Saturday, July 3, 2004
Completed sketchbook
Another sketchbook completed over the past couple of
days. This a leather bound Daler-Rowney received as a birthday present
last autumn. This one has lasted an exact six months from 1st February
to 1st July. I have used sketchbooks since I was a lad and I was encouraged
to use one by my art teacher. I was also looking in 'how to' art books
and everything else to try to find a job description for 'Artist'. I still
haven't found one. But they all seemed to think a sketchbook is a good
idea. This isn't sufficient recommendation to use one really. Most of
the guidance on shading in apples was pretty suspect after all. But for
other reasons the habit has stuck for many years.
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They have a diary function, they organise ideas (pretty much chronologically), you always know where it is and where your work is (it isn't scattered all over the floor or in a drawer), it's very portable and acts as an archiving device. When I used public transport a lot they were little travelling friends. They have serious disadvantages too. A lot of work ends up in them. What do you do? Do you cut them to take images out and frame them up for sale? The book itself can become a precious object in itself and I tend not to break them up which means there is a lot of stuff locked up in them. My books have been a compromise A5 size for some time as I found I was over doing it in A4 books and effectively wasting effort. A6 is too small. Recently the books have included a lot of glued in material and this one has a lot of fold out pages etc. A lot of artists I have spoken to don't work like this. There is one I know who has a bookcase of sketchbooks as I have. Most of the rest don't. |
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This is a sketchbook drawing from the recently completed sketchbook. Most of these little drawings have been done in a pretty 'automatic writing' manner. The idea is to invent something, invent some imagery I haven't seen before somehow. There are obvious recurring themes here. Spirals, crosses, dots, circles and various blob forms seem to recur. These drawings have provided the starting points for the recent prints and paintings. The sketchbooks also act as a repository for the current run of odd titles gleaned from mass media and recombined.
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