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With no regard for Anywhere

What difference does a place make? I used to think there was weight behind having an address in one of the world’s great cities. It meant something, as if one had earned the right to work and live at a pricier level with richer rewards. Then it became apparent that great work and expensive work too, was being produced in odd places, small places, insignificant places. So much for big city theory. But if one works outside the brightest lights on a night time map, how does the creator get to collaborate on a project? Usually because of a reputation earned in a big city. With a reputation, one can work anywhere. So the fable goes. A fable is an instructional tale unlike a fairy tale which is for amusement. It is interesting that designers who do live “anywhere” appear to spend a lot of time on planes and places far from where they live. Ask them when they get their work done and they’ll tell you they work in the air. Quiet time. Like reading my newspaper on a local train. Personal time but with a time constraint.

I have lived anywhere. The first anywhere place I lived after New York City was lonely but it took me five years to realize how lonely it was. I’d been hooked on the quiet and the beauty. I relished the silence of night. I began to hate it during the day. “Will somebody please make some bloody noise!” I would yell at the office window. In five years of twice a day dog walking I made two or three acquaintances. And I am quite gregarious, interested in people.  The place was Bedford , New York. What made Bedford manageable was frequent trips into New York City to break up the beauty and mix with humans.

The next place I lived was chosen hurriedly in an effort to change to a design-supportive community. It was populated with aging hippies. This is fine if things like productivity, ambition, hard work, curiosity, living on the edge, are not high on your agenda. To be fair, we were told that hidden in the hills, were beings of some significant accomplishment, whom we could look forward to getting to know. We got out of there too fast perhaps, to meet them, ensconced as they were, apparently, behind the deep foliage. That was Woodstock, home to excellent dog walking trails. And the most delicious tap water.

We had not had time to do an assessment of the town before moving in and were now hurriedly leaving. Where to go? A lifer in the area recommended a town to the south of us, closer to New York City. Another friend confirmed what a “pretty cool town” town it was. If you are not going to listen to the opinions of others, you need time. Why, I now ask myself, did I think, a town half an hour south would make my world a better place?  We landed in New Paltz and cannot get out of here fast enough and get closer to the city. But you can hike, some protest. I don’t want to hike, I want to work! A one year tour of two Anywhere places and due to force of circumstance we made bad decisions. This is no reflection on these towns per se. It is about place and the factors that make place very different from space. There is space everywhere. Anywhere. Lots of it. With little sense of place. Which is why the great tourist destinations tend to be places which are inseparable from their spaces. It is noticeable. It is not Anywhere. What is important to each of us? Space or Place. New York has power in it’s place and that power is due in part to the lack of space. They also work at different speeds. Place is immediate, you feel it, you know it. Space is slow, spend half your life on that ranch before falling in love with the dust and scrub.

I do admire those who have a home in a beautiful spot on this planet. A place chosen, a place that has congruency with its space. I’ve had that in my past. Although at times I feel as if I am walking backwards now, the view is one of some hard won lessons.  Perhaps when one is fully engaged with work and those dear to us, place becomes those relationships and the physical location, the structure, even the land begins to disappear. In living in my own most beautiful areas, I was so absorbed in my work, the surroundings earned only passing interest. Without work that provides essentials for living and no close knit friends or family, we look to the place itself as that which needs to be changed.  When life is out of balance I look at the heaviest object as the one that might need to be moved

“It may seem sometimes like we don’t know what we’re doing. And it’s true: we don’t. That’s a bit scary, but you can take comfort in knowing that nobody else knows how to do what we’re doing either… so there are no experts in what we’re doing. Except for us: we are becoming experts as we do this.” Tony Hsieh of Zappo’s

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Posted in living.


