My dear friends Sharon and Ted gave me a gorgeous hand-made, leather-bound sketchbook for my birthday in January. They know that I am a Big Sketchbook Person. I’ve been keeping sketchbooks for decades, and I have a boxful in my studio. Anyone who browsed through them would see inside my mind - what catches my attention, what I find beautiful, what makes me laugh, what random thoughts I feel the need to download from brain to paper. My sketchbooks also contain the odd grocery and to-do list, or notes about books or artists I wanted to read or research later. I’ve never had rules about what can or can’t go into a sketchbook.
Some days just lend themselves to sketchbook art - like days of torrential rain in LA, of all places.
I’ve had a mental block getting this latest post written, and it relates to sketchbooks. I have been imagining the perfect essay, capturing all of the nuances of sketchbook practice, flowing in amusing and effortless prose. And so I have spent days without writing anything. The paralysis of perfectionism is hard to shake. That’s where sketchbooks come in. I keep my sketchbooks for my own amusement and creative expression. They are, at best, about process instead of product. Sometimes I draw fast, and leave things unfinished, maybe because the person I’ve been drawing got up and left. Sometimes I carefully compose the page, blocking a draft in pencil, adding ink, and then painting with watercolors. Often I include collage elements - an excerpt of an art show program, a metro ticket, a bit of a perfume box. Paper memorabilia of all sorts.
I’m creating an illustrated personal history.
I don’t feel any pressure to make my sketchbook entries “good,” if “good” means art that a theoretical gallery would show, or art that a theoretical person would buy. (Who can predict either of those things anyway? That’s fodder for another post.) Rather, I can say honestly that I make my sketchbook entries to please myself. They are “good” when they make me smile, or better yet, laugh as I remember some absurdity that I chronicled. I show my sketchbook scenarios to my family, because they often relate to an incident we experienced or a place we visited together.
I crack up every time i see this page. I drew this after my daughter and niece and I spent the day at a hot spring in Italy.
I love when artists’ sketchbooks are included in museum shows. No matter how famous and successful the artists are, I feel a personal connection to them when I see what they created for themselves, to work out their ideas and interact with the visual world. Among many others that stand out in my memory are Betye Saar’s sketchbooks at her LACMA show Call and Response https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/betye-saar-call-and-response, and those of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Corot (1769-1875), which I saw at an exhibit somewhere in Europe a few years ago. https://www.themorgan.org/drawings/item/246991
I hope you enjoy this peek into my sketchbooks. Some day I may find a way to scan my favorite pages and print a compilation, as my wonderful kids have suggested. In the meantime, I’ll savor the process.