What’s A Sketch For?

At the end of the year I sit and look through some of my sketchbooks, of which I have many. They are not really very organized, but I do keep separate sketchbooks for different themes and topics such as 1 for urban sketching, 1 for teaching Sketching Rome Tours, 1 for dreams and doodles (kind of..but really these are random pieces of paper collected and shoved in a book or folder sometimes and a lot of times get lost and refound) and then other sketches that don’t really fit these categories.

I wanted to share a few of my sketches from the past year and also think more about the act of sketching and how I could better utilize this oh so important skill. It seems to be a nonchalant thing, something I’m pretty sure every artist does either in passing the time (aka doodling) or to study something to better undertsand it, or as a preparatory idea before starting on a larger and longer endeavor.

Sketching is also used to document; a person, a place, a fleeting moment that you may not return to in person. I like these sketches, they seem to be important no matter what they actually look like.

Then sketching can be used to explore ideas, experiment with new materials and is a more relaxed and informal way to practice your craft as an artist.

Last year I experimented with new ways of sketching in my around Rome urban sketching sketchbook. I came up with these quick and kind of wild pen drawings done with soluble pen (i.e. non-waterproof) and then would give them some color, deciding where to add color as I went and leaving some of the sketch in black and white.

I really enjoyed working this way this past year as a way to get away from the idea that drawings have to be “perfect,” “correct,” or “accurate”. In the past I spent so much time worrying more about how correct the drawing was rather than creating something in the moment. I assigned myself this way of working as a way to give myself permission to not only be imperfect but to also revel in the beauty of imperfections.

In this sketch above of Garbatella, I just picked a point and started drawing. No planning ahead. No going carefully in pencil first. No worrying about how it would look in the end, but just going from one thing to the next and then the next and adjusting (or not) as I went.

When teaching I emphasize trying to find a balance between thinking and understand what you’re doing and being free to make bad drawings (and good ones too!). You do need to think about what you’re doing, but not overthink it, it’s a delicate balance sometimes. Mostly you need to just be engaged with the moment and keep working, not being afraid to just scrap something and start again. Don’t be precious is really good advice!

The other good advice is to practice and practice more by drawing all the time. But not just drawing, but also going back and looking at what you drew thinking about what works and what does not so that the next approach can be fresh and new.

Here are just a few pages of some of my sketchbooks from teaching. I like to paint and draw alongside people so that we do it together. It is fun for me to look back through some of these and see these little drawings as thoughts on paper.

The final kind of sketches that I have more recently started doing are sketches of images from dreams. I find these really challenging, only because dreams can be so specific and so vivid that I find it hard to capture what they actually looked like in the dream.

Something that I started doing is turning pieces of images from dreams into paintings as a way to do something new and to experiment with working solely from imagination rather than direct observation.

Since I was classically trained my entire education and work since has been based on learning to represent and interpret what I see, working from imagination was never encouraged in my studies. I think that this is a major deficit in my training and it’s time to make up for that and get back to an artist’s most useful resource, the imagination!

The final sketch is of my grandmother done while she was sleeping. This was the second to last time that I saw her before she passed away and spent several days with her in her home.

This time meant a lot to me personally and though the sketch isn’t much, it is a personally memory just for me to mark that moment we spent together.

Sketching is such a natural and integral part of an artist’s life and practice. I remember never sketching for years because I thought I was terrible at it! When I started to really sketch was when I moved to Rome and became part of the urban sketching group here. The group made me feel so welcome that I was inspired to get better, to enjoy the time spent together and use this as a way to get to know and explore Rome.

Needless to say I got a lot better, I really improved my ability to sketch over the past decade in Rome. But the point is really that I let myself relax and begin to use the language of sketching in all the ways that it is meant for.

What I would like to do more of this year is to really use the sketchbook as a book for exploration and ideas- ideas that have the freedom to live somewhere before getting censored by the inner critic. It’s ironic that an artist should be censored first by herself, for an artist is the only one who really can have the freedom to express all ideas and ways of being human.

As time goes on I am able to see that “perfect” is stiff, impersonal and frankly boring. I would much rather come in contact with personal humanity and I think that sketching is the perfect gateway to exploring our imperfectly human selves.