Scattergood, "Just got lost in your sketchbook images,
I draw almost every night from live TV, usually from
The Charlie Rose Show and will send you some..."
"9 drawings done by an artist under the influence of LSD - part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him." - cowboybooks.com
Seige laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand
Fevering after the unself. By the hand it unceasingly
Changes the eye unceasingly changed. Back and forth the
Gaze beating against unseeable and unmakeable. Truce for
A space and the marks of what it is to be and be in face of.
Those deep marks to show.
"Sketchbooks are a vital part of my practice, both as brainstorming for larger works and as ends in themselves. I began using sketchbooks in 1996 and have accumulated over 30 of them since that time.
The book and the scroll are two presentation forms that maintain the inherent, tender authenticity of drawing. If drawing is the organization of looking, then these are where organized impressions interact with each other to produce new life. Many of these books are old friends. They are an expression of a private live for drawing. The particular qualities of each book - the paper, the binding, the dimensions - combine with the tenor of my life at the time to imbue them with a personhood that maintains its aura long after a book is filled." - Kate Aspinall
"Fascinated by the rebuilding of London after the Second World War, Auerbach combed the city's numerous building sites with his sketchbook in hand. Back in his studio he worked and reworked each painting over many months resulting in thickly built up paint surfaces more than an inch."
"A 'sketch' is: a rough idea; the basic elements; a quick interpretation of something; a quick plan for a possible later product; essential features; a preliminary layout; a quick study; an outline; a workup."
La prochaine Biennale du Carnet de voyage, prévue du 14 au 16 novembre 2008, a Polydome, se prépare activement. Plus de 150 auteurs de carnets et écrivains du voyage prendront a nouveau la direction de Clermont-Ferrand.
"Did you know research has shown that when we do an activity and enter the 'flow' state, the brain releases 'happy hormones'? So if you feel guilty about taking time out to draw - remember you're improving your health and well-being - and that can only be good for you and your family and friends!" - Anna Black: Learn to Draw Right
"I believe the desire to create is in every one of us and we just need to find the right key to unlock it. . ." - Anna Black Licensed Drawing of the Right Side of the Brain teacher
"It's rare we get a chance to see inside artists' sketchbooks. Occasionally a museum will have one on show - displayed open at one page - so frustratingly you don't get to see the other pages... This site offers a fantastic opportunity to peek into sketchbooks by some great artists: Henry Moore, Edward Burne Jones, John Constable, Edgar Degas, Gericault, W.M Turner, John Singer Sargent, Leonardo da Vinci, Frederick Leighton, Frida Kahlo - plus many books and journals by artists today.
The subjects vary enormously from the sheep Henry Moore used to see grazing out of his window, to the studies of draperies and figures by Burne Jones. Frida Kahlo's pages are a riot of colour, Turner's landscape sketches show how he studied value tones for his paintings...
There is a wealth of inspiration here and it makes a unique drawing resource. The links take you to sites and sometimes you have to look for a 'page through book' button in order to scroll through the pages.
Don't ignore sketchbooks of artists whose names you don't recognise - if you do, you are missing out." - Anna Black on Links to Artists' Sketchbooks Online
left:There's A Lot That's Not Real and A Lot That Is (2004, UK) limited edition, David Byrne sketch book right:Arboretum (2006) a collection of drawings and diagrams mapping the strange corners of Byrne's mental landscape. . .
A deeply personal sketchbook used by Marc Chagall for over twenty years will be one of the highlights of Sotheby's Books and Manuscripts sale in New York on 17 June 2011. The 85-page book contains unpublished drawings in a variety of media, providing a virtual catalogue of Chagall's colorful and moving iconography.
"This remarkably intact sketchbook was used by Marc Chagall from the 1940s to the 1960s, and includes a wide variety of subjects central to his oeuvre. The sketchbook abounds in portraits of Bella and self-portraits of the artist. These include a very beautiful ink-and wash portrait of Bella in a patterned dress with a bowl of fruit. There are two sensitive portrait heads in pencil, one with closed eyes, the other with open eyes surrounded by dark circles; both drawings possibly depict Bella's final illness. Chagall himself appears in several fine self-portraits, in one as a brightly colored satyr with palette and brushes. . . " - Sotheby's New York
My portraits are a visual journal of my life. My subjects are the people that I have encountered as I go about living my life. It is where I have found myself...
