I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.
About five years old, I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon and, you know, the black curly hair. That's how I was portraying myself.
Evaluate. Long experience had taught me to evaluate and assess. When the unexpected gets dumped on you, don’t waste time. Don’t figure out how or why it happened. Don’t recriminate. Don’t figure out whose fault it is. Don’t work out how to avoid the same mistake next time. All of that you do later. If you survive.
When a drawing doesn't come out right it's because I haven't figured out where the joke is. Not that every drawing has a joke, but every drawing has a point. At least it should have. And you figure out where the point is.
I'll play it first and figure out what it's called later.
The bass is just the crayon that I picked out of the box. I'd probably be writing similar stuff if I played guitar or trumpet. The pictures I want to draw I do with this crayon I chose, which is the bass.
I've been drawing as long as I can remember. I think all children draw as soon as they figure out the thumb and can grab crayons. The only difference with people like myself is that we never stopped drawing.
In fact, I believe to a certain extent a person today who starts with just clay, with no drawing and no painting and no figure drawing, still-life drawing, various things, they miss a great deal.
People were very nice to me. They knew I didn't have the money to do figure-drawing classes, so they let me annex the figure-drawing classes that the animators had.
When someone's wounded, the first order of business is to stop the bleeding. You can figure out later how best to help them heal.
I was always smaller and slower than everybody else, so I had to figure out other ways to be successful. Some people can survive on their athleticism; I had to survive on my brain.
I've always said the bass just happens to be the crayon I picked out of the box. I'd still be drawing the same pictures... should I have picked trumpet or accordion or guitar, whatever it may be. The sounds in my head are still the same.
I think love is something you figure out later on in life, and you have to make a lot of mistakes to figure out what love is, which is why we all have shitty, tumultuous relationships when we're younger, and it's harder to let go.
I'd done a drawing of the model using only peripheral vision, looking at a spot on the wall to the right of where she sat. It wasn't really a drawing of her I produced; it was a drawing of the cloud of lights and darks she dissolved into when I focused on the spot. You could look at my drawing of this cloud and read it as a nude female figure, though a little translation was required.
But I love the idea - whether it's in my work or where I live - exploring new frontier, and I like putting myself in strange places and trying to survive and figure things out and gather up an infrastructure. I like knowing that I could figure out a way to live anywhere.
Order is the first law of heaven, and you have to have order to survive on Earth. Figure out what has to be done each day, each week, each year and develop a system to achieve it.