Old Sketches

Probably everyone who keeps sketchbooks has used the contents as a mine for subject matter. For some a sketchbook is a visual diary of the day or week; for others it's a way to meditate on potential subject matter, and of course for some sketchbooks are simply a pastime, and a great one. For me they serve all of those functions. In the studio I have stacks of sketchbooks, big and small, full and in progress. Sketching becomes part of the practice of the artist, if pursued.

So, as this week begins and the seasons are starting to rotate, it's a good time to rummage through old files and reconsider forgotten ideas. This morning, searching for subject matter in old digital files these sketches came to light. Of course I could leaf through all of these books, and have done so a number of times, but today I raided my old computer files. If you're like me you find something--a page of watercolor thumbnails, perhaps, or a long-forgotten gouache, even--to fire up the creative juices.

Near Gunnison, gouache, 2015

Speaking of forgotten images, this forgotten gouache of a road near Gunnison Colorado, in fall, showed up in a folder of watercolor images. The original idea for this one was to see how gouache behaves and to assess its opacity. I had purchased a few tubes of gouache because opacity in water media is useful and because acrylic paint isn't all that appealing to me. And you can reactivate gouache but not acrylic. When I ran across this image I remembered it because of the notation alongside. Sometimes sketchbook notes can help a lot. Besides noting the day and year they remind about me what I was actually interested in. This picture was painted from an online image over a violet-colored ground.

Thumbnails of the Sea, watercolor, 8x10, 2015

Here is that page of watercolor thumbnails mentioned above. When I ran across this page it surprised me. I had completely forgotten it. Seascapes haven't been a large part of my body of work, but the seas are constantly interesting to me. The waves and light and sky all are so enormously changeable, even moment to moment, that it's a challenge to capture even a bare suggestion of reality. These are ranged on an 8x10 sketch page. The pages were fairly lightweight and actually intended for ink drawing so adding watercolor caused some cockling. Each of these has a predominant color, which no doubt was one of the ideas I was mulling.

Hollyhocks, watercolor, 3.5x5.5, 2009

For the painting to the left I reached far back into some rescued files from nearly a decade ago. This particular watercolor was done one late summer day when I was searching for something to paint. The actual sketchbook has disappeared but the jpeg has survived. Sometimes these little sketches carry enough information to make a studio work in oil. This one still could translate to a bigger one, or perhaps to a background.

Nifty Fifty, watercolor, 4x6, ca2001

And last, here's a postcard sketch done nearly 20 years ago, for a collaborative project. The project involved mailing postcard-sized sketches to each participant in the group and in return the artist would receive one from each of the others. This was mailed to someone in one of those groups, if memory serves, and was done from a photo. The image here is a scan of the postcard. The most interesting part of this painting was rendering the beautifully reflective chrome.

Searching through old sketchbooks (or in this case digital files of them) is useful for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it may be reassuring to see progressing skills from beginning to the present. For another, review of old sketches can provide inspiration or even change the direction of an art practice. Finally, once in a very great while you might actually discover a picture that will stand on its own.

For me, then, old files can be a gold mine.