could spend a lot of time sitting and drawing in my air-conditioned car, I’m perfectly fine with pulling up some images on my computer when I need something to draw.

Oh, and even though I was a purist about only drawing with a pen, I use a pencil now and again, and I own several erasers.

Sorry, but it’s taken me a while to finally figure out that art isn’t about slavishly following rules; it’s about constantly finding new ones to break.

Throughout history, artists have led the way in adopting new technologies. We have always sought better, faster, and easier ways to create. Part of that is because we’re interested in new things and new ways to work, but it’s also an economic necessity. If an artist can use technology to speed up the process, we can make more art and more money.

In his book, Secret Knowledge, David Hockney describes how he covered a wall in his studio with images arranged chronologically and saw vividly that around 1420 something changed. Art looked different. Overnight, artists could suddenly draw better, capturing people and perspective far more accurately. The common wisdom in the art history world was that suddenly, people just figured out how to draw well. As a practicing artist, Hockney knew there had to be more to this.

As he describes in the book (and in the documentary you can watch on YouTube), people were using cameras — even in the 15th century. They used lenses and mirrors to project images of people and places onto canvases, then traced and painted them.

With the help of physicists, lens makers, and historical documents, he makes an ironclad case that many artists whose work looks like photographs were actually using secret knowledge to achieve incredible results.

And why don’t we know this? Why do we think that Jan van Eyck, Caravaggio, Vermeer, and so many other important artists were magically talented artists when they were actually using these tools? And does this diminish their accomplishments?

Hockney provides a simple explanation: these were trade secrets. Even their assistants often didn’t know how they achieved these results. It gave them an edge in a world where speed and realism meant higher commissions.

But, as Hockney points out, the lenses, mirrors, and cameras didn’t make the art. The artists did, using tools to help bring their vision to life. The Secret Knowledge does not rob these masters of their originality or expressive power. They had extraordinary skills, a blend of talent, ingenuity, experience, and decades of hard work.

People have always felt that artists needed to suffer. That, if their work doesn’t come from sweat and tears and trauma, it isn’t ‘true art’. That, if you see how the magician does the trick, it loses its power.

There is also a myth that artists are a special breed apart, bestowed with some kind of divine gift. We need to believe that Michelangelo painted the entire Sistine Chapel on his own (two coats!). So we ignore all those nameless apprentices who painted backgrounds for Rafael and da Vinci and so many geniuses who followed. Similarly, we never know about all the trade secrets each atelier jealously guarded.

When people complain about AI stealing artists’ work, I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m skeptical. The fact is, artists and photographers have always had their work stolen by unscrupulous people. And artists have always borrowed other artists’ work, often without credit.

Andy Warhol cheated all the time. He made photo stats of pages from the Daily News and screen printed them onto canvas or projected and traced them. Roy Lichtenstein copied comics. Van Gogh copied Japanese woodcuts. Bacon copied Muybridge. And every artist, no matter how great, stands on the shoulders of the ones who precede him.

And all the artists who never cheated? They were just never caught.

I think people who aren’t artists are more troubled by the idea of artists cheating than other artists are. Photography, the airbrush, paint in tubes, Procreate, and even the “maulstick” (a stick to steady the hand) were all once called cheating.

Artists know that it’s just part of the job. Art isn’t the Olympics. There is no “standard equipment.” Use what works.

Maybe one day, AI will be able to draw as inaccurately and wonkily as I do. Maybe it’ll even be able to paint with gouache and tempera sticks. Even if some future model of artificial intelligence could duplicate every page in every one of my sketchbooks, there’d really be no point.

It will never be “Danny generated.”

For me, the process of making art is what matters, not the result. The feeling of sitting and staring at an old shoe, a sandwich, or some dirty laundry. The sensation of a Lamy Safari nib scratching across a page of Vellum Bristol. Of a sable brush skating across the surface of a creamy pan of cad yellow. And of 65 years of experience and emotions, ideas and dreams, joys and fears guiding the movement of these digits of flesh and bone. I don’t think any technology will be able to simulate that experience. And even if it could, why bother? I already have a device that does it sitting between my ears.

I’m done with ‘Secret Knowledge’ in my own studio. I’m putting away the shame of the middle-schooler who hid his tracing paper, because Jan van Eyck didn’t feel guilty, and neither should I.

Your pal,

Danny

And I don’t mean the wall where everything looks terrible and you want to quit. That one usually pops up within a few days of starting to draw and it’s almost cozy in comparison, because at least you know what the problem is.

No, the wall I’m talking about is the one where you open a sketchbook from six months ago, lay it next to what you drew this week, and you genuinely cannot tell the difference. Same types of lines, same problems with hands or noses or perspective or mixing colors, same degree of progress.

Oh, you’ve been working. You’ve been showing up. But nothing seems to be developing anymore.

That’s a plateau. And it seems to stretch, flat and unvarying, out to the vanishing point you can’t seem to quite understand.

And the monkey — your inner critic that’s always looking for evidence that you should give up — the monkey loves this moment. “See? This is as far as you’re gonna get. This is just who you are. Mediocre.”

So let’s talk about what the heck is going on and what we are supposed to do about it.

Your brain is a pattern-recognition machine. When you’re learning something new it’s working hard. Building new connections, burning energy, making mistakes, figuring things out. That effort has a feeling to it — the feeling of getting better.

And then at some point your brain gets efficient at doing the things, drawing, driving, baking bread. It files away what it’s learned. The things that used to take enormous concentration — seeing negative space, getting proportions roughly right, not death-gripping the pen — all of that becomes automatic. Your brain has basically said: got it, sorted, what’s next?

Which is great, except that “what’s next” is your job to provide. And if you don’t give new instructions, the brain just keeps running the same efficient programs. Same drawings. Same results. Same wall.

The plateau isn’t a sign that you’ve reached the end of the road. It’s just your brain on cruise control.

The obvious response to a plateau is to work harder. Draw more. Practice more. Push through.

Makes sense. That’s what worked before. So when progress stalls, doing more of the same feels like the right answer.

But doing more actually makes it worse. Your brain is already efficient at what you’ve been practicing. More repetition just deepens the groove you’re already in. You’ll get very, very good at exactly what you already know, and nothing else will move.

I work out twice a week with Jenn, my trainer. Every month, she gives me a completely new program — different equipment, different focus. “This month, we’re working on hip mobility. These exercises work together to build balance and strength.” And I show up Monday, and there’s a whole new set of things I can’t do properly yet.

Sometimes she’ll have me do an exercise where I couldn’t possibly use the weight I’ve been lifting. New movement pattern, different muscles, have to start lighter. It feels like going backward.

But as Jenn explains it, I haven’t lost what I used to be able to do, I’m just starting at the bottom of something new. We’re targeting different muscles, and now those new muscles are growing. New connections are getting made. And when I go back to the original exercise, I’m stronger than I was before. What felt like a setback was actually the whole point.

Drawing works the same way. This will feel counterintuitive, so trust me for a sec: to get past a plateau, you have to temporarily go back to being bad at something.

Not bad at everything. Just bad at something new. Anything.

