Recently in sketchbook Category

This summer has not included much formal clay/studio time. Instead I feel like the character Frederick The Mouse from a book by Leo Lionni.This book is a great antidote to narrow thinking and is a wonderful allegory for the role of the artist. While all the other mice are collecting seeds and supplies for the winter, Frederick, who has the heart of a poet, collects images to get all the mice through the winter.

I have been collecting images all summer. I spent five days at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY taking a class with Lynda Barry. It felt like a combination of five days with a stand-up comic and deep exploration of my childhood through the cultivation of images and finally words that add up to breathing stories. Our days were filled with making lists and visualizations of images from our lists and then, expanding them into seven-minute timed writes. If we lost the image and didn't know what came next, we switched to the piece of paper next to us and drew spirals or the alphabet--always keeping our pens moving . It felt like fishing with a pen in the sea of images that make up the ocean of my childhood and the origins of my imagination. We read out loud with no comment or eye contact. While I listened I drew more spirals.

I loved listening and drawing. It is a very fertile way of working. While I listen my brain is turned off and I am just there. My pen is moving and I can trust my gut. In this case we weren't looking at anything but the page with intense consideration. By hearing other voices I was reminded of the kind of image that is alive. I remembered friends' names that have been lost to me for years. I invented a character based on my experience with just facts no emotion and I got some profound laughs when I read it aloud. We did not re-read our work all week. We did not talk about the work outside of class. We watched movies and took naps together. It was exhausting, inspiring, and exhilarating all in one breath.

The important thing I took away had to do with working by hand. In my normal process I write with a pen in a notebook and draw with pens and pencil, later adding water and collage. Then I type up my words and email them to myself. When I see them again as a separate image (legible and spell-checked) I can continue to expand and elaborate. This always seems insane but somehow  Lynda's approach added depth and validation to what I have been building upon since I was a kid.

At one point I thought I had a notebook illness, but instead I have come to realize that these many  books are my assets--the varieties of shape, size, and function push new problems and suggest new solutions.Yesterday I posted circular plate images drawn from rectangular books. Today's square plate paintings are pulled from my 8-inch square notebooks.

My sketchbooks serve as both a private place to experiment and a portable stage to carry and to show-and-tell what I have been fooling around with. The books hold ideas in more or less chronological order. I do get ahead of myself laying in color, but then I go back and add more layers. The books become a collection spot for bits of sketches, idea scraps, color, a stray word or two, and an occasional quote.

Working on a small mailing I decided to use handmade envelopes. These are made from experimental paintings for plate ideas.  Sometimes they are scrap paper that I insert behind the page I'm working on so that I don't get the whole sketchbook gummed up with sloppy paint. These "outside the margin" pages can get really beautiful when my focus is elsewhere.
When the pages get cut up using a template for the envelope shape,  I pay some attention to placement but as the image is folded and glued into a container it crops and combines the image in unforseen ways. As stamps were adhered, Warren and one of Zoe's friends asked, "Did you photograph these? They are really beautiful." So I did that before mailing these paintings out as messengers sneaking handmade art into daily life.

In Mr. LaHotan's second-grade art class I was excited when we were going to make things out of clay. But before we could move from painting to pottery, we had to tell him the difference. Since it seemed so obvious to me that clay was 3-dimensional, I stayed quiet. He stressed that when we worked in clay we had to observe our progress from every direction.

Surprisingly, I still see it differently. Trying to combine what I love about working on paper and what I love about 3-dimensional clay I am mixing my paint so it is like slip and mixing my slip so it is like paint. I write in my fast, illegible script and paint in my notebook. Then, transitioning to slip and clay, I search for the same feeling. When the claywork drawing seems more exciting, I alter my sketching materials yet again. The cups above are the result of printed handwriting; the page below shows template-shaped ideas for the cups.