As an artist it has been the tradition for me to keep sketchpads. It started at school with red and yellow A4 Daler Rowney pads which I filled with pencil drawings and acrylic paintings of Aunty Evie, Uncle Jimmy, apples, oranges, shoes and the occasional dining room chair. I enjoyed drawing and painting in these sketch pads, life and art was simple then. There was an object, an artist I admired, and all I had to do was channel that artist to reproduce a facsimile of the object on the paper. I was quite good at this. I even received some praise (9/10 – great shading) and one of my drawings (a baby Orang-utan) was hung outside the headmasters office. It was the only home-work I liked doing. It’d be nice to wax lyrical about how I loved the texture of that 150 gsm paper and the smell of the spiral binding but sadly I cannot. It was a pad of paper.
I kept using these sketch pads through my art foundation course where they became an essential part of my development as an artist, or so the tutors would have me believe. We were under pressure to turn our sketchpads in to schematic representations of where our art came from, a kind of a+b+c+d=z, where a = under exposed photo of a flyover, b = flavour of the month artist from Tate Liverpool or Walker collections, c = teenage dreams of sloshing paint around a manhattan studio and d = too much angsty music. I’ll leave what z equalled to your imagination, just don’t try too hard. I also advanced to some scrap-bookery, diligently tromping to the newsagent of a Sunday to buy the Times so I could cut and paste Waldemar Januszczaks double page review. Things became slightly more complicated, but I understood the purpose and was a good student, so the sketchpads became nice plump, juicy fruits of my adolescent sensitivity. The plumper, and more difficult to close, the better. In fact I still feel pangs of jealousy when I see an art student with a sketchpad so crammed with stuff that it sits open like an grubby, impractical fan.
My pads must have been fat and logical enough as I managed to get onto a sculpture BA were, again, I was encouraged buy more sketchpads. I was feeling a bit more like a serious artist so graduated from the trusty Daler Rowney to the black hard-backed sketchpad. In hind-sight I think this is where the problems started. These black books were nice things. As books they were much nicer than the assorted paper-backs I was reading at the time. If they had text in them they’d be closer to Readers Digest condensed books, ie, posh and serious. Writing or drawing in these books, especially when they were brand new, always carried with it an almost imperceptible anxiety that whatever I was scribbling wasn’t good enough to be bound between two leathery looking covers. Not that it stopped me. I let rip as an undergraduate and, today, feel I might have experienced my creative finest hour during that period. The pinnacle was a ‘piece’ in which my then girlfriend, now wife, burped into a tape recorder for 90 mins. We got grants for this type of thing back then. I lovingly made a cover and packaged it up like the band I was never in’s first demo. I don’t know where it’s gone. If it found it’s way into a charity shop I hope someone bought it and was rightly mystified.
But I digress. The black sketch pads remained a feature, the course was a good one so there wasn’t as much emphasis on the ‘a+b+c+d=z’ type stuff (thankfully, the burp tape could’ve been a tricky one), but I was well trained so kept one anyway. That’s what artists do.
University was only the start for me and these pads. After I graduated and moved into the foul world of work, owning a sketchpad was sometimes the only tangible evidence I had that I was still an artist. There were odd moments of cross-over, I’d sometimes use my sketchpads to rough out lines of computer code – the irony – and keep lists of deathly dull tasks that needed doing. Generally, as the discipline of formal education fell away, the content of these sketchpads became more and more fractured and wierd. Less about drawing, more about shopping lists and ‘inspired’ vignettes, a particular favourite being a portrait of 2Pac Shakur drawn from a fan site on the internet which was then turned into an etching (described as ‘the vilest thing I’ve ever seen’ by a tutor at Lincoln University, result!)
I have boxes of these sketchpads, hundreds of pages of nigh-on schizophrenic rambles and doodles. Not in an inspired arty way either, just in a plain old confused, talking to yourself with your shoes on the wrong feet kind of way.
The situation briefly equalised while I was a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art, my thoughts and doodles coalesced long enough to actually realise some ‘work’, but a new element appeared, suddenly the old hard backed sketchpad wasn’t good enough. I’d entered the territory of the Moleskine ‘as used by Hemmingway, Picasso and Chatwin.’ The stuff that’s been put in these things is not your everyday stuff, it’s important stuff. Of course it’s a marketing ploy to suck in aspiring creative types like me, but hey, I’m a sucker. These are nice empty books, desirable, if you like. So if I’d felt slight anxiety at writing or drawing in the first page of my old sketchpads, I was more or less paralysed when faced with the first creamy page of a brand spanking new ‘Moley’. I’ve actually only owned two, an a6 and a5, both unlined (sounds like I’m talking about cars) The a6 was a lovely runner but is now nearly full, thankfully. I haven’t seen the a5 one for ages. It might be down the back of the bed, or in amongst the other nuggets of my creative genius on the shelves at the top of our stairs. Neither of them will be much use to the Smithsonian Institute when they come to collect my papers.
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The rational behind this rambling is recent realisation that , as an artist, I have habits that I do not fully understand. Most of these make up the more interesting side of my practise, but some, like keeping sketch pads, feel more like tropical animals that have somehow defied natural selection and continue without any discernible use. Their content is again fractured, but with the other myriad of ways of recording and developing ideas (this blog being one) maybe between them I ve build up a more useful mechanism.