THINKING ON PAPER

As a child I fantasized that my bedroom had a bunk bed and the room was completely filled with paper up to the height of the bed. I sat on top of the bed and filled the paper with either writing or drawings.

I’ve kept journals and sketchbooks most of my life. My sketchbooks are strangely orderly. I tend to follow a theme and work on variations of it throughout the book. Conversely, I feel challenged by what I should keep in a journal. I have journals that recount my day, others about work, separate ones for travel, and still others filled with automatic writing. Talk about “organizing your thoughts!”

Some artists work with whatever comes to hand. Bonnard made sketches in his small pocket calendar, My father was a doctor in same hospital as William Carlos Williams, and he told me about him writing his poems on his prescription pads. Some authors swear by the Moleskin notebook. I used to have a friend send me Ordning & Reda notebooks from Sweden, until they stopped making them.

Not all notebooks are personal or sacred. Darwin’s children filled his manuscripts with marginalia of personified vegetables racing.

I remember seeing the drawings of Pisanello and the sketchbooks of Constable for the first time. How immediate they felt. Their quality of investigation, of thinking on paper. It’s another way to engage with the world.

NOTEBOOKS FROM SOME ARTISTS, SCIENTISTS, WRITERS AND SOLDIERS

HISTORY SPOTLIGHT: TURNER

I suspect Turner was using this page to gage the color on his brush, not to make a composition. Although it would be all the more remarkable if it were. I love this page because I see the modernist emerge, but I am sure that is just my projection. Turner made 37,000 sketches and watercolors, and I highly recommend looking at the project taken on by the Tate to catalog all of this work, most of which has been bequeathed to the museum.

They have categorized it by periods with images and essays for each one. This is a great resource for a deep dive. THE TURNER PROJECT

FROM THE LIBRARY : ROLAND ALLEN’S THE NOTEBOOK: A HISTORY OF THINKING ON PAPER

“The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper” is a remarkable history, and one that may make you think twice about giving up pen and paper. Once your read this, you might also like to revisit Doris Lessing’s ‘The Golden Notebook.” That book made me think about how our lives splinter into categories that we keep in different notebooks until at the extreme it bursts into a constellation of post-it notes. As someone who keeps many different notebooks for different aspects of my life, this really struck home.

“Roland Allen reveals how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, Isaac Newton and Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James; shows how Darwin developed his theory of evolution in tiny pocket books and Agatha Christie plotted a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books; and introduces a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers, and mathematicians, all of whom used their notebooks as a space to think--and in doing so, shaped the modern world.”

AT THE MOVIES: MR. TURNER

I picked Mr. Turner for this month because his sketchbooks are remarkable, not that they play much of a role in this film.

. . . “Mr. Turner” understands creative people on every conceivable level, and translates that understanding with a deftness rarely seen outside of astute documentaries about creative people. To watch it is to feel as though you’re a part of its world, talking shop with the painters, experiencing tiny fluctuations in received wisdom and sudden changes of artistic direction that can only be sensed by professionals who are plugged into their art form, and completely in command of their talents. – Robert Ebert

ART SPOTLIGHT: CURRENT

I spent December and the first part of this month painting over some paintings I wasn’t happy with. What I love about that is that I start with a patina and some history that I either work with or against. You can see the rest of paintings that I reworked here.