Scattergood, "Just got lost in your sketchbook images,
I draw almost every night from live TV, usually from
The Charlie Rose Show and will send you some..."
While his premature baby Max was in the hospital, being kept alive by advanced medical equipment, Abeles drew a series of portraits that became a record of the family's ordeal and eventual triumph. Testimony of a parent's faith in the healing power of art and love. . .
• Max Abeles drawings
• Preemies | The Max drawings
"9 drawings done by an artist under the influence of LSD - part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him." - cowboybooks.com
Elisa Alaluusua's "PhD research title is Sketchbooks - 'A Qualitative Analysis of the Creative Strategies Used in Sketchbooks by Novice and Expert Artists'. Her interest is in sketchbooks as objects as well as spaces where artists test their ideas and develop their visual language. For her research she has interviewed artists who keep sketchbooks. She also uses her own drawing as an investigative tool while researching sketchbooks; particularly ones kept by her own student." - London College of Fashion's Forum for Drawing
Anastasi's drawings were dictated by the jerks and vibrations of a subway ride. In the late 1970s during monotonous rides on the New York City subway Anastasi "took to a new way of drawing - without looking. With his arms rigid and bent at the elbows, a drawing board in his lap, and a pencil in each hand, Anastasi sat like a robot and allowed the motions of the subway train to take over. His drawings became compilations of lines that are messy records of the train's starts and stops, accelerations and decelerations. His endeavor was art of a new order - a new kind of language - inspired by his friend, music composer John Cage, that employed chance as a method of creating art." - Suzanne Tswei, Star-Bulletin
• Subway Drawings
• Artist shares credit with Subway car
Scattergood, Thanks so much for posting so much art in one incredible spot. Please consider adding a link to my Sketching St. Louis blog to Artists Sketchbooks Online. I am an avid sketcher, illustrator and artist. I have recently been blogging my sketchbook pages as I capture various scenes around St. Louis, MO. I can spend hours browsing the links on ASO and think the site is just great. I have already added a link to ASO on the Blogs page of my website. Links to blog & my website below. Much appreciation, Michael Anderson
• Blog: Sketching St. Louis (Flickr)
Seige laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand
Fevering after the unself. By the hand it unceasingly
Changes the eye unceasingly changed. Back and forth the
Gaze beating against unseeable and unmakeable. Truce for
A space and the marks of what it is to be and be in face of.
Those deep marks to show.
"Sketchbooks are a vital part of my practice, both as brainstorming for larger works and as ends in themselves. I began using sketchbooks in 1996 and have accumulated over 30 of them since that time.
The book and the scroll are two presentation forms that maintain the inherent, tender authenticity of drawing. If drawing is the organization of looking, then these are where organized impressions interact with each other to produce new life. Many of these books are old friends. They are an expression of a private live for drawing. The particular qualities of each book - the paper, the binding, the dimensions - combine with the tenor of my life at the time to imbue them with a personhood that maintains its aura long after a book is filled." - Kate Aspinall
"Fascinated by the rebuilding of London after the Second World War, Auerbach combed the city's numerous building sites with his sketchbook in hand. Back in his studio he worked and reworked each painting over many months resulting in thickly built up paint surfaces more than an inch."
"A 'sketch' is: a rough idea; the basic elements; a quick interpretation of something; a quick plan for a possible later product; essential features; a preliminary layout; a quick study; an outline; a workup."
La prochaine Biennale du Carnet de voyage, prévue du 14 au 16 novembre 2008, a Polydome, se prépare activement. Plus de 150 auteurs de carnets et écrivains du voyage prendront a nouveau la direction de Clermont-Ferrand.
"Did you know research has shown that when we do an activity and enter the 'flow' state, the brain releases 'happy hormones'? So if you feel guilty about taking time out to draw - remember you're improving your health and well-being - and that can only be good for you and your family and friends!" - Anna Black: Learn to Draw Right
"I believe the desire to create is in every one of us and we just need to find the right key to unlock it. . ." - Anna Black Licensed Drawing of the Right Side of the Brain teacher
"It's rare we get a chance to see inside artists' sketchbooks. Occasionally a museum will have one on show - displayed open at one page - so frustratingly you don't get to see the other pages... This site offers a fantastic opportunity to peek into sketchbooks by some great artists: Henry Moore, Edward Burne Jones, John Constable, Edgar Degas, Gericault, W.M Turner, John Singer Sargent, Leonardo da Vinci, Frederick Leighton, Frida Kahlo - plus many books and journals by artists today.
The subjects vary enormously from the sheep Henry Moore used to see grazing out of his window, to the studies of draperies and figures by Burne Jones. Frida Kahlo's pages are a riot of colour, Turner's landscape sketches show how he studied value tones for his paintings...
There is a wealth of inspiration here and it makes a unique drawing resource. The links take you to sites and sometimes you have to look for a 'page through book' button in order to scroll through the pages.
Don't ignore sketchbooks of artists whose names you don't recognise - if you do, you are missing out." - Anna Black on Links to Artists' Sketchbooks Online
"A drawing should express the emotion of tactile experience. The artist may mix the media of strongly textured material with drawing . . . Look carefully at the textures of the landscape before you begin to drawing them. Fig. 6-16 Elise Brewster. Landscape in text, from travel sketchbook. in Rendering in Pencil, Arthur Guptial . . ."
