As many painters would say, the sketchbook is where initial ideas and ephemeral things get worked out before commitment to canvas. My sketchbooks are that, but they are also their own thing, as I imagine is the case for some artists. Most of the work I’ve done in total is in a sketchbook. Sometimes I’ve felt guilty about this fact, but I realize that is how I like to work with the portable and non-committal sketchbook.

The pages included in this project are all from 2019, but my sketching reaches much farther back. I sketched in a notebook before I considered myself an artist.

One observation I’ve made is that a sketchbook is a handy way to keep work secret. Like the secret messages I’ve woven into my work, they clam up on the shelf, and no one will ask to look through them. It would be rude (I suppose). Some of the images I’ve drawn, though by no means upsetting, I wouldn’t want a general audience to see, but I also feel the need to share some of what I do with you now. It is a conflicted space on a light setting.

An artist I know writes poems and performs musical pieces in what he calls a “Spirit Language,” which has similarities to glossolalia and the Pentecostal Church. I consider my sketching practice to be similar in that I feel as though I am writing a language that is personal to me but that has elements that would be recognizable to anybody. In my artist friend’s rendition of glossolalia the spirit of language is present in sentences, punctuation, intonation, syntax. The words are what have been substituted. I’d like to think I achieve a similar thing with recurring visual elements and implied narratives.

I do, occasionally, draw from life, but most of my sketching is entry into a personal world where everything has fallen in on itself. Perspective is skewed. Everything is flat as if layered in PhotoShop, insurmountable, a stage set of impossibility.