Sketchbooks: artefacts of plork
I have for years kept sketchbooks. I probably don’t keep them as much as I should do. Writers like Wilde, artists like Sylvia Plath and Milton Glaser, all extoll the virtues of keeping journals, diaries, or of the practice of drawing (Popova 2014). I probably don’t draw as much as I should. My excuse is that it’s hard to juggle the constant back-and-forth of having to write, and draw, and research, and animate…there’s a lot going on at the moment. But that’s an excuse. There’s really nothing stopping me drawing more, and reaping the benefits of regular observational drawing.
I do have a regular drawing practice – a non-representational one. It’s just abstract shapes, and I’ve written about it before. In fact, I’ve started taking my sketchbook and undertaking this practice in the sketchbook, not just on individual sheets of paper. Abstract shapes, lines, colours and the relationships between them have become part of my artistic practice; part of my sketchbook. But, as Lynda Barry repeatedly argues in Syllabus(2014), and as Glaser and Plath describe, there is huge value in the keeping of daily observational sketchbooks.
My use of sketchbooks has changed over time. When I was studying Art A-level at school, I always felt as though there was a right was to keep a sketchbook. Partly that was because the real benefits of sketchbook work weren’t explained to us; ‘sketchbook’ was just another word for the collected and curated research and development for a project. I remember moments of feeling like my sketchbook wasn’t ‘interesting’ enough, so going back and adjusting some of the pages, knowing that if I added more information in (even after the work was finished) I would get a better mark. In that regard, I was taught that sketchbooks weren’t just research tools for personal growth so much as tactile PowerPoints for R&D.
These days, my sketchbooks aren’t so much sketchbooks but notebooks. Often the closest piece of paper to hand, my sketchbooks have become a mix of sketches, doodles, deas, thoughts, incoherent ramblings, and meeting notes. On one page you’ll find a sketch from a response to a family wedding; another a bad pun for a Christmas card; on the next pages, there are notes from a phone call with a client. As such, they’ve become somewhat emblematic of my relationship with work and play in general: I imagine the two as separate, but they are interwoven; they are more complex and rely more on each other than I would previously have thought.
It's this idea that struck me recently: that sketchbooks are a particular physical example of plork, of playfully working towards something. Or, perhaps, working towards many things: personal growth, a particular drawing, an idea, a client project. A sketchbook is a space to explore and be curious, to quickly prototype and try out ideas in a space where you can’t ‘fail’. And a place to do your taxes (although I wouldn’t recommend this).
Of particular interest to me is the sketchbook as a notebook that combines the ‘play’ of personal artistic endeavour and the ‘work’ of dealing with clients, commissioners, funding bodies; “whoever has the gold”, as Richard Williams might put it (Williams, 2009). Sketchbooks like mine become unequivocal proof of the complexities of balancing professional artistic life – that, woven into the fabric of all of the ‘fun’, is the reality of ‘work’. That is not to say the paid-for projects are approached any differently; simply to acknowledge that they are there. And that says nothing of the other types of project: the PhD research, for example.
I tried previously to keep work and play separate. Michelle Lloyd of unitedartspace.org makes a point of having two sketchbooks:
“I have an everyday sketchbook that I refer to as the ‘play sketchbook’ and another one as the ‘practical’ one.
The play one – this one I carry around with me. I just capture things as I see them. I doodle away when I’m sitting on my sofa and I just sketch things in here. I relax and have a play around. This is the sketchbook when I don’t think about the outcome of what I’m drawing. I’m just letting go!
The practical one – with this one I start to process my thoughts and feelings. I start to mind map things out so that I can see the connections. For example, if I am reading a book and I see a quote I like, I write it down in this sketchbook and mind map my thoughts and feelings around the quote. I then think, how does this relate to my experiences in life right now?”
Lloyd 2014
About halfway through my PhD, I decided that as I was starting the development for UPUP I should perhaps start a new sketchbook before finishing an old one (for shame!). However, it didn’t take long before this sketchbook became the primary sketchbook I was using, meaning, again, it was the closest thing at hand to take notes in, and has since become a combination of ‘play’ and ‘practical’ sketchbook. * I do have separate notebooks for keeping desk-based research notes in – the primary reason being these need to be more legible and accessible than my as-quick-as-I-can-think sketchbook scrawl. Also, they tend to be lined, as much as I am able to write on any kind of paper, I just find a blank sketchbook more satisfying and conducive to drawing than on lined paper. Lynda Barry, I can only apologise
But maybe it was bound to be. I’m using client meeting notes as a fairly obvious example of ‘working’ in my sketchbook, but I’m also aware that, to all intents and purposes, everything I do in the sketchbook is work; as a creative professional, all the observation, abstract drawing, random idea noting and doodling in effect in some small way builds my creative practice, and as such is my ‘work’. In this regard, you could look at sketchbooks as plork in almost its purest form – playful making, where the output is both what’s on the page, but more importantly, self-development. This is not, of course, restricted to practicing artists.
Perhaps what this shows is the importance of playfulness as an attitude. Not that in order to suffer the dull stuff, we must create fun for ourselves; more than we are always primed to take advantage of playful moments. The work – the taxes, the phone calls, the notes from client meetings – all exists within the contextof something designed to house exploration, observation, curiosity. For that’s what a sketchbook is, to me, however you keep it; it’s a place to observe, and a place to experiment. Keeping notes from professional activities in there doesn’t make it any less playful. If anything, it demonstrates that it’s difficult to separate the two, difficult to distinguish between them. And whilst I’m not going to argue that with every feedback phone call I get I’m feeling the ‘joy of play and work being one’, looking at sketchbooks as artefacts of plork could further deepen and legitimise plork as a tangible part of creative practice.
References
BARRY, L. 2014. Syllabus / Lynda Barry, Montreal, Drawn & Quarterly, a client publisher of Raincoast Books.
LLOYD, M. The Importance of Keeping A Sketchbook! [Online]. Unitedartspace.org. Available: https://www.unitedartspace.org/the-importance-of-keeping-a-sketchbook/ [Accessed 22-09-2023 2023].
POPOVA, M. 2014. Lynda Barry’s Illustrated Field Guide to Keeping a Visual Diary and Cultivating a Capacity for Creative Observation. themarginalian.org [Online]. Available from: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/12/02/lynda-barry-syllabus-book/ 2023].
WILLIAMS, R. 2009. The animator's survival kit, London, Faber.