We sometimes hit a plateau because we know better. Our expectations of what we think we should be able to do becomes a real burden. You know what a good drawing should look like, and you keep trying to make that drawing, and you never go anywhere new because new means uncertain and uncertain means the monkey wins.

Give yourself ten pages — or a week, or a month — where the only rule is that you’re in your discomfort zone. No showing anyone. No standards. No posting to social media with self-derisive comments. Just experiments that take you into new territory.

There are lots of ways to try this. A different medium you haven’t used. A constraint that takes away your usual tools — draw only in one color for a month, or give yourself three minutes per drawing and stop there, regardless, or draw everything with your left hand for a week. Your usual drawing muscles won’t help you. You’ll have to build new ones.

Pick an artist whose art makes you slightly uncomfortable or confused. Spend a week with their work. Try to steal just one thing about how they see. Do it for a little while, and you’ll be sowing seeds that will show up in your work months later in unexpected ways. You’ll be looser. You’ll be more confident. You’ll be doing something different and you’ll have bulldozed over that hump.

A plateau is only invisible progress.

So pick up the lighter weight, lift it from a different angle. Challenge yourself to be a beginner again, to be bad again, to be different, to wander off the beaten path, into the weeds and find another upward route. Trust yourself to grow.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. If you want to try something new on May 16, join me in Paris. Kinda. I’m doing a live online workshop called “A Day in Paris,” and we’ll be seeing all the sites and creating a big illustrated journal spread capturing it all, and you can do it right from home. Get off the plateau and come to Paree with me. Find out more here.

Tell me more, mon ami!

When I tell myself I have a week to write something, I’ll dither. I’ll procrastinate. I’ll rewrite the same paragraph five times, and doubt slithers in. But the moment I say “you have ten minutes, starting now,” I’m off and running. I stop thinking about whether it’s perfect.

I just think, and the thinking becomes the thing.

We have this myth that real art requires real time—long, uninterrupted blocks where we can disappear into the work. Big beautiful stretches of nothing but us and the blank page.

Weekend workshops, sabbaticals, cabins in the woods.

And maybe that’s true for some people. But I’ve found the opposite. Most of the good work I’ve done came in the little spaces between other things. Five minutes waiting for coffee. The walk to the car. Notes jotted down while brushing my teeth. I’ve written a dozen books this way, and every one of them was built from moments I almost didn’t count as real time.

Whether it’s a restricted palette of three colored pencils or ten minutes on the clock, the boundary creates a direct line to the end. There’s no room for overthinking.

If I break my working day into little slots—thirty minutes for this, twenty for that—and I’m intentional about what goes in each one, my days become rich instead of vanishing between my fingers. It doesn’t all have to be “work” in the sense of output. Fifteen minutes learning something new. Twenty-five minutes napping. Thirty minutes with a book and not my phone.

I’m choosing what happens in the in-between spaces instead of letting them evaporate into nothing. The enemy is long chunks of undifferentiated time, hours with no shape. That’s where procrastination lives, where the small voice tells me that conditions need to be perfect before I can begin.

The other half of this is environment. When I sit down to draw, the materials I need are there at hand in a little IKEA cart. Not dried- up tubes of paint lost in a dusty closet that require archaeology to dig up. I have a list of essay topics I could write on. I have a bunch of ideas for drawing projects. I don’t have to stare at the wall, wondering what I’m supposed to do. The work is already prepared. The thinking has been done.

And sometimes I’ll just say, I’m going to spend 20 minutes drawing random things I pull up on Google Images. It doesn’t have to be a big project, just the fun of making something new.

So if you are in a constant quest for time, let me remind you — you already have it. You have the five minutes before a meeting. You have the walk to the car. You have the margins. Stop waiting for the perfect moment and start using the moments you have. Give yourself constraints. Fill the small spaces. Prepare your tools. And then watch what happens.

The work can be smaller than you think. And it can still add up to big things.

Okay, I’m walking up my driveway now, and my 10 minutes are up. See you next week.

Your pal,

Danny

Not the horrible parts — the fear, the death, the not knowing. But I miss things about it.

A certain tranquility. Sitting in my garden. Floating in my pool at night, looking at the stars so bright and vast.

The sense that this was a time of epic change, that rhythms and patterns were disrupted, that we could reconnect with what truly matters, that anything might be possible. We could learn to bake bread, to draw, to play the piano, take up knitting, read Victorian novels, do a hundred push-ups a day. We could spend an hour on Zoom talking to friends in New York whom we hadn’t talked to properly in years.

I heard that for the first time in a century, people in India could see Mount Everest. The air pollution had cleared. From hundreds of miles away, the mountain was just suddenly there. That amazed me.

There was a tremendous togetherness to it — literally every person on this planet was experiencing the same thing at the same time. It seemed, briefly, to ease the divisions between us, to remind us that we have so much in common, we are all human. It gave me a feeling of love for my species that’s much dimmer these days.

I watched the birds in my garden and thought: they’re completely unaffected by this. Just doing what they always do. Not afraid. Just living. I knew I was anthropomorphizing — birds live with the constant threat of being eaten — but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d escaped something that had paralyzed us. That they were in on a secret we’d long since forgotten.

And I remember feeling awed by science and technology. That they found a vaccine as quickly as they did. That millions were saved. Another example of the miraculous times we live in, even when we can’t quite believe it.

Writing about it now, six years on, I realize almost all of these things are still within reach. I could listen to the birds. I could draw with friends. I could call people in New York. I could read Tolstoy. I could feel all of it — and yet most of it I won’t.

I’m writing this while a war is raging and the news is full of warnings about artificial intelligence — how it will end work, or democracy, or the species. And I’m having the same thoughts I had during COVID. The same ones people must have had during the Spanish flu a hundred years ago, a pandemic so vast it killed tens of millions and then was simply forgotten. Not processed, not learned from. Forgotten.

When COVID began, I couldn’t stop thinking about that. How is that possible? And yet here we are again — the same catastrophes, the same inadequate responses, the same helpless shock as though none of this has ever happened before.

The reason, I think, is that we each believe — secretly, stubbornly — that our moment is different. That the lessons of the past applied to those people, in those simpler times, but not to us. We are more sophisticated, more informed, more imperiled than anyone who came before. This time the stakes are genuinely existential. This time we might not make it.

Except that every generation has thought this. Every generation has been certain that theirs was the hinge point, the moment of no return, the war to end all wars. And so far — so far — they’ve all been wrong.

We are so smart. We write everything down. We publish books, make films, hold memorials, build museums. We talk about never forgetting. And then, more or less on schedule, we forget — because remembering would require admitting that we are not exceptional. That we are just the latest version of the same animal, making the same mistakes, feeling the same dread, and somehow, improbably, carrying on.

And yet — no matter how dark things get, no matter how many times we have to be dragged back to the same hard lessons — we can still see the mountain. We can still hear the birds. We can still draw the beauty of ordinary things. We can still float in a pool at night and look up and feel, for a moment, that it’s all somehow worth it.

That’s not nothing. For a species as hopeless as ours, that might even be everything.

I love mankind. But alas.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. I just published a new video. I think you’ll like it if you like sketchbooks — and who doesn’t!

