Hi, this is Danny Gregory and I'd like to tell you about my new book. It's called An Illustrated Life.
Drawing inspiration from the private sketchbooks of artists, illustrators and designers.
I've been looking for this book since I was a boy. I've looked for it in dusty secondhand bookshops,
in the art sections of libraries and online bookstores and auction houses.
And because I never found it, I had to put it together myself.
A book full of sketchbooks and illustrated journals from all sorts of people
who love nothing better than to hunch over a little book and fill its pages with lines and colors.
That seems fitting somehow, making a book about books people have made,
books that were generally not intended to be shared at all, and certainly not seen by strangers on large numbers.
Pages of this book are filled with doorways to private worlds, drawn and written to record impressions,
to work without judgment, to take risks, and to chart new directions.
Some of these books are unromantically utilitarian, rough sketches for professional tasks.
They demonstrate the gestation of ideas being hatched and fed.
You see the first inklings are several stages and the notion blossoms.
There are pages that feel like scrapbooks filled with a collage of scribbles
on napkins and yellow legal pads and post-it notes, repositories rather than true journals.
And then there are books that were filled like crossword puzzles, doodles, and sketches to pass the time
while waiting for a load of laundry or the express train.
But as you page through dozens of randomly sketchy portraits of commuters or empty streets,
you feel the accumulation of time, the flaky layers of pastry that make up the years of a person's life,
enriched by living in a moment instead of doing Sudoku, contemplating the world as it passes,
even if it's serving up just a glimpse of a Kmart parking lot or a slumbering night shift worker.
And then there are those books that are aching in the intimate, full of worries and ambitious ambitions
and you wince it what the artist must feel to share them with the world.
You can feel the anxiety spilling out or the disappointments being massaged with layers of ink.
These artists chart their obsessions with death or failure or sex or flume
or simple visceral pleasures of hypnotic cross-hatching.
Their sketchbooks are their artists, their therapists, their sidekicks, their crying town.
There are people in this book whose lives have been transformed by the simple act of drawing or breakfast in a book.
We've seen their world for the first time by sketching down a page.
Many of them didn't grow up with any understanding of their artistic potential.
They were flummoxed by the system of art education,
but late in life taught themselves slowly to make their hands draw what their eyes could see.
These pages contain the work of prodigies, self-flagellators, millionaires, paupers, professionals, and novices.
But they're following the same path, working toward the back cover, one page at a time.
I hope you enjoy my new book, An Illustrated Life.
And it brings you the kind of inspiration that so many minds working so hard in so many different ways can afford you.
It's available now, and I think it's 260-odd pages worth spending time with.