A thousand words

A spinning spoon will make froth. So I determine not to make froth. I like to live my life as if it were a model I am building and I am more interested in process than having a cut and dried future vision. I strive for success but prefer to keep the end picture fuzzy, variable. So this post series is about flawed thinking, instances of poor business sense, bad decisions, hasty judgements, a string of mistakes. And when I forget to draw from history I make the same mistake twice or on occasion over and over again.  In here too, is hard work, determination to never never never give up (thank you Winston Churchill), and to stay small, focused, and light on my feet. Enjoy the process. I can choose when to plough on or when to turn away. I am no cruiseliner as a designer. I’m one of those fast rubber dinghy boats. I have a short life to live, and a lot to do. My field for several years has been making patterns for architectural interiors. My dream is always to work with splendid architects, get my work manufactured large in scale in transparent or translucent materials. Stack them or hang them in layers. The site is STUDIODOON.

From there I go to a tiny scale. Business card scale. Networking cards for anyone who has not joined a company that strips their name on to the standard company card everyone else has. Or simply want a card completely their own. These are custom cards, designed differently for each individual. They carry all kinds of networking data that would never appear on a company card. I call them DOONCARDS. Anyone can use them but adults have an understanding of the intimate interaction when cards are exchanged. Young people generally don’t know the game. I have to create opportunities for kids to demonstrate to themselves how smoothly these cards can factor in their relationships. Great project. Kids live in a virtual cloud and here is one tiny physical item that one carries and gives away and it has all one’s information on it. One buys a piece of personal artwork and gets a thousand cards for free. Carving the marketing to be a fish through water is a slippery process.  DOONCARDS have yet to make money.

To fill in blanks, what else can I offer? I looked at my illustration skills, waiting for me to pick them up and dance again. I started doing portraits. Narrow focus once more. There is a wide application base here. From execs in annual reports to magazine features, every person is a portrait. I bring a fresh flat graphic style to it, mix it with some of my photography and I call the venture DOONFACE.

This posits a classic dilemma. When you take a direction and work at it, no matter what your field, and it does not yield income what do you do? How long do you keep at it. Persist or turn away? I’m squarely in the persistence camp. My gut is my guide. Throw in some common sense to stack the odds in my favor. Work hard. I’ll write further about these ventures but right now the point is there is no income from this work. My frustration is that this effort appears  commercially viable and yet no commerce going on. I see viability because it is visible in the market. It exists throughout print and electronic media daily. (See Tony Hsieh’s comment in the above post). So I spread my images out to potential clients. Calls and emails. Voicemails. The dark cage on the ocean floor, that’s what I think of voicemail.

Financially we sit on an ocean floor as well. This is serious instability. How we get through this, is what this blog is about. Negotiating with myself now takes strange turns. Should I stack shelves in a supermarket? I already got passed over at Kinkos. You had better honor your education, I told myself. More thought about change and persistence. This time I have no chips to bring to the table. Nada. Flat broke. We used up our resources getting this house and moving in. We sold a great old Land Rover three months ago. And now we are below sea level it seems, and it’s scary. We will be forced out of here in a few weeks and if this is point A, we don’t have a clue how to get to point B.  It’s the middle of a long cold winter.

Something nags at me. Instability runs through this like a river. Right now I can’t see light. Hard to make sense. There is work out there and I have to bring it home. Move closer to where there is a density of the stuff. The first time I went to New York was for raw excitement and I stayed and worked commercially for fifteen years. In New York there is always another possibility. The rhythm of projects and being paid is needed. I want my work in bedrooms and backpacks and the back seat of the car. Design inside life. Putting into play, at this late stage, the business of being a designer and illustrator, but with real, not imaginary clients.

Making sure that internet bill is paid is a monthly scramble. But we have learned how to do a fresh home cooked dinner for five dollars. Lessons are burning.

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Posted in DOON, business, living.

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How to be August without really trying.

How long did I spend deciding to write this blog? Ten minutes. “Should I write about what’s going on?” I asked Gayle. “Actually talk about money. How many bloggers talk about their money situations unless they are dispensing advice, or buffing their prosperity hair before heading out to brunch. Lunch. Coffee. Whatever. Who talks about the crap one goes through? Should I do that?

