Sketchbooks: searching for beauty and treasure
In this video and blog I take you with me as I hunt back through sketchbooks, some old, some more recent looking for inspiration and I chat about the importance of using the ‘beauty of what we love’ to guide our creativity.
I am looking back through my sketchbooks for several reasons:
To pick up lost threads and re-familiarise myself with what is calling to me within my own art after taking a break from creating
I am looking to see if there are any pages in my sketchbook which I particularly like, which are worth scanning and which could possibly work on a larger scale as wall art
I am also doing some thinking and preparation for an interview with FIDA worldwide about the importance of sketchbooks. You can read what I said in the finished interview here
Looking back through your own creations with an inquisitive heart is often a useful way to take stock. It helps that I have years and years of sketchbooks I know, but I think it can be a useful practice at any point in your creative journey...
Spending time carefully looking at and considering a pile of your own art creations can be an interesting exercise in connecting, noticing and getting specific about the things you love in your own work.
Our art work often reflects something of ourselves back to us…it can provide us with bread crumb trails and signals about the next path to take or the next thing to create.
Be a detective, seek and identify the specific moments in your own work which fascinate you the most as these could contain the clues that you need for which path to follow in your artistic investigation.
This year I have been drawn back to a line from a poem from Rumi the Sufi poet. “Let the beauty we love, be what we do.” It’s a philosophy that is so useful to bring to our art making and life if we can.
The full section of the poem is
Today, like every other day,
we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
From Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing, by Jalal al-Din Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.
It strikes me that this is a powerful sentiment for now, when many of us wake up feeling empty and frightened by the things that are happening in the world.
It speaks of letting our own light shine, being truly ourselves, letting our own creativity galvanize us and lead the way, not letting other’s expectations of us get in the way of the things we love to do, the things we must do. That creativity is important.
It reminds us to listen to what is calling to us, if we are able to amongst the noise, to pay attention to what makes us feel alive, interested and curious, to create rather than consume.
It suggests that perhaps letting our own unique flavour of creativity flourish is a way to bring light, show gratitude, live well... That perhaps creativity can be considered an important act of devotion, gratitude, or rebellion...
So consider this a small reminder and rallying call to try to let the beauty of what you love, light your own path and let it be your own guide and mentor…