I try to reach beyond a physical description to capture the feeling, poetry, and nuances that convey the special qualities of my subjects. - Laura Chasman
Joan Miro claimed that "since the age of cave
painting, art has done nothing but degenerate."
Carnets de Tanzanie (facsimile sketchbook) Tanzanian Notebook
by Denis Claveul, Guillemette de Grissac,
and Philippe de Grissac [cover]
Tanganyika Wildlife Safari, Tanzania 2001
sHandke (a group admin) says: Hello fellow artists. I have been creating an online blog, entitled Community Sketchbook where I would like to post pages from all artists' sketchbooks. Eventually, I hope to create an actual sketchbook that is mailed from one artist to the next via "snail mail," and those images will then be posted on the blog. If you like this idea and would like to see your pages of your sketchbook(s) posted to the blog, please join.
"I don't call them sketchbooks,I don't like the word sketch. They are just "my books". I number them and I'm up to No 10. They are collections: - ideas, thoughts, quotes, photos, drawings, images, newspaper cuttings, messy and very personal." - Margaret Jackson
"This is a leaf from the sketchbook of the trip to the Lowlands. The legend reads: "awff dem rin mein Weib pey poparti" (on the Rhine, my wife at Boppard). Thus the drawing was made on the boat in July 1520. It gives the best (at least the best preserved) picture of Durer's wife in her later years; with her cold protruding eyes and the domineering lines at the corners of her mouth, she does not look particularly lovable. Her juxtaposition with the young girl, whose coiffure is labeled "kolnisch gepend" (Cologne girl's headdress) by the artist, is certainly only accidental here, but is nevertheless not without analogies in the context of the sketches on this journey" - www.finear-china.com
"This is a leaf from the sketchbook of the trip to the Lowlands. The legend reads: "1520 Caspar Sturm alt 45 Jor zw ach gemacht" (1520, Caspar Sturm, 45 years old, done at Aix-la-Chapelle [Aachen]). The lighting is peculiar, the landscape is related to the portrait. It is conjectured that the word "toll" indicates a tollhouse. The drawing is mentioned in the journal of the trip to the Lowlands: "Ich hob den Sturm conterfet" (I did a portrait of Sturm)" - Adolph Menzel Museum
Daniel Robert Eldon (18 September 1970 - 12 July 1993) was an English photojournalist. The son of an American mother and English father, he moved with his parents to Nairobi, Kenya, when he was 7 years old. In 1993, after a botched military raid that left hundreds wounded and dead, angry Somalis attacked journalists who had arrived on the scene to cover the story. Tragically, Dan Eldon and three of his colleagues were beaten and stoned to death on July 12th by an angry mob in Mogadishu, Somalia. He left behind a series of journals, which his family has exhibited on the Internet and on a worldwide tour.
Dan Eldon created most of his journals between the ages of 15 and 22, although he created several small notebooks previously. He started his more formal journals in 1985 for a school anthropology trip and an English class. At the same time, he was beginning to travel around Kenya more often and to take more photographs. Filled with ephemera from his young life - newspaper clippings, food labels, call girl cards picked up in London phonebooks, and even grains of rice - the journals are stored at the Los Angeles country Museum of Art. . .
"I've been keeping books pretty much consistently since I was fourteen - which at this point is more than twenty-five years. I was very fortunate to have had good mentors as a teenager, and was introduced to keeping a daily sketchbook during high school. The practice of keeping one with me wherever I went, integrating these books in to my life, came very easily. . .
. . . I identify with those artists that straddled the line between old and new ways of thinking; principally people who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From that period I love Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and others from the early Modern era. Obviously, there are some heavy visual influences from Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Another inspiration worth mentioning is Dan Eldon, the young Reuters photographer who was killed in Somalia back in 1993. His visual journals are amazingly beautiful, and communicate an incredibly vivacious and adventurous spirit."
"Annie Freud, poet and writer. Her first home was in Maida Vale where she lived with her parents, Lucian and Kitty Freud. Her parents separated in 1952, shortly before the birth of her sister, Annabel. . . Annie lived with her maternal grandparents, Jacob and Kathleen Epstein in term-time, until her mother was remarried to the economist, Wynne Godley in 1955 and they moved to Chelsea. Throughout her childhood, Annie grew up aware of the arts as part of her daily life. . . Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and web-sites and in 2005, a small collection of her poems was published by Donut Press, under the title: A Void Officer Achieves the Tree Pose. Her next book Best man in the world was published in 2007, followed by a collection of poems, The Mirabelles , in 2010."
