Put Your Butt in the Chair: Inside the Simple Alchemy of Making Art

“I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long….I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten [o’clock], eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around…” 

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–John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3. Interviewed by Peter Hessler. Paris Review. Issue 192. Spring 2010
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I once heard some famous novelist tell Terry Gross on Fresh Air that he wrote seven hours a day, every day, each day from ten to five he put his butt in his chair, he was a book writing machine, blah, blah, blah. Maybe this was true, though I had my doubts, especially because here is what I do when I illustrate a book:

I wake up, make coffee, feed the cat. Then I hug my wife goodbye and walk to Gasoline Alley Coffee over on Lafayette Street. I talk with the baristas, sit on the outside bench, read the Times—the actual paper, newsprint staining my hands—watch New Yorkers streaming to the subway on Bleecker Street, take notes in my sketchbook for twenty minutes, head home.

Our cat thinks he’s a dog so I throw his toy for him and he retrieves it. This takes ten minutes. Then I neaten my desk. Rearranging tchotchkes—toy tractor, lead soldier, Lisa Simpson figurine. Check my watercolors, cut watercolor paper, leaf through sketchbooks. I sharpen my pencils, fill the wastebasket, empty the wastebasket. When everything is not quite ready I shower, put on sweatpants, a white t-shirt, and brown socks. 

Back at my desk I polish my reading glasses. Look through the sketchbooks again. The cat is behind me, perched on top of the sofa. I can hear him purring as he stares at the back of my head—he’s seen this act before.

By now, it’s late morning and I still haven’t started painting and I’m beginning to feel a little foolish but also that something is welling up. I put Tosca on our CD player (yeah, I know) and as the first chords hit—a double espresso shot of horns and strings—I head to our espresso machine in the kitchen and make another cortado. Hot milk whooshes into the cracked porcelain cup as the opening aria belts out across the living room, crescendoing as I fill a small mason jar with water from the sink. The last thing I do before I sit down at my desk, I turn to the cat and touch him on the nose. Then I touch brush to paper and for the next hour I’m sort of out of my mind. 

For almost thirty books my morning routine hasn’t changed much, except for the espresso machine (our old De’Longhi lasted eight years and six books before it broke). I’ve come to see all this morning puttering—the “gonging around” in John McPhee’s words—as inextricably linked to the work itself. One leading to the other. Dependent on each other. In some sense, if creativity comes to us in the shower, how do we first build that shower.

It’s a little neurotic, I know. Especially the cat-nose thing. And the socks. When I started painting my new children’s book Here is a Book my brown socks were new and when I finished painting sixty-three days later, they had holes in their soles from scooching around our wood floor. My t-shirt had holes too, around the neck (and stains in the armpits, which is gross). 

It was the same day, every day—café, Tosca, cat. The “gonging around” inexorably building to when I was at my desk and painting—an hour or three hours that felt like ten minutes—after which I was done. Exhausted, horizontal on the couch, the cat staring down at me, and I would think about getting on my bike.

Because here is what I do after painting. Let’s call it “ponging,” or post-gonging. I’m hesitant to cite Ernest Hemingway (because, Hemingway), but in A Moveable Feast he wrote about knowing when to stop writing each day so that his subconscious could take over, and he would refill, like a well. For me, refilling often means biking around Central Park. 

I bike up 6^th Avenue, watching out for tourists, then around the park, watching bird watchers. There’s a hill on the west side of the park where I stop and run. Then I lie on my back and stretch, clouds scudding above me, and all this time I’m…percolating. About tomorrow’s painting. Or, about the one I painted today—the artist in the foreground was okay but something in the field around her wasn’t quite right, too static, off. I can feel it in my gut now, I’ll have to repaint it, but how? 

My second “ponging” is excursions to the Rockaways. A few years ago I wrote a piece about the winter surfers there. Now I go there to run. Listening to Fresh Air on the way out, then running east along the shore, shells crunching under my sneakers, waves breaking to my right (a fact that always amazes me as I was walking down Bleecker Street an hour ago). I notice how the waves look like wind-blown meadows, with eddies and furrows, and how I could paint something like that. I stop to watch. There’s a pair of oystercatchers watching me, heads tilted, pip pip pipping. They skitter across the sand and lift out over the waves. I jump in too—it is so cold—get a cortado at a local café and come home.

My last “ponging” is biking on errands around our neighborhood—down to the art store in Soho, up to the hardware store in Nolita, over to the grocery store in the East Village. As I rattle over potholes on Spring Street, I think about the text that accompanies the paintings—how the words sound as they knock against each other, how I could swap this word for that, take out another word entirely. Goodbye, word! Heads up, tourist.

What all these “pongings” share, I realize, is motion. Cycling, running, swimming in the ocean. I’m a slow-moving fish (man on bike) swimming through the ocean (city) and this thought (mixed metaphor) carries me through the day and night and now it’s the next morning and that motion comes pouring out.

The funny thing is that when I finally sit down to paint I am motionless. Just sitting there, butt in chair. Going nowhere. But my arm is flying, my fingers a blur. I’m painting so fast. Like, ridiculously fast. This is a sprint. Schwoop schwooop, paintbrush spiraling westward. No stopping or correcting or going back. I’m going as fast as I can, seeing how fast I can make this paintbrush fly, things are happening between paper and paint, the watercolor seeping and drying and damn damn damn everything needs to happen now with the aria playing in my ears as the blue sky spreads and deepens and move move move make this blue wash move already, sunlight exploding through the clouds and the meadow swirling and the artist cycling through it all. And then it’s an hour later and I’m horizontal on the couch, exhausted again.

During the pandemic, when our local café was closed, I set up a “café” in our kitchen. I brought a stool over there and placed it next to my espresso machine and it became the café bench. I’d walk the ten steps over there, read the paper, drink my cortado, and for an hour or so I storyboarded this book. I was managing myself, tricking myself really. Setting the scene was all in my head, so if I rearranged my head, then put pencil to paper, the book could work. The odd alchemy of making art. Cat by cat. 

Consider this essay. To write it I biked around Central Park three times. I jumped in the Atlantic Ocean twice. I thought of writing about oystercatchers while looking at oystercatchers. I wrote a first draft on the benches of Gasoline Alley Coffee, printed that out and edited it there the next morning. I edited another draft watching an English Premier League soccer game. There were umpteen drafts, fourteen cortados. I sharpened my pencil often. I biked the neighborhood. I met friends, ate dinners with my wife. Went to bed, woke up.

We are all different in the way we make art. We have our quirks. Mine may revolve around coffee and oceans, yours may revolve around…what? Maybe that famous novelist’s quirk—if he were being honest with Terry Gross—revolved around walking his dog, or reading at the library, or doing Wordle with his children, all that gonging around before he put his butt in the chair, just daydreaming about characters and love and life as he moved through his day, finding his way into the book.

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Here Is a Book by Elisha Cooper is available from Abrams Books.