Sketchbook person

This is what I meant when I said aimless musing

My new years resolution almost every year is to try to become a sketchbook person. A Sketchbook Person is one of those people that has those beautiful sketchbooks warped by use and love full of post it notes and dried flowers and all that other crap. They draw their friends at parties and strangers on the train and somehow have the time and the levelheadedness to drag out a set of watercolours and paint a little landscape while on holiday.

I am not a sketchbook person. I have a basic blue canson sketchbook. I’ve been buying the exact same one for years because its reasonably priced, reliably the same and of a perfectly middling size. I rip pages out when theres a slightest mistake, can’t quite sit down and fill a page with interesting pictures straight out of my brain or variations on a concept that will eventually go to final (I tend to just go to final?). My sketches for work begin as tiny thumbnails in this book but they never occupy the page with the charm I’ve seen in other people’s sketchbook and never ever in my life have I picked up a leaf or a flower and said “hmm this is something I should press in my sketchbook”. I have had phases at various stages in my life, often when I was younger, unhappier, had less friends and fewer places to go where I had tonnes of sketches and drawings just for myself. But even then I was working on watercolour paper that I just collected in piles rather than a book that I kept handy. When I have an idea I write down notes rather than putting down a little thumbnail and I almost never draw on holiday. I take photos that I work from later on, I make notes and make it a point to look around with intent and I always go see art but I’m not one to be found in a busy foreign square with a clever travel paint kit.

Despite my yearly resolve to sketchbook, I’ve always thought of a sketchbook practice as nice-to-have but not essential. I felt like I was making enough work to keep up with the pace of my imagination/thoughts and to keep me active outside of school and eventually art school. In art school I let the line blur between my personal work and work for school (ie, for someone else). As a result I enjoyed school more, did better and had a more tangible grasp on what the steps I needed to take in order to not flounder completely on graduating. I took them, I graduated and I didn’t flounder. But now, outside the rigorous atmosphere of an art school, I feel less in control of my work. Of how it looks and what it’s trying to be. Its now that I’m trying to build back the practice of making work without considering that it might be seen by someone else (Instagram has made the “viewer” omnipresent for so many of us) so that I can begin to become familiar again with what what my thought process, interests and limitations are when there’s no purpose to the painting and no audience that’s going to see it immediately.

So in keeping with this I went out and bought myself a nice sketchbook. I might share results when the book is over, I might not.

Here’s a list of “sketchbook people” I watch with envy:

• Karlotta Freier

• Ishita Jain

• Anand Radhakrishnan

• Sameer Kulavoor

• Sydney Smith

• Matt Bollinger (in love with the idea of a “face book” for portraits. If you see me steal that no you didn’t)

• Woodrow White

• Julie Avisar (I’m just in love with how she draws trees)

sigh, imagine having a rich inner life