:"Amherst College's new admission recruiting viewbook contains a handsome, eye-catching frontispiece: a two-page color drawing of the Octagon, Johnson Chapel. "The artist is Elise Brewster '84, a landscape architect who lives in Berkeley and works with scientists who are trying to restore San Francisco Bay. When she was tapped for the project, Brewster was in Rome. A 1997 winner of the prestigious Rome Prize, she was spending a year living and working as a Fellow at the American Academy. Her goal was to deepen her understanding of the classical landscape. She did this by sketching constantly at the Janiculum, the beautiful hilltop on which the Academy is located, and on excursions around the city. By the time she left Rome she had filled 24 sketchbooks with her drawings. 'This is the way I learn a place,' says the former art and English major. . ."
left:There's A Lot That's Not Real and A Lot That Is (2004, UK) limited edition, David Byrne sketch book right:Arboretum (2006) a collection of drawings and diagrams mapping the strange corners of Byrne's mental landscape. . .
A deeply personal sketchbook used by Marc Chagall for over twenty years will be one of the highlights of Sotheby's Books and Manuscripts sale in New York on 17 June 2011. The 85-page book contains unpublished drawings in a variety of media, providing a virtual catalogue of Chagall's colorful and moving iconography.
"This remarkably intact sketchbook was used by Marc Chagall from the 1940s to the 1960s, and includes a wide variety of subjects central to his oeuvre. The sketchbook abounds in portraits of Bella and self-portraits of the artist. These include a very beautiful ink-and wash portrait of Bella in a patterned dress with a bowl of fruit. There are two sensitive portrait heads in pencil, one with closed eyes, the other with open eyes surrounded by dark circles; both drawings possibly depict Bella's final illness. Chagall himself appears in several fine self-portraits, in one as a brightly colored satyr with palette and brushes. . . " Sotheby's New York
My portraits are a visual journal of my life. My subjects are the people that I have encountered as I go about living my life. It is where I have found myself...
I try to reach beyond a physical description to capture the feeling, poetry, and nuances that convey the special qualities of my subjects. - Laura Chasman
Carnets de Tanzanie (facsimile sketchbook) Tanzanian Notebook
by Denis Claveul, Guillemette de Grissac,
and Philippe de Grissac [cover]
Tanganyika Wildlife Safari, Tanzania 2001
sHandke (a group admin) says: Hello fellow artists. I have been creating an online blog, entitled Community Sketchbook where I would like to post pages from all artists' sketchbooks. Eventually, I hope to create an actual sketchbook that is mailed from one artist to the next via "snail mail," and those images will then be posted on the blog. If you like this idea and would like to see your pages of your sketchbook(s) posted to the blog, please join.
"I don't call them sketchbooks,I don't like the word sketch. They are just "my books". I number them and I'm up to No 10. They are collections: - ideas, thoughts, quotes, photos, drawings, images, newspaper cuttings, messy and very personal." - Margaret Jackson
"This is a leaf from the sketchbook of the trip to the Lowlands. The legend reads: "awff dem rin mein Weib pey poparti" (on the Rhine, my wife at Boppard). Thus the drawing was made on the boat in July 1520. It gives the best (at least the best preserved) picture of Durer's wife in her later years; with her cold protruding eyes and the domineering lines at the corners of her mouth, she does not look particularly lovable. Her juxtaposition with the young girl, whose coiffure is labeled "kolnisch gepend" (Cologne girl's headdress) by the artist, is certainly only accidental here, but is nevertheless not without analogies in the context of the sketches on this journey" - www.finear-china.com
"This is a leaf from the sketchbook of the trip to the Lowlands. The legend reads: "1520 Caspar Sturm alt 45 Jor zw ach gemacht" (1520, Caspar Sturm, 45 years old, done at Aix-la-Chapelle [Aachen]). The lighting is peculiar, the landscape is related to the portrait. It is conjectured that the word "toll" indicates a tollhouse. The drawing is mentioned in the journal of the trip to the Lowlands: "Ich hob den Sturm conterfet" (I did a portrait of Sturm)" - Adolph Menzel Museum
"The tree in from of my window on Kirov
Street N.75 apt. 2." October 24, 1944.
Outline of the head of Ivan the Terrible.
• Eisenstrein and Ivan the Terrible
Loopsided (self portrait), copy; 2012, Ea Ejersbo
Looking a bit lopsided from an infected throat.
9B graphite pencil in sketchbook journal
Daniel Robert Eldon (18 September 1970 - 12 July 1993) was an English photojournalist. The son of an American mother and English father, he moved with his parents to Nairobi, Kenya, when he was 7 years old. In 1993, after a botched military raid that left hundreds wounded and dead, angry Somalis attacked journalists who had arrived on the scene to cover the story. Tragically, Dan Eldon and three of his colleagues were beaten and stoned to death on July 12th by an angry mob in Mogadishu, Somalia. He left behind a series of journals, which his family has exhibited on the Internet and on a worldwide tour.
Dan Eldon created most of his journals between the ages of 15 and 22, although he created several small notebooks previously. He started his more formal journals in 1985 for a school anthropology trip and an English class. At the same time, he was beginning to travel around Kenya more often and to take more photographs. Filled with ephemera from his young life - newspaper clippings, food labels, call girl cards picked up in London phonebooks, and even grains of rice - the journals are stored at the Los Angeles country Museum of Art. . .
Dan Eldon was an artist and photographer who left behind a captivating visual legacy. His art exudes expressions of the untamed, compassionate and creative soul. . .
A collection of 17 artist's books, consisting of drawing and writing, for a show at Katharine Mulherin Gallery, May 2009. While seemingly individual in their ideas and titles, the books in Library I often expand into each other, exchanging words and images. Some characters and pieces continued on in altered form to my book Mascots.
