The Sketchbook
The Sketchbook
I travel with sketchbooks the way other people travel with cameras.
I have about ten of them now. They've been to Vancouver, New York, Arizona, Mexico City, Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta, France, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Estonia, Greece, Venice, Prague, Holland. Each one holds a specific quality of light from a specific place at a specific moment that a photograph would have flattened into something recognizable but not true.
The sketchbook is where I catch things before they're gone.
Alex used to sleep in a doorway near a grand church in Budapest. Every morning I'd buy him a coffee and we'd talk. On one trip back after the pandemic I got there late in the afternoon and the light from a bar sign was casting a blue hue on the stone wall beside his empty doorway. I fumbled with watercolours still new to my hands, trying to get it down before the light shifted. When I put the last stroke down I noticed his bedroll was gone. I never saw him again.
That's in the sketchbook. A blue light on a stone wall, a missing bedroll, a moment that took maybe ten minutes to capture and will never happen again.
People at markets are fascinated by the sketchbooks when I bring them out. They want to see inside. There's something about the rawness of them, the smudges, the rushed marks, the pages that buckled when the paper got too wet. They feel more honest than the finished work. The sketchbook is the conversation before the painting. It is the thinking out loud part.
I'm making a book from one of them. The pages already tell a story. Budapest and New York and Belgium woven together, seemingly chaotic, coming together at the end the way things do when you've been paying attention.
The sketchbook goes everywhere. A hand made screen printed one from More tentacles Studio in Berlin lives in my work purse, My accordion sketchbook from Florence in my travel day bag, the endless piles of various sized Moleskins in every other space they will fit. When traveling It's one of the most important thing I pack.
Jackie
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