You need a reason to draw.

I’ll give you a bunch.

I haven’t drawn much this week. Or this month, if I’m honest. I’ve been writing every day, reading, thinking, watching tennis.
When I go through a fallow stretch, it’s usually because I no longer have a good reason. It’s happened often enough that I don’t panic.
But when you haven’t drawn in a while or ever, you struggle with starting. You don’t know how or what to draw. Maybe you buy a book and do the exercises, but within a week, they’re stale homework. Or you try to draw the things you think you’re supposed to make art about: bowls of fruit, landscapes, nudes. You feel no connection to any of it, you’re rusty, and what comes out is a lot lousier than you’d hoped. After enough of that, you give up.
You need more than a vague sense that making art would be a cool thing to do. A real reason will sustain you through the disappointing early pages until you’re making something that seems worth it all.

Children don’t need anyone to hand them a reason. They just pick up a crayon and go. But under their scribbles is a reason: drawing is how a little, powerless person gets a grip on the big, new world. With a paper and pencil, they can build a house. They can command an army of stick figures. They can draw the monster under the bed and take away its fangs. All of that before they can read or write.

My own reasons have changed a lot over the years.
If you’ve read Everyday Matters, you know I came back to drawing because my life had stopped making sense to me. By drawing what was in front of me and putting it in an illustrated journal, I slowly began to see the value of my life: the shape of each day, the beauty lying around in the kitchen.
I got calmer. More present. I found a reason that has impelled me for years.
For thirty years, I’ve drawn what I ate, what I watched, the laundry piling up. When I travel, drawing is how I come to understand a new place — you don’t really see the Eiffel Tower until you’ve tried to draw it — and it’s how I hold onto the trip afterward. Photographs fade. Drawings lodge in my memory.

Other people are a reason to make art too. Twenty-five years ago I painted my mother as a little girl on the lawn with her dog Jumbo, put it in an enormous gold frame, and gave it to her for her birthday. She was about the age then that I am now, and it still hangs in her stairwell. It wasn’t store-bought, which my mother has always regarded as second-rate.
Invite me for a weekend, and there’s a decent chance I’ll mail you a drawing of your house some time later. Or your dog. People would rather I made them a picture of their pet than of themselves (”Is my nose really that big?“). I strive for a likeness but, more importantly, a personality —the sideways look, the wonky posture, the lovable grin. I’ve drawn so many dogs by now that I’m teaching a workshop on it. (Join me on October 10.)

Most people assume artists make art for money, and that selling it is proof you’re an actual artiste. I’ve done that too. I illustrated magazines and books, took commissions, got paid. It was flattering. I liked seeing my drawings printed, and my ego enjoyed being asked.
The money wasn’t enough to live on, and the effort cost me. When you’re drawing for strangers, to a brief, about a subject you have no feeling for, you’re thinking about what they’ll make of it, whether you’ve given them what they asked for, whether the check will come.
The work got harder to make and worse when it was done. My line got wooden. Eventually I stopped taking new commissions, and I’ve turned them down ever since.
I do make illustrations for these essays, but I write the brief, and I make them for you and me, the only clients I work for anymore.

Home decor is a reason a lot of people give me for learning to make art. They want to make something for the guest room or to match the couch. I warn them there are only so many walls in a house, and it can take years before you make something you’d actually want to hang on one. It’s a slim reason to carry you through the first rough year.
In my early twenties, I made big paintings for my bachelor apartment, ostensibly to fill the walls, but probably just to persuade young women that I was talented, sensitive, and deep.
These days I rarely frame or hang anything of my own. I’ve also stopped trying to impress young ladies. There might be a correlation.

Learning to make art is another reason I’ve made art. I drew a different dog for a hundred consecutive days to teach myself Procreate on the iPad. I’ve done Inktober and Selfietember, dutifully following the brief and the deadline. I don’t much love the art I make under those circumstances, too much like having a client and a brief, but it’s definitely made my tools sharper and stretched my drawing muscles.

Another reason I make art is to explain things: directions to our house, instructions for my television remote, a design for a bookshelf I’m planning for the studio. I think best with a pen in my hand — words, boxes, arrows, scribbled notes in the margin.

Sometimes I’ll make art just because there’s something burning and frothing in my gut: some anxiety, some fear that I can’t put words to. Sitting with my watercolors and pens helps me to work through what that thing might be and how I can soothe it. There’s definitely a connection between my emotions and these lines on the page, and I get a clarity from this process that even my shrink can’t distill.

And art has connected me with people. I’ve gone on drawing trips with friends, turned up to urban sketching meet-ups, taught workshops, and drawn with thousands of strangers online every Thursday for seven years.
I’ll admit I don’t especially love drawing next to other people. Lots of chatting gets in the way of my pen, so the drawing comes out tight and half-observed.
What I love is that art is the reason we’re together. It’s a nicer thing to have in common than a football team or DNA. Then I go home and draw alone, which is how I like it best.

I stopped making my bachelor paintings after a month or two. I turned down commissions. Inktober and a-dog-a-day became like chores. Most reasons have a shelf life. The ones that have lasted came from my life and some deeper need.
The strongest reason I’ve found for making art is just to be making art. There’s something ordinary and natural in it.
We’re animals who want to bring some order and explanation to the world, and this is one of the most powerful ways we do it. We like to transform things. Sometimes that means throwing up a skyscraper or bulldozing a mountain; in its most accessible form, it’s turning a sheet of paper into a flower, or a log into a bear. The urge that makes a six-year-old build a Lego castle is still in all of us, and a pen lets you make your mark on the world, literally.

There may be obstacles. The voice in your head that wants to know what the point of it is. That whispers you’re not qualified, not talented, too old, too busy, too broke.
Quiet all that rubbish down and just make something. Your life will get richer and stranger and lovelier. A pretty good reason for doing just about anything.
If you’d like, reply to this essay and tell me your reason for making art. Or your reason for not making it at all.

Your pal,

Danny