Sketchbook, July 2021-September 2022. (Best if viewed full screen, and you can click CC for some captions.)
It always strikes me, when I finish a sketchbook, how much like a diary it actually is. During this journey through a little more than a year -- a year that's seen a lot of upheaval and emotion and change -- the images and the choices recall exactly where I was and what I was thinking, while to the viewer, they probably look like innocuous still lives, landscapes and skyscapes. In some ways, this visual diary is more personal and secret and coded than written words could ever be.
On the other hand, I hope it's interesting to look at, whether you know any of the underlying aspects or not. From an artistic point of view, I like the two loose watercolors of Parc Lafontaine, in the fall and in the winter, and then the explorations of the sky, where the watercolors and one lone acrylic attempt to capture something that was quite new to me, and elusive.
I feel like I've had little time to really focus on art this year, which I'm sorry about, but at least there was this sketchbook which I kept going, and took with me on the trips to the lake to care for my father. It was often hard to draw -- I just didn't have the emotional bandwidth -- but the desire is coming back now, and I'm glad about that.
Fascinating, and I can see how the emotional content shows through even though I can only guess what it might be.
I kept visual diaries for nearly three years and looking through them a decade later brings back the most vivid memories. At a personal level I find them so much more powerful than any of my many written journals. As you say, secret and coded.
I am in no place to take the process up again.
Posted by: Relatively Retiring | October 01, 2022 at 02:12 AM
Thanks, Judith. Since you've done it yourself, you know! And I'm hoping that a practice of writing or drawing earlier in our lives will carry over even if we aren't doing either later on, because our minds are tuned to observing and thinking about things. Do you think so?
Posted by: Beth | October 01, 2022 at 10:13 AM
Good to see your sketchbook and to know that your desire to draw is returning.
Posted by: am | October 02, 2022 at 09:49 PM
Beautiful. You've moved to a new town? Worthy of an exhibition at your local Mairie!
Posted by: Vincent Mulder | October 07, 2022 at 07:46 PM
So much resonance in what you share, thank you Beth. I have written in a journal most days many years of my life, but rarely
re-read. For a time I was doing a drawing a day, and when I look back at those drawings I am transported in such a palpable way.
A Mexican pitcher that I still have is so vivid in its black and white rendering, a birch tree outside a window, a pair of worn then and now gone sandals brings me bac to these objects and to me at that moment of looking at them. Uncanny and an invitation to return to such a practice again.
I have been thinking of you and am grateful for what you share.
Posted by: Vanessa Langloys Miller | October 08, 2022 at 07:13 PM