The sketchbook has many names... visual journal, portable laboratory, journal, notebook. Whatever you call it, the purpose also remains both elusive and most definitive. A sketchbook is a place of discovery, experimention, record-keeping, notation, and a place in which learning and growth occurs... The blank page can be both intimidating and exciting. A blank page can induce nervousness and terror, as in "I don't know what to do next!" It can also incite a feeling of new beginnings; an open slate as clean as fresh snow, just waiting for the first mark to be made. - Sara Gant - Northside High School
Paul Gauguin (a facsimile sketchbook) - Paul Gauguin, a Sketchbook / Carnet de croquis. Introductory texts in French and English by Cogniat and Rewald. NY, Hammer Galleries, 1962. 3 small 8vo volumes in a single slipcase. A full-color facsimile of a Gauguin sketchbook, including cover printed to resemble the worn exterior of the original.
"After returning to paint in the Breton village of Pont-Aven in summer 1894, Gauguin suddenly found his activity restricted by a fractured leg suffered in a brawl. Thus, instead of standing before an easel, he was forced to spend much of his time seated, creating works on paper, which he must have placed in this hand-made portfolio. He decorated the inside with motifs inspired by his picturesque surrounds and penned a mock-heroic dedication to the local innkeeper on the leather cover, perhaps marking the grand finale to a drunken evening spent with artist cronies whose names are included in the inscriptions." - The MET, NY
Giacometi sketches: 4 figures & 3 heads
after Velazquez Pope Innocent X
pencil on paper, 10.25" x 8.25"
Collection of Louis Broder, Paris
from: Giacometti's A Sketchbook of
Interpreative Drawings Abrams 1967
Text by Luigi Carluccio
(facsimile sketchbook)
Stephan Schreiber's late gothic pattern book
produced in Urach, South-West Germany in 1494.
It was dedicated to Count Eberhard of Wurttemberg. Gothic Illuminated Sketchbook BibliOdyssey
"A while ago I went to a farm to get some practice sketching sheep and chickens. I was off to a good start with some head studies, but the animals got restless. They ran off before I could draw their bodies. Here's what my sketchbook page looked like." - James Gurney
"This website is an ongoing, year-long project to keep an illustrated journal and species list from my wanderings in Rhode Island and New England, with a few forays to other locations. It is heavily weighted towards bird-watching, but my interests in natural history are varied, and the occasional plant/amphibiary/insect/mammal will make an appearance..."
"an exhibition (organized by Miriam Stewart) of over 70 sketchbooks and 45 drawings that were originally part of sketchbooks from the Fogg collection of nearly 150 sketchbooks. Intact sketchbooks include those by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, Sanford Gifford, Edward Burne-Jones, John Singer Sargent, Henri-Edmond Cross, Reginald Marsh, George Grosz, and Christopher Wilmarth. Also on view will be drawings that were removed from sketchbooks by John Constable, Paul Cézanne, Henry Moore, and Brice Marden . . .
Artists have used sketchbooks for centuries, entrusting travel sketches, figure studies, compositional ideas, and notes of every kind to their pages. Designed to be easily portable, sketchbooks are often kept in artists' pockets and documenting an unusually personal view of the artist at work. The drawings and notes in these sketchbooks vary from nature and figure studies, to travel sketches, copies after old masters, expense accounts, and lists of pictures. Some sketchbooks are self-conscious and conceived as a whole, with every page signed, while others are more spontaneous and filled with a random assortment of hastily drawn sketches and doodles.
