Keeping A Sketchbook

Thank you for the positive response to last newsletter’s drawing activity. I would love to craft more of these activities in future newsletters, although my mind tends to go blank when I attempt to imagine what I could possibly teach. Same goes for writing, and I think it’s a matter of patience and magnification. I do have activities and writing to share, just not the confidence and patience to pick the right lens and focus on what is right in front of me. I have this confidence with visual art/making, not so much with verbal expression — but writing this newsletter is training me to recognize that what is in front of me is not blank, it is actually grainy, and I must take the time to inspect those grains.

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Yellow leaves have been reminding me of a few projects I worked on in the past three years where I was going outside with a sketchbook and drawing stuff in the autumn woods and on the side of the road. In the past week, my daughter and I both got sick and activity levels ground down to nothing while we got better, so I took to flipping through these old sketchbooks filled with outdoor drawings.

I haven’t been keeping a sketchbook this year — early this spring I decided that due to time limitations I would just store stuff in my head and not on paper. Now I’m wondering if I can somehow take the time to use a sketchbook again, realizing how valuable it is to have these physical records of figuring things out.

These were drawing experiments in the late fall. I sketched just with graphite outdoors, and noted (with words) the colours, and then when back indoors I painted the scene from memory a few times. I really enjoyed having just the memory as a referent instead of the actual outdoor scene or a photo; it was a relief to not be switching my eyes back and forth between paper and reference material.

I was recently admiring Carson Ellis’ journal-revisiting project in which she illustrates old excerpts from her 5-year diary (check it out here). And also I was admiring the 100 day weaving series by Jessie Mordine Young, who is planning an even more ambitious project for 2023, which is to make a weaving every day of the year.

My sketchbooks have mostly been about projects beyond the sketchbook itself — possibilities, things to remember, thumbnails of paintings. Would I have the patience to stick to a daily sketchbook-centric project? It would certainly fit within my time limitations, and like Carson Ellis’ 5 year diary, could provide material for later, larger projects. I do feel a sense of relief when I imagine a sketchbook-based project. Just a page a day and goals are fulfilled, and maybe if a larger painting comes out of that, how wonderful.

Here I was placing little fluorescent wood blocks in the woods and then painting them. I intended for these to become large paintings some day.

(Side note: I think I would use the Leuchtturm 1917 sketchbook in size A5 instead of the old classic classic black Moleskin — the paper is super smooth and creamy and the cover is banana yellow.)

Stuff:

- I am almost finished The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. It’s good!

- I like Celeste Ng’s approach to writing — noticing the tiny mundane details of daily life — makes me think of what to paint and what to draw — listen to her interview here with Adam Grant.

- Also love this from Carson Ellis, in her Slowpoke newsletter: “I quit my drawing project - to keep a daily illustrated diary for the entire month of October - on October 4th. My very forgiving personal philosophy is that it’s always okay to set a creative intention and then bail on it, even in full view of whoever is paying attention to you on the internet.”

See you at the end of October!