At this, I got my back up—and it’s not just because I do love jazz (well, most jazz — except for Fusion, Pop Fusion, Neo Bop, Free Jazz, Acid Jazz, guitar jazz except Django, and anything recorded after 1985).

I ranted on for a while about how we should open our minds, try new things, wonder why others like them, and that’s what artists do. Oh, and also that it’s good for your brain and helps you be a less intolerant curmudgeon.

I guess this little rant shows that I’m intolerant of intolerance, but my critique is really of myself: the things I don’t want to do, the ways I don’t want to think. And yet I do.

It’s an ongoing struggle to expand my mind and keep it open.

There are a lot of things I used to think I’d always hate but now I’m willing to tolerate—or even enjoy. For most of my life, I could never abide any spectator sports, but now I’m willing to watch hours of tennis or Formula One racing or the Tour de France. I still can’t sit through a football game (but I did just get Chuck Klosterman’s new book on football, and I’m hoping that he’ll persuade me that I should enjoy this incredibly popular sport).

And that’s the thing: there is so much stuff that is popular that I just don’t understand. Why do people watch basketball, eat Domino’s pizza, drink IPAs, or read multi-volume science fiction novels about imaginary civilizations? Why do they wear baseball caps all the time? Why do they listen to K-pop?

It’s easy to say that people are idiots or pseudo-intellectuals or from another generation. But almost none of that is really true, and I think by and large it’s just an excuse to not push myself.

My brain is designed to put things into categories. It just makes it so much easier to process the insane amount of information that I’m constantly being bombarded by. Life is easier when I can say, “This is the thing I like and agree with. This is a thing I reject.” But the sieves and filters built into my brain are not always precise. And my crude categorization can end up blocking opportunity.

It’s tempting to just opt for the comfortable and familiar every time: to curl up with Seinfeld reruns, crack a Bud Lite, and tuck into a tuna on rye, avoiding the risks and stresses of the New. There was a time when the idea of eating raw eel was gaggingly incomprehensible, but had I stuck to my guns, I would never have discovered the silky pleasures of unagi nigiri and dragon rolls.

There seem to be two primeval evolutionary mechanisms in conflict in me when I have to decide to order the usual or try the special of the day. On one hand, I was wired by my ancient ancestors to avoid eating that new plant sprouting outside the cave or getting too close to that unfamiliar creature who had just stepped out of the bushes. The wrong choice could poison me or turn me into someone else’s lunch.

After the pandemic waned and we were allowed to start traveling again, I just didn’t want to. It’s taken me a couple of years to get comfortable with the idea of leaving my safe, isolated house and rubbing shoulders with people who don’t wash their hands or wear masks. I think that’s pretty instinctual: as an animal, I became pretty absolutist in protecting myself.

But on the other hand, all my ancestors eventually wandered out of Africa and began the globe-trotting adventure that spread our species around the planet. If we were pathologically averse to anything new, we would have stayed home and starved on the savannah rather than writing essays in Arizona.

When I try something new, I’m taking on work. I have to read the instruction manual. I have to pay close attention. I have to put up with stuff that my habits and instincts label as annoying or hateful. And I have to be ready to faceplant.

And after the initial excitement begins to fade, I get fidgety and irritable. I get whiny, like a six-year-old being dragged through a department store. I could suck at this! I probably will! I want to stop and go back to something familiar. That’s normal, but it’s also a critical crossroads. If I let myself, I can just quit—or I can push through and get to reap the benefits of this new experience.

And the benefit isn’t just getting to not suck at this or that. It’s to get brave.

The more I do new things, the more comfortable I have to become with being uncomfortable. I develop toughness and resilience. Which means I can push myself into even more uncomfortable places. It’s a sort of masochism that can lead to greatness. Or at least a willingness to eat raw eel.

I tend to be a snob. I assume reflexively that if something is popular, it’s probably not for me. But if a lot of people love something, that’s actually information. Their enthusiasm is worth investigating, not a reason to look the other way.

Because I was a teenager in the late 70s, I had a natural antipathy toward Bob Dylan. All that late 60s, early 70s stuff was crap for those of us who had discovered punk and new wave. Hippies were so passé. Then, when I was in my late 30s, I met Bob Dye. I thought Bob was a cool hipster, so I was kind of shocked when he revealed that he was a huge Bob Dylan fan (and not just because their names are so similar). Bob had no patience with my dismissal of his hero, and he insisted that we sit down and listen to all of Highway 61 Revisited and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and then talk about it. Two hours later, I was convinced, and I’ve been an ardent Bob Dylan fan ever since.

Bob—well, both Bobs—opened my mind, and it stayed ajar.

Since then, I’ve had JJ school me in why I should listen to Rush and read Edith Wharton. My pal Anthony has turned me on to Robert Fripp.

Every time one of my prejudices falls, I rise.

I read a great book (Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker) that introduced me to this way of approaching new art in a gallery: “Just walk up to a piece and try to think of five things that it brings up… Not five things that the art is about… What are five things you notice… or how it makes you feel.”

Now I’m willing to ask myself: what’s the value in a Pollock? What are all these weird, incomprehensible things in the Whitney Biennial? Why do people rave about David Foster Wallace? Why would anybody eat beets? What’s so great about living in Phoenix, Arizona?

Asking people why they love what they love can help me share the love—or at least help me understand them better. The Grateful Dead. The Dave Matthews Band. Cilantro. Running marathons. The NHL.

I get it, but I still don’t like it.

I’m pretty good at trivia contests. I have yet to earn any money on Jeopardy, but all this random information in my brain has been enormously helpful to me in many other ways. I know it’s helped me come up with ideas because I have a large inventory of so many ways of doing things. I can combine them in fresh combinations to solve any greater problem. They call it ‘bricolage.’

That’s what creativity is: it’s not sitting in an empty room staring at the ceiling and hoping the muse will deliver an idea. It’s taking existing things and gluing them together to make new things out of them.

Of course, if I don’t know about a lot of existing things—because I have a very small repository of raw materials and eat all my meals at Arby’s—it’s that much harder to find fresh combinations. It’s like having a toolbox with one Phillips-head screwdriver and a ball-peen hammer. I’m working on getting an entire hardware store into my skull.

Which brings me back to jazz. I assume a lot of people are used to thinking of jazz as maybe instrumental background in a restaurant or an elevator or a Charlie Brown Christmas. Or perhaps they have recoiled at the clashing sounds of free-form jazz like Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. Or been bored by the banality of Kenny G.

Jazz is often treated as esoteric or “for intellectuals” now, but from the 1920s through the 1950s, jazz was just mainstream popular music. From the Jazz Age of the 20s up until the explosion of rock and roll—much of which evolved from jazz—that’s what you heard on the radio and what you played on 78s. Jazz. Billions of people listened to it, and they weren’t all bores and intellectuals. (If this piques your interest at all, start with the New York Times’ great series called “5 minutes to make you love Jazz.”)

Jazz is an incredible opportunity to hear artists create something in real time. Take someone like Keith Jarrett, whose four-record set The Köln Concerts is just a recording of him sitting down at a piano in front of a room full of people and making up music for several hours. The music is beautiful, new, and very moving.

