Sketchbooks

I've just bought an old copy of the 'Picasso's Sketchbooks' exhibition catalogue. The book has facsimiles of six complete sketchbooks and fragments of 36 others. I used to have one which I bought back in the 1980s, lent it to someone and it never returned. What I thought was interesting when returning to go through these images was how little writing he did. All his thinking is visual, each page represents a search for an alternative resolution to a visual problem, and I think there is a strong lesson to be learnt here. Sometimes students feel they have to annotate everything in their sketchbooks in order to justify their decision making. However if the mind is thinking visually, stopping to write can often hold back the visual invention as the brain is having to switch between different modes of thinking. This doesn't mean that  artists should not write, Picasso and many others have written wonderful poetry, but that artists have to be careful to not compromise one way of thinking by muddling it up with another.

Picasso

Ex LCA student Henry Moore's sketchbooks are not as wide ranging in approach as Picasso's but are similar in that they concentrate on solving visual ideas. However some sketchbooks are about finding ideas from direct observation and others about free form invention. The famous shelter or sheep sketchbooks are reflections on 3D form as much as they are records of observed events, once again we have an artist looking at the world and selecting out of it the information that supports their aesthetic vision.

Henry Moore

However many of Moore's sketchbooks are more like Picasso's, he is looking for a range of visual solutions to a problem and works images through as variations on a theme.

Henry Moore

As always there are alternative arguments and at first sight Edward Hopper's notebooks seem to suggest that he is writing to support his visual thinking, but when you read the text you realise these drawings are done after the event so to speak, they are documents of work done. The notebook as document of practice is something that has become more prevalent recently, as several artists have begun to use the document of practice as their actual practice. It is in Hopper's work I see the initial germ of this idea emerging.

Hopper

Pep Carrió

Pep Carrió

Pep Carrió’s sketchbooks are stream of consciousness records of every day of his life. He never misses a day and his sketchbooks become the artwork itself, gradually building up a mass of images that have an impact simply because of the sustained invention that has now continued for years. 

An alternative approach is that of Dieter Roth. He used the diary format to reflect on his life, interweaving selections from these diaries into his work, making almost direct translations from them and creating copybooks from them using Xerox. Each page becomes an intense interaction between word and image, he often used water soluble ink as he wrote so that when the paper was dampened ink would bleed and spread, the writing then becoming more visually akin to other types of mark making. At the same time as he made these diaries, alongside them he was collecting every piece of waste less than 1cm thick that he encountered every day in the studio, preserving it in a plastic folder and compiling these into ring binders. His everyday thoughts are collected alongside everyday detritus. A concept that I think is very interesting, artists' jottings being valued as much as the dirt and rubbish on the studio floor. This is almost in direct opposition to Picasso who values every page, signing and dating his work as he proceeds, as he obviously believed that at some point in time researchers would value his work so highly that they would want to be able to follow his thinking in sequential detail.

Roth diary pages

Roth daily collection file pages

Dieter Roth: vitrine of notebooks

Roth often used both sides of his paper, so this has given exhibitors a problem, and of course there is an interesting solution.

Dieter Roth

Double sided frames can be really useful and encourage a very different audience engagement with the work. Professional framers, such as John Jones in London, also make double sided hinged frames. However framing and how this can change an audience's engagement with the work is something else and I shall open this out a little more in the next post.

Sketchbook links of interest:

Using sketchbooks to think with

An earlier post on Richard Diebenkorn's sketchbooks.

Frances Alys sketchbooks

Sketch Open

Lucy Lyons makes sketchbooks the focus for her practice 

Sketch the exhibition

My own way of using a sketchbook. Tracking the evolution of an idea. 

If you want to follow the thread about documentation the best thing to do is click this link to

Documentation as Art Practice in the 1960s by Christian Berger and Jessica Santone, for an excellent PDF on the subject.