Sketchbooks

As long as I can remember I’ve always had at least one sketchbook. As long as I can remember having sketchbooks, I’ve always been weirdly averse to using them. I think I’ve only ever filled one, and it must have taken years and years. I’ve only recently spent any time thinking about this. I’m not sure what the aversion is exactly.

The only sketchbook that I really use regularly is all text. I write down ideas for paintings as they come so I don’t forget them, or even just ideas for details that don’t have a home yet, or a background, or a color or an image source to think about. But I use it quite often. It’s the place that the queue of upcoming paintings sorts itself out, where things get combined and cropped and edited before I even work them out as images on a surface, where they’re still just hazy pictures in my head.

Don’t get me wrong though, I make a pretty large number of rough drawings and studies before almost every painting that I produce, but these are almost always on old packing paper (which I horde) taped to the walls. I recently noticed that I have stacks and stacks and rolls and rolls of these old studies, I often give them away with paintings or use them to wrap other finished work. But they’re never in a bound sketchbook. It’s like the book makes me uneasy, like it demands some level of finish or polish to what’s going in it, which is weird. What am worried about in there? Is it that someone one day will open it and decide that I’m terrible? Am I afraid of showing process for some reason? But if that’s the case, then why do I hand out studies left and right? Maybe I’m lazy and I don’t make enough work. It’s probably somehow related to an “I’m not good enough” mental block. Maybe it’s because if I’m in my studio I’m usually standing so paper taped to the wall makes more sense, and if I’m not in my studio I’m more likely to be lazy or distracted or eager to do any other thing but produce art. Hard to say really, but this all sounds plausible and at least partially right. 

Recently while wondering why I don’t ever use my sketchbooks, I came to this realization and decided it was wrongheaded and needed changing. So now I’m trying to give myself permission to just mess around in there. It doesn’t have to be on the subject of what I’m really working on in my studio, doesn’t have to be studies for paintings or illustrations, doesn’t have to be related to anything. What it does have to be is a regular practice, while I’m sitting doing nothing, when I’m away from my studio or watching tv with my dog, or traveling. Essentially I want to just doodle and fuck about in there while giving myself permission to not worry about anything. Feel like drawing a skull for no reason other than they’re fun to draw? Go for it. Weird eye and beak combos that have nothing to do with anything? Cool. Birds that are for a painting four paintings down the queue? Get after it. Lines and text and abstract loose shapey weirdness? Do it. Just fucking relax for God’s sake, would you? Sit down and draw, you’re making me nervous.

Milkhare / Sacrifice / Portent

I started thinking about witchcraft. It started the same way as anything else, it just bubbled up to the surface at some point when I wasn’t paying attention. It might have had its seed in a show I signed on for at Haven Gallery, a show themed for folklore, and so I had to fit something into that. It was sneaky and so I don’t recall the actual beginning, just the point when it had taken hold. I only noticed once I was reading about the various poisons associated with western witches, the plants that they used to kill and to create dark magic like nightshade, mandrake and fly agaric mushrooms, the creatures they worked through like hares and goats. The pieces are three separate aspects of musing about witchcraft, about trying to cajole order out of confusion, looking for a system.

A milkhare is a manifestation of a witch, a familiar they would use to steal milk from farmers. The hare drinks the milk and returns it to the witch. I’m not certain why the concept is so fascinating, but I find it deeply troubling. Maybe it’s easy for me to relate to the concept of darkness and uncertainty all around, that odd and awful things are happening and there must be some culprit. But who’s to blame? The outsider? Maybe there really is a monster out there beyond the pale, living in the dark woods. Anecdote and superstition substituting for fact and reason still seems to be our standard mode of operation and it doesn’t seem to have changed much over the past several hundred years. It’s disheartening.

Sacrifice is a curio to make sense of the disordered world. Surely death, blood and poison can help me through this maze. Sometimes I let the strangeness pour out and I try to hang logical sense on it later. Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be any reason or sense to be had. This seems like one of those times.

A lot of mourning doves live around my house. I end up putting them in paintings just because I see so much of them. I know that they’re just living their lives, near the neighbor’s bird feeder, but it’s easy to pin something more on them, on their sad songs and watching eyes. They’re always watching, always. Portent is about a clinging sense of dread. I don’t generally have what I’d call a hopeful outlook on the world, and the last several years feel even darker. The black goat is calm and still and grows an extra horn. The birds are carrying poison and the horns are tangled in string and hung with more nightshade. It’s uncertain. I’m uncertain. It feels calm and quiet and humming with unease all at the same time. If only I could figure out what they’re trying to tell me, maybe then I could navigate safely.