Most jazz is about playing with variations on something familiar. It begins with a standard song, like “My Favorite Things” or “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” One artist—with a huge range of experience in making sounds with their instrument, a lot of understanding of musical theory, and a sense of comfort and freedom and trust in their bandmates—will start to dismantle that familiar song and create something brand new out of the pieces. Another member of the band will build on this with new variations, and the tune will continue to get passed around as new ideas develop and the whole group supports this creative exploration. It’s wonderful to hear: something really familiar becoming something brand new, and the audience is right there at the inception.

I have a box set of Miles Davis and his quintet playing live at the Plugged Nickel, a small Chicago nightclub, in December 1965. They performed there for two nights, playing seven sets, all of which were recorded. In each set, they play the same basic list of songs, but each take is a completely different experience for them and for us.

I can’t think of another art form that’s so bold and courageous, and that inspires me on creative adventures of my own. You can hear all seven hours on Spotify. Or YouTube.

The older I get, the more important I think it is to keep stretching. My body and my mind.

As Kevin Kelly says in his wonderful book, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier, “the chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.”

Sure, as I get older it’s tempting to be more conservative and guarded, to be suspicious of strangers and new ideas. After all, I have fewer years to recover from grievous errors.

On the other hand, I have fewer years in which to grow and have fun. New ideas and experiences are like investments that will grow over time. Each one spawns others, and eventually I get more and more wealthy from these experiences. The longer I wait to try stuff, the less I’ll be able to benefit from it.

And there is less at stake than there was when I was twenty. I’ve also shed much of the arrogance that I had when I was younger, the cocksureness that I was always right. Now I’m more open to how other people think and live. I’m less afraid of looking the fool.

I learned a few new things this week: I planted grass seed in my yard for the first time. I invited a fellow baker to come over and teach me some sourdough techniques. I read a book about surfing. I listened to a new record by an old favorite (Morrissey) and an old record by a new favorite (Surprise Chef).

That’ll do. Time to watch a rerun of ER.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. I just made a video about how I learned the true meaning of creativity. I hope you like it!

Play video

Ages ago, someone told me that we replace all of the cells in our bodies every seven years. Every single one. That idea has haunted me since. It seems to mean that I am literally no longer the same person I was seven years ago. Even though I have memories of things that go way further back, they are not the memories of the me of today.

That’s not a completely alien idea; it’s like copying files from an old computer to a new one or making a new printing of an old story. The information is the same, but the vessel is new. But somehow, when it comes to the cells that make me up, this has always felt different. Because I think of me as this me, this couple of hundred pounds of meat and skin, these scars, this reflection in the mirror. I don’t usually think of myself as a concept, a construction, or as data that can be re-recorded on a new cassette.

I woke up with this idea in my head again, and as I write this, I’m starting to realize why. The first and most obvious reason is that I am in the middle of organizing all the data files for Sketchbook Skool, 16 terabytes of data stored on a big stack of hard drives. Part of my archiving process is to make clones of each drive, so we have backups in case anything goes wrong with the originals. I put an empty drive into a slot in the dock, put the original in the other slot, push a button, lights flash, and soon every byte has been duplicated and I have two identical drives. All those hours of footage, all those conversations, and drawing demos are now in two places.

And somehow, as I do this, my body is doing the same thing. As I watch the blinking on the front of the dock, my old cells, the old me is slowly being copied and then deleted. Old cells are being cast off, exfoliated, dropping onto my pillow, blowing around my apartment with mites of dust, sluicing down the shower drain, peeing into the bowl, crapping out with my digested burrito.

Me shitting me out.

The other reason this popped into my conscious predawn today is that in less than two months, I will slough off the last cell that ever saw Patti first-hand. The last cells that ever talked to her, held her, kissed her goodbye. Soon, every part of me will be a fresh clone with no personal experience of her.

In December, Jack and I took Patti’s ashes out of the cookie jar that has contained them since March 18, 2010, and put them in their final resting place. We went to one of her favorite places, just after sunset, and we put her ashes in a place we can always come back to, a private place in a public spot, one she went to every day, where we know she would be happy to be, no matter where we are.

Her ashes are not Patti. They are just dead cells that were burned and preserved, not in amber but in a heavy-duty plastic bag, which we kept in that cookie jar, on a shelf where I could see it every day and gaze at when memories of her became intense. They stood for her but now they no longer need to do that.

For she is in us.

The process of burying Patti was not sad. It was actually slightly comic as Jack and I bumbled our way through it, making a couple of clumsy errors that were pure Patti, pure Hoofy. I don’t think either of us felt sad as we did it. Rather, we felt that she was with us still, that the pain of losing her was a faded memory, and that this was the final thing the three of us would ever do together, and that it should be light and silly just as our best times as a family always were.

Patti’s cells are now forever in that one place. Jack’s are now in Los Angeles, three thousand miles away. And mine are here, being replaced with new cells, new cells that look older, more wrinkled and grey.

Many of the hair cells were not replaced. Some of the brain cells did not replicate with all the memories in place. Other cells have less resiliency and vim than their predecessors. And yet they are all still me, they all still bear the weathering of the years, the experiences, joys, and traumas that made me and still do.

My memories of Patti have changed with these cells. Some are lost forever. And those that used to take precedence because they were at the front of the line have stepped back into the mists. I am no longer haunted by thoughts of Patti at the window, of the policemen, of the visit to the coroner’s office. I no longer think of Patti as a woman of fifty, increasingly limited by her disabilities, who didn’t want to grow old in a wheelchair.

Now, when I think of her, I rummage through my huge archive of snapshots. I see her in a Polaroid, pregnant with Jack. I see her in a soft focussed, black and white picture dressed up to go to a party, I see her laughing in a bar with friends I haven’t heard from in years, I see her smiling through her freshly cut bob, I see her holding our first dog Frank like a big baby, his long legs sticking up in the air, both of them grinning. I see her looking at me like she did on our first date, saying ‘Mommy’, the gap between her front teeth.

As I think of these memories, I feel old tears well up in my new eye cells. These new cells are never overwhelmed by the tsunami of grief that used to seize me, but it’s good to know that those old memories can still affect them, even though I am happy, happy with my new cells, my new home, my new job, my new love, my new wife, my new life. My new cells make up a new me with all the best bits of the old.

Your pal,

Danny

“I’m no good at art, so what’s the point?” I get it. Art can feel intimidating, particularly if you’ve never done it before. We go to museums and see the work of amazing artists and think, “I could never do anything like that.”

But we’re comparing ourselves to a small handful of the greatest geniuses in the history of humankind — a hundred men and women out of the tens of billions who have walked the earth. It’s just not a fair comparison. Or a necessary one.

The goal of art isn’t to compete with other artists, dead or alive. It’s to find yourself, to find a way to express who you are. Think of art like your signature, the way that you dress, walk, or speak — things that develop over time until they become natural extensions of who you are.

Nobody else can make art like you. Nobody else can tell a joke like you, swim like you, cook like you, kiss like you, or be a friend like you. Being good isn’t the point. Being you is.