"I've been keeping books pretty much consistently since I was fourteen - which at this point is more than twenty-five years. I was very fortunate to have had good mentors as a teenager, and was introduced to keeping a daily sketchbook during high school. The practice of keeping one with me wherever I went, integrating these books in to my life, came very easily. . .
. . . I identify with those artists that straddled the line between old and new ways of thinking; principally people who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From that period I love Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and others from the early Modern era. Obviously, there are some heavy visual influences from Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Another inspiration worth mentioning is Dan Eldon, the young Reuters photographer who was killed in Somalia back in 1993. His visual journals are amazingly beautiful, and communicate an incredibly vivacious and adventurous spirit."
"Annie Freud, poet and writer. Her first home was in Maida Vale where she lived with her parents, Lucian and Kitty Freud. Her parents separated in 1952, shortly before the birth of her sister, Annabel. . . Annie lived with her maternal grandparents, Jacob and Kathleen Epstein in term-time, until her mother was remarried to the economist, Wynne Godley in 1955 and they moved to Chelsea. Throughout her childhood, Annie grew up aware of the arts as part of her daily life. . . Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and web-sites and in 2005, a small collection of her poems was published by Donut Press, under the title: A Void Officer Achieves the Tree Pose. Her next book Best man in the world was published in 2007, followed by a collection of poems, The Mirabelles , in 2010."
The sketchbook has many names... visual journal, portable laboratory, journal, notebook. Whatever you call it, the purpose also remains both elusive and most definitive. A sketchbook is a place of discovery, experimention, record-keeping, notation, and a place in which learning and growth occurs... The blank page can be both intimidating and exciting. A blank page can induce nervousness and terror, as in "I don't know what to do next!" It can also incite a feeling of new beginnings; an open slate as clean as fresh snow, just waiting for the first mark to be made. - Sara Gant - Northside High School
Paul Gauguin (a facsimile sketchbook) - Paul Gauguin, a Sketchbook / Carnet de croquis. Introductory texts in French and English by Cogniat and Rewald. NY, Hammer Galleries, 1962. 3 small 8vo volumes in a single slipcase. A full-color facsimile of a Gauguin sketchbook, including cover printed to resemble the worn exterior of the original.
"After returning to paint in the Breton village of Pont-Aven in summer 1894, Gauguin suddenly found his activity restricted by a fractured leg suffered in a brawl. Thus, instead of standing before an easel, he was forced to spend much of his time seated, creating works on paper, which he must have placed in this hand-made portfolio. He decorated the inside with motifs inspired by his picturesque surrounds and penned a mock-heroic dedication to the local innkeeper on the leather cover, perhaps marking the grand finale to a drunken evening spent with artist cronies whose names are included in the inscriptions." - The MET, NY
Giacometi sketches: 4 figures & 3 heads
after Velazquez Pope Innocent X
pencil on paper, 10.25" x 8.25"
Collection of Louis Broder, Paris
from: Giacometti's A Sketchbook of
Interpreative Drawings Abrams 1967
Text by Luigi Carluccio
(facsimile sketchbook)
Stephan Schreiber's late gothic pattern book
produced in Urach, South-West Germany in 1494.
It was dedicated to Count Eberhard of Wurttemberg. Gothic Illuminated Sketchbook BibliOdyssey
"A while ago I went to a farm to get some practice sketching sheep and chickens. I was off to a good start with some head studies, but the animals got restless. They ran off before I could draw their bodies. Here's what my sketchbook page looked like." - James Gurney
"
Sue Bulmer is featuring me on her blog as part of her continuing series, 'Sketchbook Peeks'. It's been one of my plans for this year to get back in to keeping sketchbooks and visual notebooks. Recent purchases of Hockney's 'Sketchbook of Yorkshire' and Orla Kiely's 'Pattern' have inspired me. The process of editing and simplification that an image goes through as it moves from what I see, through my hands to what I draw gives me space to compose the image ready to work on it in the studio." Sketchbook Peeks
"This website is an ongoing, year-long project to keep an illustrated journal and species list from my wanderings in Rhode Island and New England, with a few forays to other locations. It is heavily weighted towards bird-watching, but my interests in natural history are varied, and the occasional plant/amphibiary/insect/mammal will make an appearance..."
"an exhibition (organized by Miriam Stewart) of over 70 sketchbooks and 45 drawings that were originally part of sketchbooks from the Fogg collection of nearly 150 sketchbooks. Intact sketchbooks include those by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, Sanford Gifford, Edward Burne-Jones, John Singer Sargent, Henri-Edmond Cross, Reginald Marsh, George Grosz, and Christopher Wilmarth. Also on view will be drawings that were removed from sketchbooks by John Constable, Paul Cézanne, Henry Moore, and Brice Marden . . .
Artists have used sketchbooks for centuries, entrusting travel sketches, figure studies, compositional ideas, and notes of every kind to their pages. Designed to be easily portable, sketchbooks are often kept in artists' pockets and documenting an unusually personal view of the artist at work. The drawings and notes in these sketchbooks vary from nature and figure studies, to travel sketches, copies after old masters, expense accounts, and lists of pictures. Some sketchbooks are self-conscious and conceived as a whole, with every page signed, while others are more spontaneous and filled with a random assortment of hastily drawn sketches and doodles.