Is there a speck of value here for people?” “Hmm. It’s a bold thing to do,” says she. Leaving the decision, of course, to me.

There is a certain amount of fakery going on. Ask someone how things are going. The most frequent answer I get is, ” Well, yeah, OK, though things are pretty tough out there.”

No shit.

Another thing. Do I protect the wicked? How about the innocent? Perhaps I’ll do it the way I do just about everything. Make it up as I go along. It isn’t an entirely blase way to read life. It’s a working method. Process. It all comes out of the same pot of stew, the way my life hums. And given my current circumstances, I am not doing it well.

Yes, unemployed. It’s a depression. Sometimes I envy those with jobs. Monday is my favorite day of the week. One weekend, I’d like to know what’s going to happen on Monday. Sometimes I am frightened, really frightened. It passes. I am sitting and standing, no prosthetics, no cancer or heart disease. I am one lucky guy. I have a beautiful wife. I have two amazing dogs. And I have, with increasing frequency an unease in my chest.

Right off, a few relevant details. I don’t drink and have not had a drink in almost eighteen years. I don’t smoke. I have no problem with discipline in getting work made. I work without thinking about it as work. Working on images is the most relaxing activity because it is so focused and in some kind of zone. The world cannot hurt me when I am making images.

I have a problem getting paid. I’m not the stupidest brick in the wall. I read books, magazines, blogs, newspapers, opinions. Advice. Business stories. Love them. How the titans did it. What on earth goes on in Richard Branson’s head? I have a fascination about how the major success stories happen. I grew up without television and was twenty two tears old when I owned my first TV. Thank you South Africa, for being the second last country on the planet to give your population television. I think India was last.  So reading goes back to my crib. Nothing like a great new book, or a short burst of wit and wisdom from an online voice.

“You are SO talented, I hear, nearly day in day out. I am sick of it. Oh, the compliment sits well with me, but my inner voice answers, “So?”

I am broke. I have been broke for a year. No, eighteen months. Not two grand in the bank broke. Ten dollars for the weekend broke.

And this is the part that might be taboo. So I’ll dance with it African style. Personal finance is kept to oneself. Do not discuss politics or money or religion. Well religion I don’t care about, I got that squared away years ago. Politics was great sport during the election. Now it’s just an argument and the public is pissed off. Politics is too big, it has fallen off the table and made a mess on the floor. Too many cleaners and salesmen, too big a government. I leave it there. But my bank balance? Hey, that’s no one’s business.

Which is why I am going to write this blog and attach pictures that have absolutely nothing to do with the content. Because I take pictures, thousands of them, and this is where I’ll post them. I’ll write this blog because we are at point zero. From here there is only beginning. There is no end here, just the starting. I have absolutely no idea where this blog will go because I have no idea where tomorrow is going. Yes I know no-one does either, but if you have had a job for thirty years and a cubicle and there are no signs you are being let go Friday, well, maybe you have just a little more wiggle-room than I at this moment. If you are in this position, count yourself lucky and work very hard. You need your job.

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Posted in money.

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Moving DOON

For the third time in a year we will move house. We tried two small towns of upper New York State including the beautiful lower Hudson Valley, but sadly,  they are filled with transparent buildings, one empty store after another. We also found out a thing or two about internet marketing and making money working purely online. We followed the some sage advice only to find it lacked the right flavor for our soup. There is little expertise to follow. We beat our own path and right now, face to face contact, in the design business it seems, is essential. So we spiral back to our roots, older, wiser, with some hard earned lessons won. New York offers opportunity and we hope to plant ourselves on its doorstep, a quick train ride from Grand Central. We will do our best work ever.

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Posted in energy.

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Who opened for Who?

Just found this link via a short film Hillman Curtis did with David Byrne and Brian Eno. It’s not easy, for me at least to hear Eno’s full contribution,though it seems to affect all the sound. I am a huge David Byrne fan. Back in the day, Talking Heads played Central Park, double billing or opening for The Ramones, or did the B-52’s open for Talking Heads? It’s awhile ago, a perfect summer afternoon. I was outside the arena, as always, on my roller skates. Byrne’s energy never flagged and he continued to surprise and amaze me. Listen up at Everything That Happens20070912-2007L8841215.

