I first found Danny Gregory through his blog, and his wonderful sketches.  Gregory was a regular corporate guy leading a regular corporate life, until something bad happened, and he turned to making watercolor sketches of his everyday life to cope.  And he kept on making sketches, building an impressive and touching sketchbook diary of his life.  To quote the back of the book, "This book is about how art and New York City saved my life."

The "something bad" is that Gregory's wife fell off the subway platform, was run over by a subway train, and had to learn how to live in a wheelchair.  Gregory turned to making art as a way of making sense out of his life, and of being "in the moment" like all the Zen guys say you should be.  He struggled to learn how to draw, and you can see that struggle made manifest in many of his early drawings.  

Eventually Gregory found his style, his line, just as eventually he and his now wheelchair bound wife slowly uncovered their new life together, and with their son Jack.  Gregory began adding color to his drawings, just a quick informal watercolor wash.  He creates and binds his own sketchbooks, and they are intimately personal as only a dedicated artist's sketchbook can be.  

Gregory draws and paints without fear, which is the first lesson that I learned from his blog.  If your drawing doesn't turn out perfectly, so what?  Is the Arts Commission going to show up on your doorstep and officially rescind your pencil permissions?  Will your lover break up with you, your dog leave you, and your boss fire you?  Nope.  

The way that Gregory tricked himself into drawing without fear was to say that he was documenting the moment, creating a diary, and that the drawing itself wasn't actually the point.  If I have one quibble with Gregory's sketches, it's that there are too many words, but I understand his impulse to talk, to explain, to elaborate upon what his pen shows.  And his text is witty and engaging, which certainly helps.  (Although his penmanship, while beautiful, is sometimes too elaborate to read easily.)

Ordinarily, I wouldn't say that a complete stranger's diary would be interesting.  Although it's always fun to flip through someone else's sketchbook, Everyday Matters is something more.  At most bookstores it's shelved under Self Help -> Grief, and it is about grief, although not as openly as you might think.  Instead of talking about grief directly, Everyday Matters gives you a window into the life of someone who is slowly working through it.  

Flipping through the book to write this review, I was struck by how most of the drawings are filled with an odd kind of loneliness.  Buildings seem remote, cars are driving away from him, people on the subway are looking in the other direction.  

A lot of this obviously stems from the practicalities of sketching on the streets of New York City.  But there is definitely a poignancy here, which Gregory's words don't address directly.  It's that "something more" that speaks to us, more effectively than speech often can.