JOHN SMALLEY
artist / teacher
sketchbooks
Carrying sketchbooks and drawing in them wherever I go has become an addictive activity over the years. It keeps me awake, and as I’ve often told students, the deal I make with myself is that I promise that no subject I witness will scare me off… I’ll try approaching anything— however daunting it may seem at first. I have nothing to lose.
What I’m really trying to do is to LOOK deeply and RESPOND as urgently as possible. This provides me with a non-verbal way to question the visible and to feel I’ve made direct contact with observed reality. Drawing fast or slow, or somewhere in between, depending upon the situation, keeps me concentrating, connected, suspends me in the present moment, balancing on a tightrope as it were, and this is what is most important.
I draw while on the train, in pubs, in libraries, in museums, in concert halls, in the countryside, in cities, towns, and villages… I favour very portable A5 leather-bound books and always use a black pen (a ballpoint, rollerball, or sometimes a fine-point rapidograph). It is good to work with limitations on process and using an ink pen prevents having smudged graphite drawings in books that usually receive a good bit of wear and tear… It also banishes erasure… I generally work linearly, and often employ hatching and cross-hatching. I produce huge numbers of drawings, some the result of heightened awareness, others the result of just trying to focus! I probe, I analyse, I explore and experiment… it must always be “low stakes”, notational, and there should never be anything too precious about the process… the books also become repositories for written notes, ideas, and observations...