Notable Works in the exhibition include: Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Sketchbook from the First Italian Period (c. 1756-61), Jacques-Louis David's two sketchbooks for The Coronation of Napoleon (1805-6), George Grosz's Sketchbook: Manhattan Skyline and Mice (1950-51), and a selection of sketchbooks by Edward Burne-Jones, Sanford Gifford, and John Singer Sargent. Also featured are exceptional "orphans," drawings formerly part of sketchbooks, including Jan van Goyen's Three Studies of a Cow and Landscape with Cottages and Figures (c. 1650), John Constable's Warwick from Priory Park (1809), Edouard Manet's Study for "Interior at Arcachon" (1871), Paul Cézanne's Corner of the Studio and Portrait of a Man (Emile Zola?) (c. 1877-84), Brice Marden's Untitled Work Book Drawings (1983-84), Henry Moore's Ideas for Sculpture (1940), and several pages from a disbound sketchbook by David Smith, including studies for sculptures Pillar of Sunday, The Billiard Player, and Home of the Welder (1945)."
Fogg Art Museum (Aug 1 to Oct 22, 2006)
"I should recommend... keeping... a small memorandum-book in the breast-pocket, with its well-cut sheathed pencil, ready for notes on passing opportunities: but never being without this." - John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, 1857
"I have kept sketchbooks ever since I can remember. . . To sketch or draw is, for me, a practice of mindfulness, of being present with where I am and what's there. To draw is to honor the particularity of the moment, to oppose generality, to focus the looking and seeing. It has taken me too many years to understand that mundanity doesn't exist. Every moment is unique and pregnant with potential. Finding an interesting subject is more a matter of changing attitudes than it is changing places."
"Hockney, who has carried small notebooks in his pockets since his student days, along with pencils, crayons, pastel sticks, ink pens, and watercolor bottles--and smudged clean-up rags--is used to working small, but he delights in the simplicity of this new medium:
It's always there in my pocket, there's no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there's this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it's over, best of all, there's no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There's something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.
"David Hockney's iPhone Passion" Lawrence Weshler talks to Hockney
New York Review of Books
Self-portrait at the Age of Eighty-three
Ink on paper. Drawn on a letter.
Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden
"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.'" - Hokusai Katsushika, The Drawings of Hokusai
"Hopper kept meticulous records in journals over a lifetime of his paintings, making careful drawings of each work before it left the studio. These were then annotated by his wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, who added title, date of completion, description, sale price and buyer, and often a quirkily personal aside." - Tate Modern
"Janejira has a great passion for sketching architecture and monuments during her travels. Many people take photos, while she prefers to sketch, because it is her way of connecting with the subject matter at a deeper level. Rapid sketching exercises force our eye to pin point the most vital and essential features. . . These are pieces excerpted from her sketchbooks. While some sketches took over an hour to execute, most were done as quickly as seven minutes."
"In 1980, as I set out on my first trip to Europe, I decided to make a book that would contain any and all physical proof that I had been there: ticket stubs, postcards, restaurant receipts, airplane and bus and railroad ephemera. On successive trips, these collections grew to include food smears, hotel keys, found litter, local news, pop tops, rocks, weather notations, leaves, bags of dirt - anything that would add information about a moment or a place, so that the viewer could make a new picture from the remnants. Objects emerged for me as 'icons' for particular cities and these objects became the material for EVIDENCE." - Candy Jernigan
"Yu Ji, also known as Ji Hongyu had his undergraduate study in drawing and painting at Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China (1977-81). He came to the United States in 1983 and studied at State University of New York College at New Paltz, where he earned his MFA degrees in painting/drawing (1986) and in printmaking (1989). . . Yu Ji's artwork has been recognized for its elaborate compositions based on observational sketchbook studies and for pictorial interpretations of figurative form in space." - Yu Ji Studio
"As part of its policy in favour of contemporary art, the Louvre has invited the South African artist William Kentridge to intervene with a specific project around the theme of ancient Egypt. . . Parallel to the artist's monographic exhibition - currently showing at the Jeu de Paume, Carnets d'Egypte in the Denon wing of the Louvre - consists in a new set of drawings, collages, and books by William Kentridge alongside etchings, albums and drawings (belonging to the graphic arts department of the Louvre) by artists of the XVI to the XIX century, from Dupéarc to Delacroix, from Poussin to Le Brun and Crapelet - who during their travels recorded the pyramids, archaeological ruins, explorers, and different transformations from the cat to the lion." - David Krupt Publishing
"When he was very young, Ronald Kitaj ran away to sea. He joined the SS Corona bound for Cuba and Mexico, a fresh-faced Cleveland boy who carried his sketchbooks with him and knew, already, that art was all he wanted to do. And as he travelled, he drew. . . " - The Economist
• The Economist
KOHLER ART LIBRARY
Sketchbooks: Selections from the Kohler Art Library
February 18 - May 19, 2008
image from Picasso, "Carnet Catalan"
One can almost see the hand of an artist by looking at a sketchbook. Artists use sketchbooks to quickly capture a fleeting moment depicted in a scene, face, impression, interior view, animal, rambling thought (doodle), or general idea. Sketchbooks come in all sizes, but for the most part they are portable and accompany the artist to local sites or faraway places. Facsimiles have been published to reproduce the exact sketchbook and/or pages of the sketchbook used by the artist. Smudges, rips, stains, and stray marks are all reproduced to match the original artifact. The art library has a growing collection of these facsimiles, such as the sketchbooks of Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne, Paul Klee, and Le Corbusier, among others. Contemporary book artists such as Henrik Drescher and Susan Bee incorporate a sketchbook-like quality in their work with splashes of dazzling color and playful line drawings. All of the sketchbooks on display show work that is "in the moment" and unrehearsed. They are fresh, vibrant, and great fun to view! This exhibit is a corollary to the "Workbooks" exhibit currently on display in Memorial Library, Special Collections.
