🖼️ How to make art that matters.

You can do this....

My core philosophy is that every day matters.

Every single day.

The day you meet the Queen. The day you have a baby. The day you find a special on sirloin at the supermarket.

I find that drawing helps me to commemorate those events, large and small, dull and transformative.

For me, that’s the point of art. To deepen my understanding of my life.

Each day we’re awarded a new set of challenges, new rivers to ford, new choices and wonders and pains and lessons. If we think the day is dull and familiar, we need to just dig deeper into it, look for fresh insight, peel back the layers of the onion.

I find that drawing helps me do that.

Art lessons can familiarize you with your tools, but they are not a substitute for digging your own ditches, constructing your own nest. They are just abstractions, and life is very concrete. I enjoy what I learn in life-drawing classes, but I learn far more by drawing my wife’s sleeping body, my own reflection in the bedroom mirror.

To draw well, you have to draw a lot.

Exercises and instructional books provide examples of what you might do, but experience is the real teacher.

Take tomorrow as your assignment. Draw your breakfast, your bus stop, your bathroom wall while you’re on the pot, your laundry as you fold it, your children as they watch TV, your pillow as you wait for lights out.

Be bold with your exploration. Capture what you do and have always done.

Then push yourself to new experiences, if only to draw them. Visit new neighborhoods and draw them. Meet new people and draw them. Try new foods, read new books, smell new flowers, do anything that will deepen your understanding and your appreciation of your world and your place in it.

I don’t care if you think your drawings suck, if you are ashamed to show them to anyone else.

What matters is that you pause and contemplate. If your record of that contemplation is inaccurate, try again.

Feel deeper. See deeper. Slow down. Relax. And tomorrow, do it again.

You aren’t being graded or evaluated on your drawing. No more than you are being evaluated on your life itself. The only thing that counts is you. What you experience. How you experience it. How much you get out of this day and the next.

This is your life. Dig into it. Embrace it. Notice its curves and angles. Explore its corners. Feel its edges and put them down on paper. The pen, the page, are just tools for you to take time and slow it down.

I can’t make you do it my way, any more than I can force you to live your life my way. You decide, you forge your style, you pick the line that draws your life.

Take tomorrow and instead of hesitating and questioning and doubting and fretting, draw your breakfast, draw your day. Then try it again the day after. With each successive day, you’ll be clearer and deeper.

If you miss a day, don’t freak out or beat yourself up. Just take on the day after that.

Share the results on social media if you’d like. By sharing, you will find commonality and support. But maybe you don’t need more than self-sufficiency. In that case, keep your drawings for yourself. Or toss them out as you do them.

The drawings don’t matter. The drawing does.

Your pal,

Danny