“I don’t have time to make art.” When we think about art, we imagine it’s a major undertaking — classes, supplies, a studio, the whole production. But we don’t need any of that. You can make art in five minutes, in three minutes. A doodle, a sketch. A haiku. The more you do it, the more it becomes second nature, as fast and easy and fun as consuming a TikTok video — and considerably better for you. Making art is an investment in your well-being. Even a short creative break, like a little nap, can refresh you and give you a new perspective on your day.

“Art supplies are expensive.” Some are, it’s true. A single tube of cobalt blue oil paint could cost you $100. But you can make beautiful art with a ballpoint pen you picked up for free. Draw on the back of a credit card statement. Collage with old magazines. Paint on a cardboard box. Gather up leaves, press them in a book, and make something gorgeous. You don’t need to spend a lot of money. You just need to look at the world with a fresh eye and think: what can I make from what I already have?

“I’m set in my ways. I’m too old. It’s too late.” It’s never too late to go on a new adventure. The Hobbit opens with Bilbo Baggins sitting by the fire in his cozy hole with his pipe and his cup of tea, until one day Gandalf shows up and says, let’s go. Bilbo is terrified, but then he sets forth and discovers the world for the first time. That’s what art does. It doesn’t matter whether you first look through that lens as a little kid, when you’re graduating from high school, or when you join the AARP. There’s no time like the present to discover what your true passions are.

“I don’t have anybody to make art with.” There are so many communities off- and online filled with like-minded people. You may live in the middle of nowhere, but there are people waiting for you right on this computer. Sketchbook Skool is a great place to meet others embarking on this adventure.

But you can also make art by yourself and use it as an opportunity for introspection. Sit quietly with a pen and paper and draw something on the table in front of you. Dream up some new ideas. Write a little story about when you were a kid. It’s a great way to be with yourself — and comfortable with yourself. Time that’s just yours.

“I don’t have any talent.” I don’t know quite what talent is, but if it exists, it’s just one small piece of the puzzle. A lot of very famous artists didn’t start out with some innate gift. They dedicated time to working and exploring their passion, discovering and improving their skills, struggling to push past each problem they encountered. You might be frustrated at first, sure you can’t do this — but then one day you’ll have a breakthrough that makes you realize you are, in fact, an artist. I’ve seen it happen to thousands of people just like you and me.

“I’ll never make any money from it.” Yup, it’s true. You may not. I don’t make money from my art. I never have. But I’ve never particularly cared about that. There are plenty of other ways to make money in the world — why does art have to be one of them? Life is full of things worth doing even if you’re not paid to do them. Playing with your dog, hiking a beautiful mountain, eating a sundae, floating on a lake watching fluffy clouds pass overhead. Nobody needs to pay you for those things. They’re just wonderful and make life worth living. Art does too.

“It’s just too hard.” Hard doesn’t mean impossible. Every artist — beginners and professionals alike — struggles along the way. But what’s wonderful about art is there’s no one way to do it. The road twists and turns, which makes it a great opportunity to take risks, make mistakes, and discover something brand new — a breakthrough that comes out of struggle. Each time you try, you learn, you grow, you get better. The struggle is part of what makes it great. Like climbing Everest. Running a marathon. Raising a child. All worth doing, even though they’re hard.

“People will judge my work.” It’s natural to be afraid of that, especially when you’re sharing something as personal as art. But it’s all subjective. What one person loves, another might not understand — and that’s okay. Every piece you create is part of your journey. Don’t let the possibility of a stranger’s judgment stop you from having that experience.

“I’m not creative.” Are you sure? Creativity isn’t just something we do on a canvas or on stage. It’s woven into the fabric of everyday life — the innovative solution you come up with at work, the way you put an outfit together, pull together a meal, tell your kids a story at bedtime. It’s a mindset. And once you allow yourself the freedom to explore, to make mistakes and learn from them, you’ll find it starts to bubble up in unexpected ways. Every one of us has a unique perspective, a unique voice. That in itself is creativity.

“I’m not an artist.” Who says? You don’t need a license or a degree or a sprinkling of magical fairy dust. Art isn’t confined to galleries and museums. It’s in the doodles you make during a phone call, the way you arrange flowers in a vase, the way you tell a story, the way you tie your tie, the way you wear your hat. If you create, you’re an artist in your own right. And if you’ve never tried but are curious — why not start now?

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. I just made a new video for you. I’d be so happy if you’d watch it!

It got me thinking. How much have I spent on making art over the years?

Five colored pencil sets. A drawer full of ink bottles. A hundred markers. Eight or nine watercolor sets. A couple dozen brushes. I’ve tried out so many brands of pens, settled on one, bought a crate of them. A month later, changed my mind.

Art books. Art instruction books. Art history books. Books by artists. Books about artists.

iPads. Computers. Cameras. Software. Internet service to watch other people use all of the above.

I’ve spent money on things I use every day — and things I fully intend to use but never get around to.

When my friend Tom showed me his new ultralight folding camp stool, I had to have one — even though I already own three others. I dropped a hundred bucks on it for my trip to Mexico, only to discover it was banned from the museums. It just sat in my backpack the whole trip. Now it sits in a closet, alongside the markers and pastels and metallic pens and graphite sticks that I honestly, truly do plan to use one day.

Maybe.

And then there’s time. So much of it.

A few hours a week, sometimes a few hours a day, for twenty-five years — filling sketchbook pages just to put them on a shelf. Time spent polishing my skills, experimenting, redoing. Time studying what other people do and feeling jealous and awed by their abilities.

What does that add up to?

But those aren’t the only costs.

There’s the cost of feeling incompetent. Of thinking I’ll never learn to draw properly, of scrabbling for a new idea and coming up dry. The uncertainty that I’ll ever have another idea, or that my idea will be any good, or that I’ll be able to execute it. That my skills will atrophy or never develop further. That people won’t like what I make. That it won’t be worth anybody’s time.

The cost to my ego of comparing myself with other people.

The cost to my confidence of struggling with the monkey voice in my head.

And the cost of dredging up raw materials I can’t order from Amazon: childhood memories, fears of aging, conflict, darkness. The cost of digging into myself, of letting my subconscious surface things that had been safely buried.

I don’t sell my art. But it isn’t free.

That’s only half the ledger.

I get to play every day. I get to sit at my table, open a sketchbook, uncork my bottles of ink, open my boxes of colored pencils. I get to draw faces and animals, places and snacks.

I get to try things and experiment. The fun of discovery — what’s going to happen if I do this? What will it be like to try that? Where will this idea take me? I get to splash ink and draw wonky lines and fail without it being a disaster. I get to learn from all kinds of experiences and people.

Those are the everyday pleasures.

And then there are the deeper ones.

I love solving creative problems, figuring out how to do something that seems impossible, or combining things that shouldn’t go together. I love learning how to use a tool in a way that finally brings to life an idea that’s been lodged in my head. I love the delight of seeing something on the page that I can’t believe I made — and how that makes me feel inside, and how that makes me feel about myself.

I love sharing something I’ve made and having a stranger respond to it. Having someone I don’t know tell me it moved them, gave them insight, changed something in their life.

