An image from my sketchbook
I finished a print last week and now I need to think about where I will go next.
I have a strange relationship with my sketchbook. It fills me with guilt and a sense that I am an imposter. This feeling goes right back to when I first kept a sketchbook as a student on my art foundation course. Somewhat wiser now, I know to shrug this off and ask myself a better question: where, if anywhere, does maintaining a sketchbook fit into my practice? I don’t have an answer yet, but, importantly, I think it should. This is a discussion I am also having with creative friends who seem so much more at ease with their sketchbooks than I am.
On the left is a page from my current sketchbook. Let me explain why I have picked this and how I intend to use it.
The drawing comes from a photograph I took in Leeds canal basin. Canals are important places for me as a psychogeographer. They hold so much meaning. This canal, the Leeds-Liverpool canal, is one that I have walked in various places over the years. My partner and I agreed we should walk it all in the next few months.
However, canals fascinate me aesthetically too. In the original photograph and in the drawing and painting I have made from the photograph, the profoundly black lock gates cut across the canal water. They lie in contrast to the almost solid shadows and reflections they create on this bright Spring day. The old warehouses , now gentrified and repurposed in this affluent part of the city centre, create inverted blocks of colour to the top of the 2-dimensional plane.
So, there are a few things here that capture my attention and encourage me to distil the scene in the form of a print. The subject matter aligns with so much of what I have done over the years. The transfer of experience through photograph, sketch and then print, challenges me to engage viewers of my work in what it was that originally fascinated me - not as a description of a place, but as something more experiential.
I am eager to get back to the studio today to begin a new print. I could work from this, or I could push it on further in my sketchbook. Pushing it further would probably involve experimenting with and clarifying the composition. I’m not sure. I’ll let you know!
