Books about art journals and sketchbooks generally come in two types: how books and what books. How books, which cater to new and aspiring journal keepers, focus on technical demonstrations and creative prompts—exercises that are meant to inspire readers to greater feats of creativity. What books are all about pretty work, serving up excerpts from the sketchbooks of fine artists, designers, and people who work in other visual fields.
What is missing are the why books: those that explore the motivations artists have for creating sketchbooks in the first place, and the reasons why art journals are as valid an expressive medium as any shown in a gallery.
Jennifer New’s Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art comes closer to filling that need than any book I’ve found. In addition to delightful visuals, it offers a framework for understanding journal keeping as a conceptual and physical art form.
At first glance, Drawing from Life appears to be just another what book, albeit a nicely executed one. It includes a thoughtful preface and introductory essay as well as color reproductions of the work of 31 journal keepers. Each creator’s work is accompanied by a page-long introduction that gives background and context to the images that follow.
Some whose work appears in the book are well known in the art, design, and creative professions: illustrators Maira Kalman and Linda Barry, 1,000 Journals Project founder Brian Singer, and former Harvard art professor Idelle Weber all contributed work. David Byrne, best known as the lead singer of the Talking Heads but who also studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Maryland Institute College of Art, is also featured.
Like any good what book, Drawing from Life could be enjoyed on a purely visual level. On that level alone would be one of the better examples available. But New offers more: a different way for us to look at sketchbooks and artists journals.
In her introduction, New’s definition of journals focuses more on the activity than the end result; they are for her any place “we record personal reflections, observations of our world, playful meanderings, and plans.” Consequently, she includes not only the expected visual artists, illustrators, and designers, but also filmmakers, architects, songwriters, scientists—even an engineer and a psychiatrist. The result is an intriguing mix of well-executed traditional sketchbooks and more conceptual work that challenges our preconceptions about what is or is not an art journal.
Many of the alternative journals were created by non-artists. Masayoshi Nakano, who chronicled daily walks with photographs and intricate maps in meticulously crafted journals, is a retired engineer. Renato Umal, who each day pairs a photo of himself with a simple statement about something he learned, is a musician. And Tucker Shaw, who photographs everything he eats and includes them in his journals, works as a writer in New York City.
These chronology based projects, whose power depends on the viewer experiencing the whole body of work, are ideally suited for the journal format.
In addition to an expanded definition of what comprises a sketchbook or journal, New also provides us a four part framework in which to view them. This framework, which she calls a “hierarchy of reasons” for keeping a journal, highlights common threads she has seen in the thousands of sketchbook pages she reviewed for this book. New assigns the sketchbooks she presents into one of the following four categories: observation, reflection, exploration, or creation.
Dividing the books into these four categories provides New the opportunity to offer insight into the underlying reasons people keep sketchbooks. These insights provide a context that enriches not only the work in this book, but all sketchbooks and art journals.
Throughout the book, New successfully straddles the divide between substance and pretense, offering readers a view of sketchbooks that is thoughtful and sophisticated without being overly cerebral. She treats her subject seriously without sacrificing the intimacy inherent in the medium, and the warmth of her affection for journals of all types permeates her writing.
You won’t learn many techniques from Drawing from Life, but the market is rife with other how-to guides. New offers readers something truly original instead: an insightful, intelligent context in which to consider the medium of sketchbooks.
Amazon link here.