When I made my animated film, The Artist Who Couldn’t Draw, I had this incredible feeling of having brought two creatures to life. The main characters had personalities and worlds, goals and struggles — all of which had come entirely from my imagination. Every day I went back to work with them, it was fulfilling in a way I struggle to describe. I’ve had that feeling writing stories and a novel too.

I’ve created my own time machine through journaling — it takes me back to times in my life I thought were lost and gives me fresh insight into them.

And my art helped me heal. It walked beside me through the hardest times — my first wife’s accident and her death, and the pandemic. My sketchbooks have carried me through confusion and grief. Their pages have shown me the beauty in my life when I couldn’t see it myself.

How do I put a price on that?

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Final reminder: My live workshop, Dive into Dip Pens, takes place tomorrow morning. You have a few hours left to sign up and get the full recording too. Click here for more. See you there!

And over the next 30 years, I built my network in the two square miles of Manhattan. I worked for 10 different New York ad agencies, and there were dozens more still to try. When corporate headhunters asked me if I would be willing to relocate to Chicago, Los Angeles, London, or Portland, I just looked at them like they were crazy. What, and leave New York?

To quote Alvy Singer, “I don’t want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.”

I guess the irony is that the biggest changes I’ve made to my life took place in a small garage in West L.A. and this old house in Phoenix.

Two cities in which I barely knew a soul. Where I had no connections. No inside paths to success. No legs-up. Just me.

But these are the places I wrote most of my books. Where I started Sketchbook Skool. Where I made videos and started writing these essays. Where I became the real me.

The internet made it all possible. Now I can reach anyone anywhere. And then I can unplug and sit in my garden, wallow in my hot tub, or take a nap after lunch.

But it’s not just that I can do more here in the hinterlands. It’s that I can also do less.

I can clear space for new ideas and fresh risks. I don’t have the distractions of the bright lights in the big city. I don’t have to compare and compete with my peers. Less need to keep up and stay current with the latest, groovy, trendy things. I’m writing this in sweatpants by my pool. Oh, how my old art director in her Ferragamos would jeer.

And things frankly are different because I’m older. When I was 22, I was happy to race the rats. I could claw my way up the ladder. Now I just don’t see the need.

During the pandemic, we worried that New York was dying, but of course it never was. It survived COVID, but also yellow fever and the Spanish flu. But even though New York will always be the top of the tops, it’s not the only game in town anymore.

Geography is no longer destiny. You can start an art or writing career, become an investor or entrepreneur from anywhere with decent Wi-Fi.

That means that there aren’t just 8 million people who can make it. There are 8 billion who now have a shot.

Including you.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Next Saturday morning, I'm teaching Dive into Dip Pens—a 3-hour online workshop exploring this most expressive tool where we will make some gorgeous, finished art together. You can join in from anywhere! It’s on Saturday, March 7th at 9 am Pacific. If you can’t make it live, watch the full recording anytime. If you're up for spending a Saturday morning making art, click here to learn more. If not, see you next Friday.

That we’re too old, too set in our ways, too far down a different road. That the creative version of us — the one who filled sketchbooks as a teenager, who always meant to learn something, to make something — was a younger person, and it’s a little embarrassing to pretend otherwise now.

My mother was in her seventies when she walked into her local NPR station and offered to help out. She had no background in broadcasting, no experience in journalism, no obvious reason anyone should take her on. Soon she had two radio shows with interviews and essays about her community. Within a couple of years, she was running the news bureau — director of the whole operation. She did that for a decade.

She also invented an art form. She calls it Leafages: pressed leaves she’s collected from around the world, combined with her calligraphy — quotes and aphorisms written in her own hand, the words winding around and among the leaves, the whole thing composing into something neither purely botanical nor purely literary but entirely her own. She sells originals and prints. Someone who hadn’t made art till her sixties is a working artist in her eighties.

Mary Delany would recognize the impulse. In 1772, recently widowed and grieving at 72, she noticed a scrap of colored paper on her table that matched the hue of a nearby geranium. She picked up a pair of scissors and started cutting. The botanical collages she made over the next decade were so precise that the leading scientists of her day consulted them as references. Nearly a thousand pieces. The British Museum has them now. See here.

Inge Ginsberg survived the Holocaust, spent the 1950s writing songs for Doris Day, and, in her late 90s, decided that her poetry about the world wasn’t reaching enough people. So she became the front woman of a heavy metal band, growling lyrics over distorted guitars at an age when most people are just trying to finish the crossword. She went viral. Dig it.

Harry Bernstein spent his career editing trade magazines while quietly wanting to write his own book. After his wife of 67 years died, he sat down at his typewriter and started. His debut memoir, published when he was 96, became a bestseller. He won a Guggenheim fellowship. Three more books followed before he died at 101.

I’ve watched something like this happen thousands of times at Sketchbook Skool — people who spent decades convinced they weren’t the creative type, who had that impulse pushed aside by a teacher, a parent, the sheer pressure of a practical life, and who showed up somewhere in their sixties or seventies and found it still there.

They discovered things about themselves — a resilience, a capacity for attention, a pleasure in just looking — that being “sensible” had kept under wraps.

They didn’t know drawing would change things, but they just showed up and started, and slowly their life began to change.

I’ve been thinking about all of this while finishing a new short film called The Museum of Lost Art. It tells the story of a man who lost touch with his own youthful creativity until later in life, he wanders into a magical museum and discovers his dream is still alive. I hope you’ll watch it.

I deferred my dream for decades, but I spent the last 25 years breathing new life back into it. I hope that my essays, videos, and courses will help you to rediscover your own potential, no matter how long it’s been in the drawer.

Your pal,

Danny

Most kids just stuffed the colors nilly-willy into the box or left them lying on the table. For me, arranging always provided a certain satisfaction.

The same with my bookshelves: arranging books by author, then again by title, by subject, by spine color, by height. Then I could lie in bed and gaze upon the orderliness before me.

I think that’s the reason I loved collecting stamps. Arranging all of the Queen Elizabeth II profiles by denomination or by color. And the same with the Francisco Franco portrait series. Variations on themes.

And why I like discovering an author and reading every book they’ve written, usually in order of publication.

Following the instructions for Ikea furniture and turning a pile of random planks into a bookshelf. Or organizing computer files so they sit in the right folders and have the right names. Building databases. Making swatches of all my new watercolors. Labeling each of my sketchbooks and the drawers of my art supply cabinet.

I like to put my activities into my calendar and record them in my journal at the end of each day. A journal I have filled for 1,327 consecutive days without fail.

I like to set my own schedules and deadlines. I like to finish a project long before I feel the cold constricting grasp of the due date around my throat. I call it “pre-crastination,” this need to get it done before it’s expected.

So what is this about? This desire for completism and order and neatness?

I normally think of myself as a person who eschews rules and regulations. Who revolts against mandates imposed by others. I pushed back against client mandates and company policy and due dates throughout my advertising career. I wanted to go my own way and yet…

Am I somewhere on the spectrum? Aren’t we all? Is it an anal compulsion baked into my psychology? Perhaps. Is it because I’m a triple Virgo, the stars aligning to make me this way?