Notable Works in the exhibition include: Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Sketchbook from the First Italian Period (c. 1756-61), Jacques-Louis David's two sketchbooks for The Coronation of Napoleon (1805-6), George Grosz's Sketchbook: Manhattan Skyline and Mice (1950-51), and a selection of sketchbooks by Edward Burne-Jones, Sanford Gifford, and John Singer Sargent. Also featured are exceptional "orphans," drawings formerly part of sketchbooks, including Jan van Goyen's Three Studies of a Cow and Landscape with Cottages and Figures (c. 1650), John Constable's Warwick from Priory Park (1809), Edouard Manet's Study for "Interior at Arcachon" (1871), Paul Cézanne's Corner of the Studio and Portrait of a Man (Emile Zola?) (c. 1877-84), Brice Marden's Untitled Work Book Drawings (1983-84), Henry Moore's Ideas for Sculpture (1940), and several pages from a disbound sketchbook by David Smith, including studies for sculptures Pillar of Sunday, The Billiard Player, and Home of the Welder (1945)."
Fogg Art Museum (Aug 1 to Oct 22, 2006)
"I should recommend... keeping... a small memorandum-book in the breast-pocket, with its well-cut sheathed pencil, ready for notes on passing opportunities: but never being without this." - John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, 1857
"I have kept sketchbooks ever since I can remember. . . To sketch or draw is, for me, a practice of mindfulness, of being present with where I am and what's there. To draw is to honor the particularity of the moment, to oppose generality, to focus the looking and seeing. It has taken me too many years to understand that mundanity doesn't exist. Every moment is unique and pregnant with potential. Finding an interesting subject is more a matter of changing attitudes than it is changing places."
"Hockney, who has carried small notebooks in his pockets since his student days, along with pencils, crayons, pastel sticks, ink pens, and watercolor bottles--and smudged clean-up rags--is used to working small, but he delights in the simplicity of this new medium: It's always there in my pocket, there's no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there's this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it's over, best of all, there's no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There's something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.
"David Hockney's iPhone Passion" Lawrence Weshler talks to Hockney
New York Review of Books
Yorkshire Sketchbook: In recent years David Hockney has returned to England to paint the East Yorkshire landscape remembered from his youth. Although his passionate interest in new technology has led him to develop a virtuoso drawing technique on an iPad, he has also been accompanied outdoors by the traditional sketchbook, an invaluable tool as he works quickly to capture the changing light and fleeting effects of the weather. Executed in watercolour and ink, these panoramic scenes have the spatial complexity of finished paintings - the broad sweep of sky or road, the patchwork tapestry of land - yet convey the immediacy of Hockney's impressions. And as in the views down village streets and across kitchen tables that appear alongside them, his rooted and fond knowledge of the Yorkshire Wolds is always clear. If you know the landscape there, the character of the sketches is unmistakable: if you don't, it will come to life in these pages.
£ 14.95, 92 pages, 14.5 x 21cm, 43 illustrations.
Self-portrait at the Age of Eighty-three
Ink on paper. Drawn on a letter.
Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden
"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.'" - Hokusai Katsushika, The Drawings of Hokusai
"Hopper kept meticulous records in journals over a lifetime of his paintings, making careful drawings of each work before it left the studio. These were then annotated by his wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, who added title, date of completion, description, sale price and buyer, and often a quirkily personal aside." - Tate Modern
"Janejira has a great passion for sketching architecture and monuments during her travels. Many people take photos, while she prefers to sketch, because it is her way of connecting with the subject matter at a deeper level. Rapid sketching exercises force our eye to pin point the most vital and essential features. . . These are pieces excerpted from her sketchbooks. While some sketches took over an hour to execute, most were done as quickly as seven minutes."
"In 1980, as I set out on my first trip to Europe, I decided to make a book that would contain any and all physical proof that I had been there: ticket stubs, postcards, restaurant receipts, airplane and bus and railroad ephemera. On successive trips, these collections grew to include food smears, hotel keys, found litter, local news, pop tops, rocks, weather notations, leaves, bags of dirt - anything that would add information about a moment or a place, so that the viewer could make a new picture from the remnants. Objects emerged for me as 'icons' for particular cities and these objects became the material for EVIDENCE." - Candy Jernigan
"Yu Ji, also known as Ji Hongyu had his undergraduate study in drawing and painting at Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China (1977-81). He came to the United States in 1983 and studied at State University of New York College at New Paltz, where he earned his MFA degrees in painting/drawing (1986) and in printmaking (1989). . . Yu Ji's artwork has been recognized for its elaborate compositions based on observational sketchbook studies and for pictorial interpretations of figurative form in space." - Yu Ji Studio
"As part of its policy in favour of contemporary art, the Louvre has invited the South African artist William Kentridge to intervene with a specific project around the theme of ancient Egypt. . . Parallel to the artist's monographic exhibition - currently showing at the Jeu de Paume, Carnets d'Egypte in the Denon wing of the Louvre - consists in a new set of drawings, collages, and books by William Kentridge alongside etchings, albums and drawings (belonging to the graphic arts department of the Louvre) by artists of the XVI to the XIX century, from Dupéarc to Delacroix, from Poussin to Le Brun and Crapelet - who during their travels recorded the pyramids, archaeological ruins, explorers, and different transformations from the cat to the lion." - David Krupt Publishing
"When he was very young, Ronald Kitaj ran away to sea. He joined the SS Corona bound for Cuba and Mexico, a fresh-faced Cleveland boy who carried his sketchbooks with him and knew, already, that art was all he wanted to do. And as he travelled, he drew. . . " The Economist
KOHLER ART LIBRARY
Sketchbooks: Selections from the Kohler Art Library
February 18 - May 19, 2008
image from Picasso, "Carnet Catalan"
One can almost see the hand of an artist by looking at a sketchbook. Artists use sketchbooks to quickly capture a fleeting moment depicted in a scene, face, impression, interior view, animal, rambling thought (doodle), or general idea. Sketchbooks come in all sizes, but for the most part they are portable and accompany the artist to local sites or faraway places. Facsimiles have been published to reproduce the exact sketchbook and/or pages of the sketchbook used by the artist. Smudges, rips, stains, and stray marks are all reproduced to match the original artifact. The art library has a growing collection of these facsimiles, such as the sketchbooks of Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne, Paul Klee, and Le Corbusier, among others. Contemporary book artists such as Henrik Drescher and Susan Bee incorporate a sketchbook-like quality in their work with splashes of dazzling color and playful line drawings. All of the sketchbooks on display show work that is "in the moment" and unrehearsed. They are fresh, vibrant, and great fun to view! This exhibit is a corollary to the "Workbooks" exhibit currently on display in Memorial Library, Special Collections.
