Sketchbooks

I’ve been sketching since I was a little girl. It always got me lots of attention. “Look! She can draw!” The kids at school would say when we were in art class, followed by; “I can’t even draw stick men!”

That was a great feeling. I used my “artist” card to get me friends, money, and attention. I got awards. I thought I was really something great. I had visions of becoming the next Van Gogh. I proceeded to live my life the way the biographies of all the famous artists told me they lived -- confused, and tortured with self-importance.

It took a few years, but I came to realize that the artists I had idolized were romanticized in those books. I didn’t need to be sick to be a great artist I just needed to practice art. So I stopped trying to be great and just tried to draw. I bought sketchbooks and drew cover to cover. Sometimes the art was good, sometimes terrible, sometimes magically and surprisingly inspired. They were diaries of a sort. I collected scraps from the dust left behind by everyday life in the pages of these little sketchbooks.

My father drew for a living -- exploded views of machine parts, floor plans for houses, an occasional cartoon. I looked up to him. I wanted to be just like him. His mother was an artist. We had some of her work in the house -- an oil painting of the field by her farm and sketches of horses and the farm hands. The idea of inheriting something from my ancestors was so exciting, I felt like I was part of a something big, lovely, and ancient.

Now my father is gone. He died 5 years ago. But I still warmly remember him sharing little intimacies about art with me. He’d show me how to use a drafting pencil, how to keep things neat, and helped me find subjects to draw. There were also times he helped me with the messes I made making art, like the time I spilled India ink on the basement carpet. I ran up to get him to help me remove it before my mom found out. He was concerned and said he didn’t know how to get it out; “…that stuff is just like paint!” And just as those words came out of his mouth I saw the light bulb go off in his head and he ran and got the turpentine and cleaned the ink up for me. My mother was never the wiser. Now that’s a great dad -- a kindred spirit!

Over the years I have lost my desire to become a famous and great artist. I have broadened my scope in the world and realized there are so many gifted artists out there, and more being born everyday, many, many, many more times talented than I. Competing with the world for something like that became pointless. I no longer desired that type of recognition. But I still wanted to draw.

Other things changed about art as I got older too. The definition of an artist changed. When I was young, I thought an artist was someone who could draw images that resembled a subject being viewed by the artist, but as time went on and I learned more and more about art, an artist became someone who interprets reality and creates things that come from that experience, or well, just performing something. It was very confusing. So I gave up my dreams, because my art had little or no creativity. But I kept drawing in my little sketchbooks. Now I have so many, and I’m afraid to throw them away. I try to keep them in tact. But like me, the covers are fraying a bit and some of the pencil is fading away.

Eventually, I went to school for commercial art and now I work as a graphic designer. It is sort of a cast away position for a person like me. I’m still someone who can draw, but doesn't get art. I got a BFA from UW-Madison in 1999 when I was 41, but I can't get into graduate school -- I think because I don't get art. I don't understand the academic nature of it, and I obvoiusly don't come by it naturally.

I go through periods where I sketch everyday, and months where I don’t sketch at all. But it's always there -- the drawing, the image making, and the love affair with line. The compulsion and desire to mock the images I see in the world at large, to capture them in the net of my sketchbook, like so many odd and exotic butterflies scooped up in the web of memory and romance, never goes away. I pin each precious glimpse inside the velvet pages of my sketchbooks. A physical impression of time spent here on earth. Each winged page is evidence of being, with no judgment or confusion. They are tickets back in time; I can pop them open and be transported into times of love, anger, happiness, or confusion.

What a great gift my ancestors have blessed me with -- a synergy between the eye and the hand. Too bad I muddled it up for a while with unrealistic expectations. My attitude made it almost impossible for me to do art at all. I see this gift now in simpler terms. I see it as a vehicle, a passage, a door. And now the door is wide open. The breeze can blow in whatever images it likes. The sun is shining and the butterflies are floating in, out, and all around, beyond the constraints of time and space and most liberating of all, beyond the constraints of my own debilitating pathos.