True, I was born under certain stars, but I was also born into a certain kind of family, one that brought me a lot of chaos and very little predictability. Between my mother, my father, my first and second stepfathers, my grandparents, I lived under changing rules, changing styles, changing needs, changing demands, changing houses, changing cultures, changing countries. I went to a dozen and a half schools in four countries before I was twelve.

None of which was within my control at all. But my bookshelf was.

Creativity requires chaos. We need ideas and inspirations to be free-floating and bumping up against each other.

But there have to be constraints as well. If my environment is chaotic and so is my creative project, my brain will hit a system overload, a form of anxiety that makes me feel powerless and incapable of steering the idea to completion.

When things are ordered—when I know where my supplies are, when my schedule is set, when the crayons are arranged—my brain doesn’t have to work so hard just to exist in the world. It’s not scanning for threats or frantically hunting for the thing I need. That energy gets saved for making.

My brain needs to operate within a certain range of stimulation. If my environment is inert, my brain has nothing to play with. But if everything is on fire, I get overwhelmed and retreat.

But this is not a pathological condition. I’m capable of doing work and operating even in really difficult situations. I did it when I was a kid, and I did it in some extremely tumultuous advertising agencies run by insane people.

But it’s not optimal.

I’ve turned my childhood coping mechanism into a professional-grade tool.

The life I lead now has a lot of structure, so my imagination has a scaffold for my creative ideas. I write on certain days. I make videos on certain days. I do demonstrations and livestreams on other days.

I know what to expect from my day, structure-wise, but all is not rigid and unyielding. When I sit down at the keyboard or pick up my pen, I am travelling on a well-maintained road that I can ride in all directions.

My imagination has become superbly well-trained. It’s like my pugs when I take them for a walk. They know we’re here to do business.

I can sit down and write this essay at 8:30 on a Monday morning and get it done on schedule because I’ve engineered this structure and place of safety, productivity, and predictability. My imagination knows it’s in the right environment to safely generate ideas. It’s ready to perform.

When I open my pencil box, and I’m greeted by that perfect rainbow, it means the storm has passed and the time for making has begun.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. One of my obsessions is using a dip pen.  And I want to infect you with it. I'm putting together a new live online workshop on March 7th—three hours diving into dip pens, starting with the basics and ending up with several beautiful pieces of finished art. If you want to join me for a really fun Saturday, click here to learn more.

Painters paint.

Cooks cook.

Polo players play polo.

We are what we do.

Being an artist doesn’t mean you have to justify whether or not you’re an artist.

Just make art … and you’ll be an artist.

Okay, so what is art?

That’s a big question, and it doesn’t have a universally agreed-upon answer. So you get to decide for yourself what it is. (Which means that not everyone will agree with you, but yeah, whatever).

And if you can’t decide what Art is, maybe you don’t need to worry about what an Artist is. Just don’t think so much about it and do your thing instead.

Focus on being a painter (i.e., someone who paints). Or a watercolorist (someone who watercolors). Or a sculptor (Etc.). Or a draw-er.

(Aside: Why is there no proper word for someone who draws? —Draughtperson? Sketcher? PenPerson? Ink-stained wretch? — do we really have to use “draw-er,” a word that also means the place you keep the trash bags and the oven mitt?)

Be what you do.

Better yet, forget your job title altogether, and spend your energy on making stuff — rather than on what it will be called once you’ve made it.

I say this because too many people conflate activity and identity. They worry about the noun rather than the verb.

And the verb is much more useful.

If you get up in the morning and say, “I’m an artist,” okay, then what? Put on a beret and sign some autographs? Meh.

But if you leap out of bed and say, “I’m going to make some art today,” you’re going to get somewhere.

You’re going to fill canvases and sketchbooks with stuff — some good, some bad — and one day, someone else will say, “Wow, you’re an Artist.”

And you’ll say, “I guess so. Thanks,” and then you’ll get right back to doing.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. It’s 02/06/26 at 2:06 am. Whoa.

The process, as it was described to me by English teachers and publishing guides, sounded punishing. You mailed out unsolicited manuscripts with self-addressed stamped return envelopes and waited.

Mostly, you waited …. to be rejected. If you were lucky, you waited for years to get a reply. You paid your dues in postage and silence, and one day—maybe—you got chosen.

When I was in my 40s, I finally got a book published, which made it easier to get a second book published and to get an agent, and so forth.

I had my club membership card at last.

The publisher took 92% of the list price, and in return, I got my words on paper and available for sale somewhere in my local Barnes & Noble.

For a long time, that felt like the only legitimate path.

Sure, there was always “vanity publishing,” but it carried real stigma. It was shorthand for self-delusion, or at least that’s how it was talked about. For people whose work wasn’t good enough to be published, so they had to pay to see it in print.

The message was clear: if a publisher didn’t choose you, it didn’t really count.

Wrestling, as I often do, with impostor syndrome, I absorbed the belief that legitimacy came from being selected. That publishers were the imprimatur.

Without them, you weren’t a real author.

Over the years, I worked with half a dozen publishers. Some were staffed with kind, thoughtful people. Others were faceless, global corporations. The deals were generally the same. I did most of the work. They took the lion’s share of the revenue.

Early on, there was some promotional support. I was interviewed on NPR radio shows. Once, I was even on CNN. But over time, those opportunities faded. Increasingly, I was expected to bring my own audience, maintain a social presence, and promote relentlessly.

Production, distribution, promotion—the things publishers were supposed to handle—were quietly shifted onto my shoulders.

The editorial process offered little value. Most of the feedback I received amounted to typo fixes and minor grammatical corrections. The golden age of legendary editors like Maxwell Perkins was long gone. I wasn’t being edited so much as processed—my files moved along inside a large corporate system.

I designed and illustrated most of my books, which meant I had to deliver a finished product, all ready to print. Another expense quietly shifted from the publisher to me.

I liked making my own books, but more and more, it felt like I was paying with my time and labor simply to remain inside the system.

At the same time, I was watching something else happen. People were publishing fan fiction, ebooks, crowd-funded projects, and deeply specific niche work that traditional publishers had no interest in—not because it was inferior, but because it didn’t fit a mainstream economic model. These creators weren’t being supported or discovered. They were going to their audiences directly.

The more I watched this, the clearer it became: publishers weren’t helping specialized authors reach hungry readers unless the authors did all the work themselves.

The gate was still there. It just wasn’t doing much.

The power and promise of publishing, as I see it, is the ability to say: I can find readers for this. I maintain the appro­priate network; I possess the appro­priate influence. Of course, that promise was only ever par­tially true … but nowa­days it is simply: not. Which isn’t to say books don’t find readers—obvi­ously, they do—but I don’t believe any pub­lisher presently feels they can manage the process with confidence; with the snap of a lever. Nowadays, it’s all raffle tickets—all pachinko flow. — Robin Sloan

The moment that finally clarified things for me was when my latest publisher went bankrupt and was absorbed by Penguin Random House. I had always thought of both Penguin and Random House as the crème de la crème of publishing, so I was quite excited—like I’d gotten a back-door entry into the hallowed halls.

