Grizzly About Town, 25, 26 & 27 – Parkside Grizzly
25. Parkside Grizzly
I brewed some coffee and sat down before the drafting table. Time to work! I did more penciling first this time around, making sure to get the lines of the Victorian right before using any of the ink pens. In fact, I set aside the entire lower quarter of the paper for the grizzly to be added in once I was happy with Victorian. After a few passes, it started to take shape. Even better, it looked real! I’ve always been better at landscapes and buildings than living creatures, and this one started looking quite good when I used some of the new colors I’d bought, expanding my palate, allowing for more variety on this Grizzly About Town. And I even got some of the perspective lines correct, since the home was at the crest of a hill, and the point-of-view was from below, giving the piece a nice sense of hilliness that is essentially San Francisco. There were a bunch of cars parked along the street—many of them ugly and not something I wanted to draw—so I simply removed them, leaving plenty of good post-apocalypse-like parking spots for anyone happening along. Hey, if I can draw a grizzly bear in Alamo Square, I can swipe away various motor vehicles somewhere out of sight. Freedom!
Soon, just when I was getting cocky, I started having problems with the Japanese brush ink pen. I couldn’t tell if it was the way I was using it—pushing down too hard? wrong angle?—or a flaw in the design, but it started bleeding ink along the seal of the reservoir, which would bead up and drip onto the drawing, creating little splotches, like sweat dripping from my forehead. Yes, I’m toiling so, ART literally dripping from my flesh. The first time it happened, the drip was small and I quickly flicked it off the page (and onto the wall). I was able to turn the spot into a bird flying by. In fact, it looked pretty cool: every problem is an opportunity! The second drip, however, was a large black splotch right in the middle of a pleasant green slope. That was not an opportunity, just a large stain. Shit. What to do? My mind went back to the old days, of typos on paper, to that brief time in my noir-ish mid-20s when I fancied myself a modern Dashiell Hammett hardboiled stylist and wrote on an old typewriter: White-out! That should work, right?
I still had some tucked away somewhere, and it only took me 20 minutes to fish it out of a box at the back of my closet. It took even longer for the ink to dry, so bulbous was the drippage, but finally it looked ready to apply the White-out with its tiny, sticky brush. The initial results looked promising—the blotch was nicely covered up—and I was pleased by my ingenuity, my ability to think of solutions in trying, stressful moments, really one of the main benefits of middle age. This smugness did not last: whatever was in White-out repelled the watercolor ink when I tried to cover over it. The result gave a tint of the green I was attempting to restore, but no matter how much I applied, the splotch remained visibly off, a weird white-ish discoloration smack dab in the middle of the illustration. Bummer! Maybe I could pretend it was where the grizzly was scratching for water: I’d read that the bears knew how to claw at the ground in certain areas, pools of drinking water bubbling up. But there wasn’t much to do, except tear it up—but I liked how the Victorian turned out too much for that. I’d just have to live with it.
Next up was the grizzly itself. I’d captured a pretty good pose of Bozo from the Grizzly Adams TV show. (The DVD set had arrived, though I hadn’t watched an episode yet, just fast-forwarding to frames with good poses and taking photos with my tablet.) Bozo was seated, looking curiously to the left. I drew it straight with the pen. It wasn’t entirely successful, but I would say in a survey of what animal is this supposed to be, three out of five respondents would select grizzly over baboon or big dog. In fact, something about the bear’s curious, affectionate expression, like he was looking after some cubs playing too close to the edge of the sidewalk, cars and cyclists rushing by, reminded me of my childhood dog Honeybuns. Whoa, I wasn’t expecting that!
I chuckled, the irony of it, but then I started to feel a little sad: she was a good dog, running around the woods with me back up in Big Bear. Honeybuns was a golden-colored collie-German Shepard mix and lived to be 17 years old. I say “childhood dog” but really she was always around in my Big Bear memories, and died well after I left the mountains. Honeybuns loved a good chase, corn on the cob, well-buttered popcorn, having her butt and belly petted, and always—always—greeted you at the door while a smile, tail wagging, when you came home. She represented my better youthful years, before the darkness, anger, and confusion of adolescence and family dysfunction. It infused the piece with a sentimental, nostalgic aspect. We always had pets when I was a kid—dogs, cats, tarantula, rattlesnake, scorpion, turtle, goldfish—but I’d never gotten a pet of my own in adulthood. In my current studio pets were supposedly prohibited, though a couple of neighbors had them. I liked cats too, but the main reason I didn’t have a pet was that I would want a bigger dog like Honeybuns: fierce and loyal; playful and ready for a run, yet contemplative when circumstances warranted; happy to relax when it was time to watch TV and share some popcorn. I didn’t have the space in my city studio for that kind of rural dog, nevermind the lack of open spaces for her to really run and exercise.
I stepped back. It was mentally dizzying to contemplate: drawing an only partially successful grizzly bear that resembled our family dog, dead some 20 years now, who’d lived in Big Bear, a town that actually used to have big bears; and this drawing from a grizzly in a show based on a specific mountain bear named Ben Franklin, who lived and then died in San Francisco, the city in which the drawing is set. (“If there is a God, he’s got a sick sense of humor,” as Dad liked to say.)
26. Oops
Whelp...so much for drawing grizzlies about town being a simple, stress-free idea!
27. To Draw in the Age of Tapping
Recently complicating factors aside: What, exactly, was it that made drawing grizzly bears around town so satisfying? Even more, simply just drawing? Sure, there was the artistic safety value aspect, letting out some creative steam in a different location. But “The Act Itself” seemed to tap into some other need that had been left unattended, like a vitamin deficiency due to lack of citrus intake, or an all-meat diet. And why was it working so well for me right now, after all these years without picking up a pencil or pen? Partly I think it was simply the freedom of being creative without purpose. Unlike writing, which was tangled up in Meaning and Ideas and Quality, fantasies and fears, attempts to break open feelings and impulses and find out what’s inside, or striving to find grand metaphors for our accelerating times, drawing—at least the way I was approaching it—had little pressure. Certainly I’d already encountered some major obstructions with this approach, but so far I was able to keep history at bay and enjoy my superficial Grizzly About Town unencumbered, even as I walked along some narrow paths beside deep gorges below.
But there was another dimension, a different liberating aspect: the simple physicality. Writing, in a sense, has become a technological pursuit. I’d played around with hand-written journals and typewriters (another technology) when I was younger, but the first affordable Apple computers came out when I was in college, and I’d been writing on computers for years. But with drawing, the output is only what’s on the page. The process makes the object, not just a step in creating the object, almost like handcrafts. These days everything is so damn mediated, with smartphones colonizing nearly every aspect of life, these luminous screens and the Tapping Life, such that you’re less and less interacting with the thing itself. Sure, there was a simple, childlike pleasure involved in drawing, but it was also a hands-on activity, like cooking or gardening or building bookshelves. Drawing grizzly bears on paper, especially with ink where there was little opportunity for revisions and erasures, meant you had to live with the imperfections. This project was reacquainting me with the material world, how it looked and felt. It was tapping into the pure joy of living with a body.