LINKS to ARTISTS' SKETCHBOOKS ONLINE

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

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

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

"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..."

"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

"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.

"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

"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."

• 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..."

"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

"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..."

"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.

"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

elodie studler sketching mont saint-michel

"A sketchbook believed to have been Vincent van Gogh's containing portraits similar to those in his most famous works has been found in Greece... Taken by a Greek resistance fighter from a Nazi train, the sketchbook was discovered in storage boxes by his daughter, who is seeking to establish its authenticity with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam..."

"In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing"

"My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing, scribbling things whenever they happen."

Vincent Van Gogh

"...The best way to draw often is to carry a sketchbook with you wherever you go. This way you will always be ready when the inspiration strikes... To maximize convenience, I recommned having several sketchbooks of varied sizes, so that depending on where you're going when you leave home, you can grab the one that's most appropriate. For small sizes, I love the Moleskine sketchbooks, and for larger sizes I use the Canson spiral-bound sketchbooks. Have fun out there, and don't forget your sunscreen!"

Sketchbook Habit by Mike Wiesmeier

"Think of a sketchbook as a souvenir of your everyday life. It can be a place to record your impressions or work out a visual difficulty, as well as a repository for ideas, notes, doodles and ticket stubs..."

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
Harvard Art Museums: Under Cover

"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 a pocket, and offer an unusually personal glimpse of the artist at work..."

Fogg Art Museum

Sketchbooks: Selections from the Kohler Art Libraryimage from Picasso, "Carnet Catalan"
February 18 - May 19, 2008

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 ³in the moment² and unrehearsed. They are fresh, vibrant, and great fun to view! This exhibit is a corollary to the ³Workbooks² exhibit currently on display in Memorial Library, Special Collections.

Picasso sketchbook