"Eighteen months before his 70th birthday, Christopher Lambert drew a blue line across the map of Europe. Seventy one walking days and over 1000 miles later, with a small rucksack, the most important contents of which were a water bottle and a spare pair of socks, he arrived in Rome. In his pocket he carried a sketch-book and some coloured pencils. The book he subsequently published, Taking a line for a walk, faithfully reproduces the the journal he kept." -
"Those who have nothing to say gossip and those who can not draw sketch. A sketch is just up from a doodle. If every mark counts, it is a drawing no matter how short a time spent on it." - Rico Lebrun
"At the start of Disney's production of Bambi, Rico Lebrun . . . was employed to help teach the studio's artists to learn how to draw animals. He created some intense classes where animators concentrated on the anatomy of deer and other animals. The story goes that Lebrun went so far as to cut open a deer's corpse and slowly peel away parts of the animal for drawing and study. Over days, as the smell grew more putrid, fewer and fewer people attended." - Michael Sporn
Carlo Levi, Portrait of Mussolini & other fascist leaders
Carlo Levi (1902-1975)
"Levi was born to wealthy Jewish physician Ercole Levi and Annetta Treves... He studied medicine and graduated from the University of Turin in 1924. He did not practise medicine, choosing instead to become a painter and to pursue his political interests. In 1929, along with Carlo and Nello Rosselli he founded an anti-fascist movement called Giustizia e Liberta... His anti-fascist activities resulted in his exile (1935-36) to the remote province of Lucania. His experiences there are described in his novel 'Cristo si e fermato a Eboli' (1945), which reflects the visual sensitivity of a painter and the compassionate objectivity of a doctor... After World War II, Carlo Levi continued to write and paint..."
• Mussolini & other fascist leaders
• Carlo Levi and Roma
• Fondazione Carlo Levi
Carlo Levi, Autoritratto, 1945 ->
olio su tela, cm 42 x 34
• Carlo Levi: Il Prezzo della Liberta
• Francesco Rosi - Cristo si e fernato a Eboli
Beginning of Christ Stopped at Eboli
directed by Francesco Rosi (1979)
starring Gian Maria Volonte
music by Piero Piccioni
"Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return to my peasants as i promised when I left them, and I do not know when, if ever, I can keep my promise. But closed in one room, in a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comport or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death." - beginning of the book, Christ Stopped at Eboli
• Le cadavre exquis boira (the image)
"...The initial drawing can be downloaded and modified... Here the image can be worked as print, as digital file, artworks can be scanned, photographed, etc, etc. The idea of the (surrealist) game is to add parts sequentially, but internet time is also simultaneous..."
"Sketchbooks are an integral part of the creative process. . . They're a private notebook for sketches, ideas for projects, rough drafts, and much more. Everyone approaches sketchbook differently, depending on their style of art and personal preference. I've had several so far, but my current one is my favorite. It's a small, black bound book that is easy to carry anywhere, and best of all it isn't gimmicky, like some sketchbooks with pencils and whatnot on the cover. The pages are a creamy white, and thick enough for paint. . . The most important aspect of keeping a sketchbook is not being intimidated by it. There's no reason to have it be perfect. Unlike the art you make to sell or for a grade, your sketchbook never has to be shown to anyone. It's like a diary, and you're free to make mistakes, scribble, and anything else you want to do. " - Maria
. . . and: Carl Andre, Frank Auerbach, Richmond Burton, Francesco Clemente, John Chamberlain, Lucian Freud, Philip Guston, Gary Hume, Brice Marden, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, David Smith, Myron Stout, Lawrence Weiner, Terry Winters.
