Sketchbooks: the accumulation and the connections

A sketchbook as a personal cabinet of curiosities

My sketchbook is where I go when I am feeling creative, and also where I go when I am not.

My creative life is oriented around my sketchbook. If I am brimming with ideas, I go to my sketchbook. If I am bereft of ideas, I go to my sketchbook. Every season of my creativity finds shelter and a warm welcome there.

I know my sketchbook to be a place that will reconnect me with my artistic self. I can hang out there and experiment until I find my next fascination, or allow the beginnings of a curiosity to unfurl and take shape. It is a place to listen to whispers, connect dots and pull on threads.

In fact, I have come to think of my sketchbooks as personal cabinets of artistic curiosities.

Historically, cabinets of curiosities were collections of objects gathered together for their beauty, importance, significance or preciousness. Collections that inevitably reflected the obsessions and preoccupations of the people who assembled them.

My sketchbooks are fairly anti-precious. I try not to bring a precious energy to the making of each page, but I do love the thought of them as a kind of creative keeping place. The preciousness is in the accumulation and connections.

I collect things in them that interest me: drawings, techniques, observations, experiments, colours. Things I've noticed in nature. Things I've seen in the world. Things that have occurred to me while I've been making something else. My sketchbooks are often a dizzying mismatch of ideas and techniques.

I don't always know why something interests me, or what I'm going to do with it. My sketchbooks are where my artistic ideas hang out.

An ongoing conversation

There is a freedom in a sketchbook that I relish. Somewhere to welcome an eclectic mix of stuff and bring it together without needing any of it to be for something specific.

An interesting visual thought. A shape. A fascinating colour combination. A motif. A half-formed thing. Sometimes the pages seem fully formed, sometimes they are more about oddments, offcuts and interesting bits.

Gathered together, these things become a record of my visual sensitivities and creative preoccupations. An ongoing conversation with myself and with the things that are catching my artistic attention. Sometimes that conversation jumps all over the place and sometimes it is about going deeper with one subject.

I like having somewhere for all of this exploration to live.

A place where ideas connect

One of the things I particularly value is having all these different fragments living alongside one another.

Something I'm drawing now might remind me of a drawing I made months ago. A shape repeats and reoccurs. A colour relationship deepens. An experiment that I abandoned connects with something completely different.

Sometimes I only see those connections when I look back.

That's when the sketchbook becomes particularly interesting to me. I'm no longer looking only at individual pages. I'm seeing my own creative thinking accumulate over time, and I enjoy seeing ideas begin to talk to one another and build relationships across the pages.

Things that were made months, sometimes years, apart can suddenly seem to belong together. These three sketchbook spreads are in three different sketchbooks years apart, now I can see the connections.

A place to discover what you treasure

We put things into collections because we value them. But sometimes the act of collecting also helps us discover what we value. A sketchbook is a container, a collection of experiments and studies.

I don't always know in advance what is going to fascinate me.

It's through making, gathering and looking back that I begin to notice the colours, shapes, subjects, materials and ideas that underpin my art-making. The repetitions become visible. I can see what has absorbed my attention and what continues to call me back.

So my sketchbook isn't only somewhere I put the things I already know I am interested in.

It's also somewhere to unearth what we treasure, like an archaeologist digging through the dust, looking for the thing that is already there.

I think that's a lovely thing about a sketchbook. It can be brilliantly revelatory.

A place to look and wonder

Sketchbooks are full of all sorts of art experiments and ideas, things that worked, things that didn't, things I may or may not return to. Everything is welcome.

Together, all the pages tell a story of my own preoccupations and artistic sensitivities. I can look back and see what I've returned to, what has evolved or changed and what still calls my name.

Sometimes something I had completely forgotten catches my heart again. Sometimes I see a thread running through several years of work that I didn’t recognise while I was making it.

And sometimes there is just a simple pleasure in looking back through a book full of things my creative self found interesting…

Types of sketchbook

Here are some of the sketchbooks I like, but sketchbooks are a personal preference and come in so many different shapes, sizes and varieties, the sketchbook that is right for me, may not be right for you. The best sketchbook to use is always the one you already own.

The Venezia Book from Fabriano

Stillman & Birn, Zeta Range

The Ebony Artist Book from Daler Rowney, this is the giant A3 sized book I like to use

Dylusions Creative Journal Large from Ranger

Seawhite of Brighton Pocket Concertina

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