That Goes In There, And That Goes In There

I can’t remember why I started carrying a sketchbook around with me everywhere.

This was the year after I’d finished art school – or, at least, studying in art school; I stayed for another couple of years to teach, on and off, but that’s another story – so it had nothing to do with impressing professors or trying to make a grade. And, to be honest, it’s not as if the sketchbooks were all about drawing, anyway. I was already getting disillusioned about that, in my young, jaded ways, and the majority of each book was writing: Notes, quotes, weird scribblings that were never meant to be seen by anyone else but read like mutated beat poetry nonetheless.

It went on for… a couple of years, maybe? But the height was 1999, when I decided with the zeal that only bad ideas bring that I would write at least one page a day, and draw quick, observational studies everytime I was out in public on my own. Again, I have no idea why this seemed like a good idea (The latter part, admittedly, may stem from my love of Dave McKean’s Cages, a comic about creativity that at times makes the idea of sketching in public if not quite a noble calling, then at least an agreeable pastime), but there it was. And so, for a year, I did just that: Recording the minutiae and detritus of my life in scrawls and scratches of people on buses I took, airports I waited in, details of parties and painted fingernails and loves longed for and lost.

I drifted away from all of this when I started blogging; there is only so much writing I could manage about myself without being so self-indulgent that I annoyed even myself, after all. But there are times when I think I should still have a sketchbook and pen on hand at all times, just in case my peoplewatching in coffee shops gets out of hand.

Related posts:

1. Who Said That?
2. I Grow Old, My Handwriting Shall Wear The Bottoms Of Its Trousers Rolled
3. I Know You Are, But What Am I?
4. On Jonathan Carroll
5. Gone Conventionin’