"Eighteen months before his 70th birthday, Christopher Lambert drew a blue line across the map of Europe. Seventy one walking days and over 1000 miles later, with a small rucksack, the most important contents of which were a water bottle and a spare pair of socks, he arrived in Rome. In his pocket he carried a sketch-book and some coloured pencils. The book he subsequently published, Taking a line for a walk, faithfully reproduces the the journal he kept." -
"Those who have nothing to say gossip and those who can not draw sketch. A sketch is just up from a doodle. If every mark counts, it is a drawing no matter how short a time spent on it." - Rico Lebrun
"At the start of Disney's production of Bambi, Rico Lebrun . . . was employed to help teach the studio's artists to learn how to draw animals. He created some intense classes where animators concentrated on the anatomy of deer and other animals. The story goes that Lebrun went so far as to cut open a deer's corpse and slowly peel away parts of the animal for drawing and study. Over days, as the smell grew more putrid, fewer and fewer people attended." - Michael Sporn
Carlo Levi, Portrait of Mussolini & other fascist leaders
Carlo Levi (1902-1975)
"Levi was born to wealthy Jewish physician Ercole Levi and Annetta Treves... He studied medicine and graduated from the University of Turin in 1924. He did not practise medicine, choosing instead to become a painter and to pursue his political interests. In 1929, along with Carlo and Nello Rosselli he founded an anti-fascist movement called Giustizia e Liberta... His anti-fascist activities resulted in his exile (1935-36) to the remote province of Lucania. His experiences there are described in his novel 'Cristo si e fermato a Eboli' (1945), which reflects the visual sensitivity of a painter and the compassionate objectivity of a doctor... After World War II, Carlo Levi continued to write and paint..."
• Mussolini & other fascist leaders
• Carlo Levi and Roma
• Fondazione Carlo Levi
Carlo Levi, Autoritratto, 1945 >
olio su tela, cm 42 x 34
• Carlo Levi: Il Prezzo della Liberta
• Francesco Rosi - Cristo si e fernato a Eboli
Beginning of Christ Stopped at Eboli
Directed by Francesco Rosi (1979)
Starring Gian Maria Volonte & Irene Papas Music by Piero Piccioni
"Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return to my peasants as i promised when I left them, and I do not know when, if ever, I can keep my promise. But closed in one room, in a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comport or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death." - beginning of the book, Christ Stopped at Eboli
• Le cadavre exquis boira (the image)
"...The initial drawing can be downloaded and modified... Here the image can be worked as print, as digital file, artworks can be scanned, photographed, etc, etc. The idea of the (surrealist) game is to add parts sequentially, but internet time is also simultaneous..."
For thirty-six weeks, a sketchbook was sent in random order between four artists: two in Brooklyn, two in Belfast. Every Wednesday, one participant would receive the book. The following Monday it was sent out, giving each artist 5 days to complete a spread in response to the one that preceded it. A small portion of each entry extends on to the following page. beyond this, there was not communication between the artists concerning the content of the book during its making. The books first trip across the Atlantic was on 2 June, 2003. Its final trip was on 2 February, 2004. By the time it was completed, book had travelled over sixty thousand miles.
Luks was a leading member of New York's Ashcan School and an important American Realist. "According to his friend and fellow artist Everett Shinn, George B. Luks drew incessantly. If his sketchbook wasn't handy, he would draw on all types of surfaces, whether it be a scrap of paper, a tablecloth, or a napkin; as Shinn put it, he 'chuckled as he worked, winked and drew an audience about his flying pencil point.' . . . An artist who loved to draw, Luks began sketching as a young boy and he continued to do so as a teenager, making drawings of the customers who patronized the drugstore where he worked." - Carol Lowrey for Spanierman Gallery
"Where the worlds of fine art and illustration overlapped for the Ashcan artists was in the concept of the sketch. (Robert) 'Henri, from his fine-art background, had picked up on the independent importance of the sketch,' says Zurier (Rebecca Zurier, the author of Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School, University of California Press) California). 'He learned that the sketch reveals something authentic about the artist, that it's less worked over than elaborate art, and that there's innate value in that. The other artists were simultaneously learning the value of the sketch from their work at newspapers, where they had to work quickly. . .'" Beyond Drawing Basics
"Sketchbooks are an integral part of the creative process. . . They're a private notebook for sketches, ideas for projects, rough drafts, and much more. Everyone approaches sketchbook differently, depending on their style of art and personal preference. I've had several so far, but my current one is my favorite. It's a small, black bound book that is easy to carry anywhere, and best of all it isn't gimmicky, like some sketchbooks with pencils and whatnot on the cover. The pages are a creamy white, and thick enough for paint. . . The most important aspect of keeping a sketchbook is not being intimidated by it. There's no reason to have it be perfect. Unlike the art you make to sell or for a grade, your sketchbook never has to be shown to anyone. It's like a diary, and you're free to make mistakes, scribble, and anything else you want to do. " - Maria
. . . and: Carl Andre, Frank Auerbach, Richmond Burton, Francesco Clemente, John Chamberlain, Lucian Freud, Philip Guston, Gary Hume, Brice Marden, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, David Smith, Myron Stout, Lawrence Weiner, Terry Winters.
