The Artist's Sketchbook

"It's not, 'This is my practice and this is how I work and these are my ideas.' It's very much, 'this is my life contained within one book.'" —Allison Foster, Tate Archive Curator

Thanks to a grant from the UK Heritage Lottery Fund in 2012, Tate began work digitizing their archives, known as the Archives and Access project (made available to the public in 2014). As part of the project, Tate digitized hundreds of images from the sketchbooks of British artists, including J.M.W. Turner, Graham Sutherland, and Donald Rodney.

As part of the video series, Animating the Archives, Tate shares a video featuring how artists use the sketchbook as a place for bringing ideas to life. "Exploring Sketchbooks" (9:40) is presented courtesy of Tate, London (2017).

Blank Pages: Starting the Sketchbook

The sketchbook can serve as both creative object and creative space. The blank pages, the absence of audience, and its portability provide artists with an unpretentious space for trying out ideas at any moment.

The pristine quality of a new notebook can be intimidating, however. While the object may inevitably be filled with discarded ideas, scratch-outs, and even bad sketches, the untouched quality of the new notebook seems to suggest that nothing short of perfection should appear on the following pages. For some artists, this can be a mental barrier in the production of ideas.

In "Exploring Sketchbooks," illustrator and animator Joey Yu, refers to her method of transforming the notebook from immaculate object to familiar companion.

If I was going to advise someone on starting a sketchbook, I would tell them to do exactly as I did and not start on the first page because I think there's a lot of stigma in 'ah, the first page...I don't want to touch it. I don't want to ruin it. I don't want to make bad work!' But if you kind of wreck your book almost...and I don't treat them preciously...I just chuck them in a bag. I'll wreck pages first and then I'll paint on them. So I would say you just have to be really fearless and just start.

Her approach of "wrecking" a few pages at the start breaks the spell.

Paths Towards Clarity

Not all ideas lead towards larger final products. We can even assume that for every novel, painting, and invention captured by the annals of history, there are more ideas cast aside, unfinished or forgotten. Drawing ideas out onto paper provides the artist with a range of new insight, from realizing ideas to taking a moment to inspect them more closely.

The active weeding out of ideas can be an important step in the activity of idea-making. The privacy of the sketchbook allows for mistake-making to be a low-risk feature of experimentation. Artist Gaby Sahhar explains how mistakes can guide the artist towards the strongest elements worth keeping:

You're allowed to make mistakes in a sketchbook. It's very much a space where, actually, mistakes are encouraged because you kind of learn more from the mistakes that happen in a sketchbook because then you know not to pursue them further into the artworks.

Considering the value of mistakes at an intellectual level may help to reduce the emotional displeasure that tends to accompany creative misadventures.

Extending the Sphere of Thought

Theatre designer Rae Smith refers to the organizational value of sketchbooks. Sketchbooks provide the artist with a space to offload the swarm of ideas that may accumulate when working on many projects at once:

I use the sketchbook to organize my mind throughout the processes and also to record how you can basically think about so many things at once.

That we can hold multiple ideas in our mind is not a trite observation. Leaving them there, they are at risk of being forgotten. Instead, drawing ideas out of the mind can define their nebulous edges. Consider the closet currently holding your collection of odds and ends. When the objects are brought out of that dark storage place, they become more clearly defined. Their value can be assessed; connections can be made. In this sense, the sketchbook becomes an extended sphere of the mind, one which affords opportunities for observation and tactile manipulation.

Sketchbook as Document

The sketchbook is also a record of ideas over time. Such a record can provide personal insights to the artist. Rae Smith expresses this quality of sketchbook as time capsule:

If a drawing isn't going well or doesn't look good, it simply records that state of mind at the time and actually months later, or lucky enough, if you've kept your drawings, your sketchbooks, over 35 years, years later, you can look back at it and see a different quality to an unfinished or not particularly loved drawing in a sketchbook. You can see what you were going through at the time, what you were thinking of at the time—the context of it which you can't when you're having a personal expression in a private space called a sketchbook. You don't always have an objective sense of what you're doing. And that's the pleasure of it.

The sketchbook can also reveal a more objective lineage from the point of origin to its final developments. Artist and teacher Sasha Leech discusses this particular aspect of the sketchbook:

I think you can often trace an idea to arrive to at a finished sculpture or painting or piece. It often takes many, many, many steps. It's quite nice to follow the thinking process which is often revealed in the sketchbook from one thing to another. How something perhaps started at a point that you really wouldn't have imagined if you'd just seen that finished piece.

By observing the pages of others' sketchbooks, one can see the assortment of methods. Details such as how the space of the page is used, how materials are combined, how words and outside artifacts intermix with images contribute to the open-ended possibility offered in blank pages.