"Poet and hero of the American counter-culture, Jonas Mekas, born in Lithuania in 1922, invented the diary form of film-making. Walden (Diaries, Notes and Sketches, 1969), his first completed diary film, an epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s, is also a groundbreaking work of personal cinema." -
". . . Then I began to realise that underneath all that wool was a body, which moved in its own way, and that each sheep had its individual character." - Henry Moore
"In 1972, when the packing and crating for a major exhibition made it impossible for him to work in his sculpture studios, Henry Moore retreated to a small studio (in Much Hadham) that looks out on a sheep meadow. Over the course of several months, as sheep were suckled and sheared, Moore produced this delightful flock of sketches and drawings... (He) presented the sketchbook to his daughter, Mary..."
"I remember always, that drawing was the activity that gave me more pleasure. I remember in elementary school, the lesson design used to be on Friday afternoon in the last half hour, when the teacher was already tired and happy to go end-to-week. I loved it, not be the end of the week, but because it was a drawing class. Later, when I knew I wanted to be a sculptor, I noticed that all admired sculptors who were great designers: Michelangelo, Bernini, Rodin. The design itself is a part of learning: learning to use their eyes to see more intensely. When it encourages people to draw is not to become artists, as it does not teach grammar to transform all of Shakespeares." - Henry Moore's Sheep Sketchbook, Thames & Hudson, London, 1980 (excerpt)
Facsimile Sketchbook West Wind Relief, Edition C, with catalog. Signed and numbered in an edition of 250 by the artist in pencil. Contains 66 illustrations of drawings. Exhibited in New York at the Alex Rosenberg Gallery, "The New Work by Henry Moore," April 27-June 30, 1983. Catalogue with text by the artist. Facsimile sketchbook size: 8.85 x 6.89" (23 x 18cm). Printed in 1979/80 by Daniel Jacomet & Cie, Paris.
Much Hadham: Raymond Spencer Company Limited, 1985. (Limited Artist's Edition), signed and numbered by the artist. The Facsimile sketchbook is housed in a Solander box with a vellum spine, sides covered with a Richard de Bas handmade paper
Mary Newbomb "keeps not a sketchbook but a notebook or diary. She fills it with handwritten thoughts and observations that often find their way into the work verbatim. 'Be sure to put it down,' she writes in one diary entry, 'be it squirrel in a woodpile, men with white-toed boots working on a mountain railway, caterpillars hanging stiffly and staring from a laurel bush, the magnitude of the stars - there is no end.'" - Gerry Cordon
"I believe that humanity is on the road to abolishing
the mistreatment of animals,but when it finally makes
it into legislation, there will not be any animals left
in the wild to protect." [Prof. Jordi Sabater Pi (1922-2009)
"The Black Sketchbooks series consists of small pages taken from moleskin notebooks, on which fragments of maps are printed and then worked on with various materials, from writing implements to oil stains, re-drawing each document in a game of tensions and erasures, an exercise of displaced intentions which separated themselves from reality. Project, hesitation, error, direction and drift all combine into an autonomous language that competes with the topology on the maps from which it emerges, pointing towards a referential and spatial repositioning. The pages are then photographed and large-format prints are made." - Marco Pires
(l) Apes 1430s, Silverpoint, Musée du Louvre, Paris
(r) 2 Hanged Men 1430s. Metalpoint + pen on paper, British Museum
"I usually carry a sketchbook and a small watercolor set with me at all times. Most of the sketchbooks are 4 inches by 6 inches in size and easily fit in my pocket. The media most often used is watercolor, ink and pencil. My typical ink instrument is a Rotring 600 fountain pen. The Rotring cartridge ink is watersoluable and I carry a Niji waterbrush to make the ink washes with the Rotring cartridge ink. I also sometimes use Walnut ink which is also watersoluable and suitable for washes. My watercolor kit is a Koi Water Colors Pocket Field Sketch Box which also easily fits into another pocket along with number 8 and 4 Daniel Smith Platinum Synthetic Travel Brushes. I carry water in a small pill container or if I need a little more water than they hold a 4 oz plastic gerber juice jar (for babies). My pockets are full, but I can walk down the street and no one can tell that I am carrying a portable art studio. The sketches were all done on location or as the French say, En Plein Air." - Jim Pollock
"Beatrix Potter was born in England and is known today for her illustrated books, especially those with Peter Rabbit. From childhood, she was an avid student of Nature. She drew and painted all the animals she could find, and loved painting mushrooms. Potter filled many sketchbooks and kept a journal all her life. As a child, she drew and painted from life, but usually in her room, where she brought creatures she and her brother had collected.