"My starting point is always the practice of interrogative drawing, which I regard as how visual ideas are put into writing. I am neither a generalist, nor a specialist in any one field of endeavor. Making art, teaching, writing, conducting oral history interviews, historical interpretation, are all processes in dialogue with one another which singly and collectively provide insight and meaning to human experience."
"Poet and hero of the American counter-culture, Jonas Mekas, born in Lithuania in 1922, invented the diary form of film-making. Walden (Diaries, Notes and Sketches, 1969), his first completed diary film, an epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s, is also a groundbreaking work of personal cinema." -
". . . Then I began to realise that underneath all that wool was a body, which moved in its own way, and that each sheep had its individual character." - Henry Moore
"In 1972, when the packing and crating for a major exhibition made it impossible for him to work in his sculpture studios, Henry Moore retreated to a small studio (in Much Hadham) that looks out on a sheep meadow. Over the course of several months, as sheep were suckled and sheared, Moore produced this delightful flock of sketches and drawings... (He) presented the sketchbook to his daughter, Mary..."
"I remember always, that drawing was the activity that gave me more pleasure. I remember in elementary school, the lesson design used to be on Friday afternoon in the last half hour, when the teacher was already tired and happy to go end-to-week. I loved it, not be the end of the week, but because it was a drawing class. Later, when I knew I wanted to be a sculptor, I noticed that all admired sculptors who were great designers: Michelangelo, Bernini, Rodin. The design itself is a part of learning: learning to use their eyes to see more intensely. When it encourages people to draw is not to become artists, as it does not teach grammar to transform all of Shakespeares." - Henry Moore's Sheep Sketchbook, Thames & Hudson, London, 1980 (excerpt)
Facsimile Sketchbook West Wind Relief, Edition C, with catalog. Signed and numbered in an edition of 250 by the artist in pencil. Contains 66 illustrations of drawings. Exhibited in New York at the Alex Rosenberg Gallery, "The New Work by Henry Moore," April 27-June 30, 1983. Catalogue with text by the artist. Facsimile sketchbook size: 8.85 x 6.89" (23 x 18cm). Printed in 1979/80 by Daniel Jacomet & Cie, Paris.
Much Hadham: Raymond Spencer Company Limited, 1985. (Limited Artist's Edition), signed and numbered by the artist. The Facsimile sketchbook is housed in a Solander box with a vellum spine, sides covered with a Richard de Bas handmade paper
Mary Newbomb "keeps not a sketchbook but a notebook or diary. She fills it with handwritten thoughts and observations that often find their way into the work verbatim. 'Be sure to put it down,' she writes in one diary entry, 'be it squirrel in a woodpile, men with white-toed boots working on a mountain railway, caterpillars hanging stiffly and staring from a laurel bush, the magnitude of the stars - there is no end.'" - Gerry Cordon
"I believe that humanity is on the road to abolishing
the mistreatment of animals,but when it finally makes
it into legislation, there will not be any animals left
in the wild to protect." [Prof. Jordi Sabater Pi (1922-2009)
"The Black Sketchbooks series consists of small pages taken from moleskin notebooks, on which fragments of maps are printed and then worked on with various materials, from writing implements to oil stains, re-drawing each document in a game of tensions and erasures, an exercise of displaced intentions which separated themselves from reality. Project, hesitation, error, direction and drift all combine into an autonomous language that competes with the topology on the maps from which it emerges, pointing towards a referential and spatial repositioning. The pages are then photographed and large-format prints are made." - Marco Pires
(l) Apes 1430s, Silverpoint, Musée du Louvre, Paris
(r) 2 Hanged Men 1430s. Metalpoint + pen on paper, British Museum
"I usually carry a sketchbook and a small watercolor set with me at all times. Most of the sketchbooks are 4 inches by 6 inches in size and easily fit in my pocket. The media most often used is watercolor, ink and pencil. My typical ink instrument is a Rotring 600 fountain pen. The Rotring cartridge ink is watersoluable and I carry a Niji waterbrush to make the ink washes with the Rotring cartridge ink. I also sometimes use Walnut ink which is also watersoluable and suitable for washes. My watercolor kit is a Koi Water Colors Pocket Field Sketch Box which also easily fits into another pocket along with number 8 and 4 Daniel Smith Platinum Synthetic Travel Brushes. I carry water in a small pill container or if I need a little more water than they hold a 4 oz plastic gerber juice jar (for babies). My pockets are full, but I can walk down the street and no one can tell that I am carrying a portable art studio. The sketches were all done on location or as the French say, En Plein Air." - Jim Pollock
"Beatrix Potter was born in England and is known today for her illustrated books, especially those with Peter Rabbit. From childhood, she was an avid student of Nature. She drew and painted all the animals she could find, and loved painting mushrooms. Potter filled many sketchbooks and kept a journal all her life. As a child, she drew and painted from life, but usually in her room, where she brought creatures she and her brother had collected.