Posted in music.

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Mistress, master, monster

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. — Winston Churchill

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Posted in writing.

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Break for café

With most things, less is achieved by doing them in a hurry. Take breathing. Breathing slowly and correctly can make such a profound difference to how one feels, we forget it is us who are being breathed. Sometimes tasks jump up for attention. A phone message heard on the machine, hurriedly returned and later a little reflection reveals a better way of how the conversation could have been handled. The world spins faster now. Mostly garbage in, garbage out. I try to take the time to pause and consider, and then when I find I’ve overlooked something, been afraid to assert myself and made an ill-informed decision, I berate myself, which only makes things seem to go faster. Sometimes I just don’t ask for help. I can do it faster myself. I liked the expression that it’s easy to look back and connect the dots to predict the past. Now Gayle and I are once more future bound. We are not cruising, we are bumping along and the future is a fog. So it is. The folly of expecting certainty. Break for café.

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Posted in energy.

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The love of illustration.

No, it’s not art. For the most part it is not art. But what could one call an illustrator but an artist? No question about that. It’s odd. One can bullshit one’s way in photography. One can bullshit one’s way in real fine art, in real museums and galleries. But it’s really hard to bullshit in illustration. I’m thrilled to see my old love making a return with a vengeance. Perhaps it is because the great visual form of photography has become so bastardized. Our visual tolerance for photography is boundless. Some people need the highest quality HD flat panel from a specialist store in order to watch television and movies. But that same person looks at a police car chase through a grainy jerking dashcam with the same intensity as the newest epic movie rental. More so. Something about real danger, real events and the medium becomes secondary, the camera work incidental. Illustration sprays itself across the world’s surfaces with glee, invading every crevice of our visual culture. But for the most part this is one visual field where one does need years of training. Self-taught illustrators are few, great ones a rare breed. An architect might be found designing a new bag for LVMH, a fashion designer produces new work standing behind a camera, our visual culture is in an amazing exciting phase of cross pollination and flux. And in there is inserted the illustrator, part graphic designer, part fine artist, but seldom is it the other way round. Not many photographers simply produce a portfolio of illustration. It’s too hard. It takes years, even the intervention of the computer meant one could not take one’s eye off the drawn line or shape, and one’s hand learned how to do it with a drawing tablet or mouse. It is a fabulous profession, filled with great intellects and wits, philosophers, gentlemen, comedians, clowns and louts. Take a pause next time when coming upon an illustration that grabs you and give it the few moments it deserves. Illustration is not a field that hides or veils its effort. Usually all the years of observation and practice, even in other media, are apparent. It is one of the more transparent of professions. I’ve checked back in.

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Posted in art, design, photography.

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Reasons for Watching

I never know. So I began a new series of illustrations, and posted them on a new site and called it DOONFACE. Serve up portraits of ordinary people in simple jobs or powerful occupations. Their wives, kids and pets. I can draw them all.

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Posted in art, design, photography.


A Blade of Glass

In New York City glass tells and hides stories. Constantly moving outside, a still-life inside, and the window is a screen, a barrier, a doorway inviting one in or keeping one out. To photograph windows one needs the right position, the right light, the right timing. And the right choices. Then an image can be made. It is the city of glass, and stories, layered, transient, like a river, no window is ever the same twice. The better the window display work the better bones for the river, but few window designers think outside their box. They consider only the looking in.
In New York it is more likely one sees the outside world in a window before what’s behind the glass. Nothing behind any window has ever surpassed the parade outside it. Glass is a servant of the city. It changes the mechanism of watching, as if watching dual realities, dueling realities, no directors, no actors, just a world within and a world without, both oblivious
and dependent until night, and the fight of light, and I have tried to see this in other cities, but nothing captures like New York glass.

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Posted in design, photography.

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