Beatrix Potter became widely respected throughout England as an expert on fungi (a mycologist) and lichens, although she was denied opportunities to present her studies to the British Royal Society, exclusively male. Beatrix made discoveries about lichens that endure today." - Morning Earth
"I like to draw whatever is right in front of me when I'm sitting near water or beneath trees. I don't really see until I begin to draw. Drawing helps me understand what I'm seeing. It seems to untie knots of confusion within my mind as I work.
Watercolor pencils are my favorite for outdoor drawing.
I like drawing the stuff that gets left behind after something has gone through a great change--shells, seed pods, bones, snakeskins, cicada shells. I consider these things treasures.
Human faces are interesting to me; they mirror the whole world. They contain mountains and oceans, flowers and storms. I draw and paint and sculpt faces. " -Kelly Finnerty - Morning Earth
"I carry a sketchbook wherever I go. I'll use whatever is at hand - paper bags, hotel notepads, scraps - but usually I have a small leatherbound book, a brand which, unfortunately, is no longer made. When I heard that they were discontinuing them I bought a pile of them to tide me over... It looks like a bible more than anything else, and it fits neatly in my coat pocket. The paper inside is either antique white, or buff colored... and has a wonderful laid texture that will accept just
about anything that lands on it - pen, charcoal, spit, you name it.
The books have traveled with me all over the world, kept me company in places where I was a total outsider, couldn't speak the language. But the language of
line was always there, and it bridged the barriers like nothing else could..."
The journals of Charles Ritchie have been created continuously since 1977 and record the artist's direct response to his subjects. The images and notes often provide insight into the creation of a work or lay groundwork for new drawings and prints. Since 1992 the books have been handmade and are sewn and bound by Virginia Ritchie, the artist's wife.
"I carry a sketchbook particularly as a visual diary of events on holidays and trips. I also doodle all the time at meetings or on the telephone. Doodles in particular are definitely driven by the subconcious. Absent mindedly drawing a bull parked on the toilet during a meeting says it all."
"...The story of Naomi (V Jelish) is moving, but it is a hoax, the products of the imagination of Shovlin, 25, from Leicester (UK), a graduate of the Royal College of Art, who spent three years creating the fantasy. He produced the drawings, the cuttings, the school reports et al in order, as he explained, 'to test the boundaries of ambiguity'." Naomi V Jelish is an anagram of Jamie Shovlin.
Sketchbooks are as varied as the artists who keep them. They are a repository of ideas, perceptions, inspirational imagery, and graphic experiments. "As personal records they afford an intimate glimpse of an artist's visual thinking and reveal aspects of their creative process." - AAA Collections: Sketchooks
"My sketchbooks are a source of comfort and pleasure. Whenever I feel bored or unsure about a situation, or when I plain don't feel like being sociable, I know that, in my purse, a world of escape awaits. They are my memory of events I enjoyed, my record of places visited, my outlet for what can't always quite be said in words." - The Hyphenate: Why I Draw by Maxine
David Byrne 
Isabel Fiadeiro: Sketching in Mauritania 
Sketchbook
(mature content)
México
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Donkey © William Blake Trust
"Beatrix Potter was born in England and is known today for her illustrated books, especially those with Peter Rabbit. From childhood, she was an avid student of Nature. She drew and painted all the animals she could find, and loved painting mushrooms. Potter filled many sketchbooks and kept a journal all her life. As a child, she drew and painted from life, but usually in her room, where she brought creatures she and her brother had collected.