Beatrix Potter became widely respected throughout England as an expert on fungi (a mycologist) and lichens, although she was denied opportunities to present her studies to the British Royal Society, exclusively male. Beatrix made discoveries about lichens that endure today." - Morning Earth
"I like to draw whatever is right in front of me when I'm sitting near water or beneath trees. I don't really see until I begin to draw. Drawing helps me understand what I'm seeing. It seems to untie knots of confusion within my mind as I work.
Watercolor pencils are my favorite for outdoor drawing.
I like drawing the stuff that gets left behind after something has gone through a great change--shells, seed pods, bones, snakeskins, cicada shells. I consider these things treasures.
Human faces are interesting to me; they mirror the whole world. They contain mountains and oceans, flowers and storms. I draw and paint and sculpt faces. " -Kelly Finnerty - Morning Earth.
• Kelly Finnerty an Artist/Naturalist.
An Artist/Naturalist is a person whose intelligence and sense of self is embedded in Nature, and who expresses that deep connection through making art. The Artist/Naturalists on Morning Earth pages include poets, painters, sculptors, writers. . . whose connection to Earth is profound. As can be seen from cave-paintings, Artist/Naturalists go back to human beginnings, for the arts have always been religious in their essence. Praise and celebration of life are root motives for making. Both art-making and the natural Earth are central to an Artist/Naturalist. They are the complements of the yin yang that completes the whole.
"I carry a sketchbook wherever I go. I'll use whatever is at hand - paper bags, hotel notepads, scraps - but usually I have a small leatherbound book, a brand which, unfortunately, is no longer made. When I heard that they were discontinuing them I bought a pile of them to tide me over... It looks like a bible more than anything else, and it fits neatly in my coat pocket. The paper inside is either antique white, or buff colored... and has a wonderful laid texture that will accept just
about anything that lands on it - pen, charcoal, spit, you name it.
The books have traveled with me all over the world, kept me company in places where I was a total outsider, couldn't speak the language. But the language of
line was always there, and it bridged the barriers like nothing else could..."
The journals of Charles Ritchie have been created continuously since 1977 and record the artist's direct response to his subjects. The images and notes often provide insight into the creation of a work or lay groundwork for new drawings and prints. Since 1992 the books have been handmade and are sewn and bound by Virginia Ritchie, the artist's wife.
In 1911, Schiele met 17-year-old "Wally" Neuzil, who lived with him in Vienna and served as a model for some of his most striking paintings. They moved to Neulengbach, west of Vienna, and moved into an inexpensive studio. Schiele's studio was a gathering place for delinquent children and his way of life aroused much animosity among the town's inhabitants, and in April 1912 he was arrested for seducing a young girl below the age of consent. When they came to his studio to place him under arrest, the police seized more than a hundred drawings which they considered pornographic. Schiele was imprisoned while awaiting his trial. . .
Egon Schiele usually carried a small sketchbook with him, jotting down his compositional ideas and other personal notions on the go. This facsimile edition provides unusual insight into the artist's mind and working methods. Twenty-two of these small scale sketchbooks are known to have survived. Most of them are now preserved in the Egon Schiele Archive of the Albertina in Vienna. The one reproduced here includes sketches for a number of important paintings from this period. In addition to the numerous drawings relating to Schiele's artistic oeuvre, there are several architectural sketches among the pages. There are also fashion sketches, miscellaneous notations, addresses, and calculations.
A reproduction based on the original from the Serge Sabarsky collection. Limited edition, numbered set of 1000 Neue Galerie exclusive. $140.00
Egon Schiele: The Beginning
Christian Bauer, ed. Hirmer Publishers, Sept 2013
first book to focus on Schiele's early life and work Egon Schiele's sketchbooks
Johannes Press: New York, 1967
"I carry a sketchbook particularly as a visual diary of events on holidays and trips. I also doodle all the time at meetings or on the telephone. Doodles in particular are definitely driven by the subconcious. Absent mindedly drawing a bull parked on the toilet during a meeting says it all."
"...The story of Naomi (V Jelish) is moving, but it is a hoax, the products of the imagination of Shovlin, 25, from Leicester (UK), a graduate of the Royal College of Art, who spent three years creating the fantasy. He produced the drawings, the cuttings, the school reports et al in order, as he explained, 'to test the boundaries of ambiguity'." Naomi V Jelish is an anagram of Jamie Shovlin.
"Sketchbook.org is a no-nonsense, artist-run website made to focus on the beauty and diversity of the 'sketchbook'. The sketchbook is an integral part of any artist's apparatus. This website gives artists a platform from which to display their work - by using it they can explore their own creative process while building links with others."
