Workbook tour

My first public sketch-book tour

I have always avoided putting any sketchbook work up on Instagram because the thought of it - and how effective the drawings will or won’t be at collecting likes - makes me agonizingly self-conscious, wrecking my ability to draw freely, badly, with abandon.

Substack seems like a different place, a place where showing the act of working through things visually makes sense, fits in.

But now that I am putting one up, how much happier I would be if every spread worked beautifully! But drat, that’s the point of the workbook.

There are a couple of struggles going on in this workbook (Hahnemühle A5 Nostalgie, which has smooth, rather yellow paper and takes water media quite well).

The first problem was having was having too many sketchbooks on the go at once and not drawing in any of them. I solved that by rethinking my rules for workbooks, and this book has several drawings cut and pasted from unloved abandoned sketchbooks in it as part of my set of new rules.

Rules for Workbooks

The second struggle has been almost constant since I have been making art. I love drawing from direct observation, particularly plants and flowers. There is some sort of transformation of the mind that happens when you enter into this observation fully - a mindfulness that is stronger and more powerful than meditation (at least for me).

Yet I am constantly excited by working through quite abstract, non-representational ideas in paint or ink. When I find a new idea through process exploration, I am obsessed.

But by the end of this sketchbook, I am getting a glimmer of a way to work through observing plants, and exploring the space created by the line on the page at the same time.

So the work of the book, a container for my attention, and a way of bringing an awareness of that attention back to me later, has happened.

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I have pasted work from the New Zealand artist Heather Straka in my workbook, as well as the late Mark Adams

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