What I discovered instead was indifference. They did a careless job with How to Draw Without Talent. I meant nothing to them. They contributed almost nothing, despite taking an enormous share of the royalties. And my book languished.

Decades after I first sent those envelopes into the ether, it had become possible for anyone to print a book with the click of a button and make it available directly to readers.

Technologically, everything had changed.

Psychologically, I was still laboring under the old rules.

The lingering belief that doing it yourself made the work lesser. That legitimacy came from outside approval. That success meant passing through institutions with their own priorities and agendas.

Those expectations weren’t just psychological. They were physical, too. What a real book was supposed to look like: a jacket, a certain size, a certain weight, printed on paper, or released as an audiobook. All of that made sense when the goal was to move units through bookstores. But those things aren’t requirements if you’re working directly with readers, listeners, or viewers. They’re conveniences to mass production, not creative necessities.

Once you step outside that system, the form itself loosens. A book can arrive in installments, in email, in PDFs. It can live alongside videos or drawings or audio. It can be something shared quietly, or slowly, or as the reader watches you write it, livestreaming on YouTube.

The shape doesn’t have to obey the old rules anymore.

We no longer need to measure what we make by standards designed for someone else’s business model.

We have the tools to make incredible things.

We can share them widely, narrowly, or not at all. We can publish them ourselves, or keep them private, or give them away. And we can stop looking at our work through a prism of success inherited from people with very different goals.

Setting our own rules—about what we make, how it looks, and how it reaches others—puts the power and the possibilities back in our hands.

Your pal,

Danny

What you think about your death. How the world feels from this particular place. How we should treat each other. What role God has in your life. What we think is beautiful. Our weaknesses and secret dreams.

Things that you have opinions about, you have feelings about, you have dreams about — but that just lie in the basement of your mind in decaying cardboard boxes, gathering dust and silverfish.

Sure, there are those rare moments you bring some of them out.

After a couple drinks with a college roommate, talking to a stranger on an overnight plane trip, or to your spouse when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep. But in all likelihood, you’ll go to your grave with those thoughts and feelings and opinions still locked behind cobwebs and never shared with the world.

Unless you are an artist.

So many of my favorite artists make work that displays their feelings, their inner angst, their fears. How they feel about human beings, about aging, about the body, about sex, weakness, death, society. The more intense the better.

Basquiat, Crumb, Schiele, van Gogh, Lucien Freud, Neel, Hockney. Knausgård, Dylan Thomas, Patchett, Strout, Bukowski, even Stephen King.

I love these artists because they crack open their chests and skulls and spill out things we recognize in ourselves, things we didn’t know anyone else felt or thought.

Sometimes raw, sometimes enhanced with genius.

Big things and small that may or may not ever come up in polite society.

Way beyond pretty pictures, cool techniques, gripping stories or fancy footwork, they make art that’s worth spending time with because it makes us feel like we are not alone in the universe.

Making heartfelt art doesn’t mean you need to self-flagellate in public, but you do need to be authentic and unafraid.

Art is the opportunity to share yourself. Seize it.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. I just made a video about an artist who hated his art. I hope you don’t hate it.

Or learn to play a musical instrument reasonably well.

I’ve always figured I’d eventually get into excellent physical shape. Or visit my boyhood home in Pakistan.

I’ve planned to one day own a whole pack of dogs and learn to play tennis, become a computer coder, and spend the whole day, every day, just drawing.

As time passes, many of those things have become quite doable.

But I don’t do them. And maybe, I’m finally admitting I don’t really want to.

It’s easy to kick life down the road. To stuff a folder labeled “One Day.” To put a pin in passions and wait to make them real ... later.

Are there things you’ve always told yourself you want to do one day? And — given the opportunity to do them — do you actually still want to?

Do you still really want to live in Vermont or Fiji?

To write a novel?

To own a snake?

Or a tattoo of one?

Maybe it’s time to clean out your dream attic.

To Marie-Kondo® each one, check its sell-by date and see if it’s gone stale in the can.

Don’t put it off any longer. Today, figure out what you really, truly want to do with your life.

And clear some room to start doing it.

Your pal,

Danny

I’d stare sullenly out the rainy window. I’d kick the living room rug as I walked around its perimeter. I’d tease the dog. I’d annoy my mother. I’d whine.

These days, I’m so rarely bored—except at bad dinner parties or when looking at Facebook. There always seems to be stuff I want to do—things to learn, to explore, to experience. If anything, the problem is having too many options. And too little time.

But I vividly remember that “I’m so booooooored” feeling from being eight or nine and refusing to occupy myself with my shelves of books, bins of toys, and boxes of crayons.

I’m having a version of it today.

Our Internet service is out (they promise it’ll be back by 3:21 PM—so specific and so unbelievable). I can’t watch YouTube while eating my lunch or distract myself with Instagram.

I guess I’ll write something instead. Today’s the day I typically start to draft this weekly essay, so let’s get down to that instead.

I gaze at my bookshelves, thumb through some random pages. I look through the folder on my phone that is my virtual commonplace book, an endless archive of highlighted quotes from other people’s books and blog posts.

It’s the late-night feeling of looking in the fridge for inspiration for something to snack on. Nah, nothing looks good.

My hard drive has an archive of ideas I’ve never used. Stuff I thought of in the shower, on a walk, while watching Netflix. Half-baked. Abandoned. Ideas that seemed viable, but I was too lazy to write at the time.

I rarely publish one as is. I usually use them as grease for my cerebral wheels. What comes out the other end bears no resemblance to what went into the machine.

Fine. Whatever. I’ll just start typing and see what happens.

What if the internet never came back?

What if this is it—the great unplugging, the apocalypse of connectivity?

We’d all be standing around like confused penguins on an ice floe, refreshing our browsers and getting nothing. Civilization would crumble. Governments would fall. Dogs and cats, living together.

Or maybe not. Maybe we’d just... make stuff again.

Draw things. Write things. Build things with our hands. My grandfather carved duck decoys in his back shed. Did he need Wi-Fi for that? He needed a block of wood and a knife and probably some vague idea of what a duck looked like. The rest was just hands moving and wood chips falling and time passing.

I’m typing faster now. Where is this going? I have no idea. Something about ducks. Something about the internet being a giant distraction from the fact that our imaginations are right there, waiting, like dragons we’re too afraid to climb on because what if they take us somewhere weird? What if we end up drawing a witch fighting a tuna sandwich in a forest made of old word processors? What then?

Well, what then? At least we’d have a drawing of a witch fighting a tuna sandwich. At least we’d have made something that didn’t exist before.

The router blinks back to life. Little green light, so proud of itself.

I keep writing anyway. The boredom is gone. I’m just me again, hands moving, making stuff. That’s all it ever takes.

Your pal,

Danny

🥱 P.S. If you think you might be bored this weekend, join me on Saturday for my new workshop. Find out more about it here. I promise — it will not be a bore.

📺 P.P.S. I just finished a new short film called The Artist Who Hated His Art. I’ll be sharing it with all of YouTube on Tuesday, but here’s a sneak peek just for you.