". . .a sketchbook must open flat, it must take watercolours, and it cannot be too heavy. I love the moleskines, they are by far my preference, but I find the sketchbook version (with the thick pages) has some kind of sizing on it that does not take watercolours easily (even though they advertise it to be for water based mediums). You have to 'push' the brush into the page repeatedly or the water will sit on the top. So I tend to stick with the thin page version (which bleeds a bit). i really like the smell of the moleskines too
Sketchbooks are as varied as the artists who keep them. They are a repository of ideas, perceptions, inspirational imagery, and graphic experiments. "As personal records they afford an intimate glimpse of an artist's visual thinking and reveal aspects of their creative process." - AAA Collections: Sketchooks
"My sketchbooks are a source of comfort and pleasure. Whenever I feel bored or unsure about a situation, or when I plain don't feel like being sociable, I know that, in my purse, a world of escape awaits. They are my memory of events I enjoyed, my record of places visited, my outlet for what can't always quite be said in words." - The Hyphenate: Why I Draw by Maxine
"Graham Sutherland was an English artist. From 1940 he was employed as an official artist in World War II, as part of the British War artist Scheme. He worked on the Home Front, depicting mining, industry, and bomb damage. Sutherland also painted a number of portraits, with one of Somerset Maugham (1949) the first and among the most famous. . ."
"Sutherland would wander around the coves on St Davids head with a little sketchbook in his hand, searching the seaweed and driftwood, looking for objects with interesting shapes: eroded rocks, tree-roots, a bleached skull, strange branches, rusty chains. All these details were isolated from their natural surroundings, and in his paintings and drawings were re-configured to express the emotions he experienced in the variety of forms seen in the landscape. . ." - Gerry Cordon
• Tarkovsky revisited | Fayum mummy portrait
"Artists often have sketchbooks as on going note books, used to keep quick sketches altogether for quick reference. The National Portrait Gallery owns several sketchbooks by Graham Sutherland, including one of compositional studies for his first portrait of Somerset Maugham in 1949. The sketchbook also contains studies of the Cote d'Azur landscape where the portrait was painted." - Investigating drawing, National Portrait Gallery, London
When Winston Churchill was in his eighties, Sutherland painted his portrait, which had the look of a befuddled bulldog. The controversial portrait, which Churchill himself hated because he said it 'makes me look half-witted', was commissioned in 1954 by past and present members of the House of Lords and House of Commons, and presented to the great statesman as a celebration of his eightieth birthday at a ceremony in Westminster Hall on November 30, 1954. The portrait was destroyed: it was burned on the orders of Churchill's wife out of anger only a year or two after its completion. . .
Uncovered: Food for Thought, "I believe that a sketchbook is as much a work of art as a finished painting, sculpture or photograph. . . Sketchbooks can be the story behind the story or the glimpse into the artist's mind." - Kate Oberreich, curator.
• Kate Oberreich
• Lydia Burris.
THE ESSENCE OF LINE: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas
Sketchbooks: "Central to the process of artistic creation - for gathering information, sharpening visual acuity, generating ideas, and preparing for larger, more complex works - drawings are considered the most intimate and personal of all art forms. A uniquely Western phenomenon, they are a revealing expression of an artist's temperament, style, and working methods. The sketchbooks below were acquired by George A. Lucas (1824-1909), a Baltimore collector and art agent who arrived in Paris in 1857. . .
• Antoine-Louis Barye (1795-1875)
• Karl Bodmer (1809-1893)
• Charles Emile Jacque (1813-1894)
• Benedict Masson (1819-1893)
• Album 2 - Prayer
• Album 3 - Prayer
NYC Subway Drawings: "A collection of drawings I made on my phone, using my fingers and an app called "Brushes". I keep adding on as I ride around the city. . ." - Ole Tillman"
• YouTube: woman sleeping
• YouTube: woman reading
"This is the first volume of what I hope will be a series of reproductions of the sketchbooks that my father, Steve Trefonides, has produced throughout his career. This one was made while he traveled with my mother, Phyllis, through Paris and Brussels in the mid 1980s."
"Urban Sketchers is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising the artistic, storytelling and educational value of location drawing, promoting its practice and connecting people around the world who draw on location where they live and travel. . ."
"A sketchbook believed to have been Vincent van Gogh's containing portraits similar to those in his most famous works has been found in Greece... Taken by a Greek resistance fighter from a Nazi train, the sketchbook was discovered in storage boxes by his daughter, who is seeking to establish its authenticity with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam..."
"In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing"
"My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing,
scribbling things whenever they happen."
". . .The best way to draw often is to carry a sketchbook with you wherever you go. This way you will always be ready when the inspiration strikes... To maximize convenience, I recommended having several sketchbooks of varied sizes, so that depending on where you're going when you leave home, you can grab the one that's most appropriate. For small sizes, I love the Moleskine sketchbooks, and for larger sizes I use the Canson spiral-bound sketchbooks. Have fun out there, and don't forget your sunscreen!"
"Think of a sketchbook as a souvenir of your everyday life. It can be a place to record your impressions or work out a visual difficulty, as well as a repository for ideas, notes, doodles and ticket stubs..." - Ellen Wineberg
Ian Winstanley's Scrapbook Mining Art | Ian's Site
"Like millions of others, Gu Xiong was a victim of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. At 17 he was taken from his family, blacklisted because they were educated and outspoken, and sent to the remote countryside to work dawn to dusk in the fields. Hungry, weary, he picked up a pencil and by the light of a kerosene lantern started to draw the people and objects around him. The drawing became an obsession - he filled 25 sketchbooks - and it gave him strength. 'My hope rose from within through my art,' he says now." - Gavin Wilson
Gu is now an associate professor at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
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México
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"Beatrix Potter was born in England and is known today for her illustrated books, especially those with Peter Rabbit. From childhood, she was an avid student of Nature. She drew and painted all the animals she could find, and loved painting mushrooms. Potter filled many sketchbooks and kept a journal all her life. As a child, she drew and painted from life, but usually in her room, where she brought creatures she and her brother had collected.
PANTHERPRO WEB DESIGN
