on beginnings, sketchbooks, & clarity
A peek into my sketchbook from the summer of 2018.
This weekend I took a journey through some of my old sketchbooks and began with the black Moleskine I carried around at the start of my graduate program at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Fresh-faced (or as much as one can be fresh-faced at 26), I moved to Boston for the summer, entering the program knowing no one and in some ways barely knowing myself. I knew I wanted to get my MFA and had some hazy dreams of what I wanted my future to look like, but I really didn’t know how everything was going to pan out. I felt that I was entrenched in a state of flux. What followed was seven weeks of uncertainty, experimentation, frustration, and absorption.
Within my first week of being in Boston, my then new and now longtime friend Jake and I spent a hot and humid day exploring Cambridge, eventually finding ourselves wandering through a multi-story antique shop on the edge of the city. I came away with a few vintage scarves, two National Geographic magazines from the sixties, and a wooden dollhouse chair that at the end of the summer I had to pack in a saucepan cushioned with socks to survive the flight back home to Cincinnati. Throughout the summer, I used these items in a variety of different still lifes as I tried to figure out what I had to say and how to say it.
Looking back on that summer, the memories come back in bright and sweaty flashes (my fifth floor studio space was not air conditioned and I was definitely dehydrated most days), but turning through the pages of my sketchbook, I see a younger version of myself searching for anything and everything. I remember absent-mindedly drawing during class, scribbling fragmented phrases during critiques, and putting off my bigger studio projects in order to create another random collage in my sketchbook. I cut apart the National Geographics, created elaborate patterns and tried to understand the disconnect between what felt easy and what felt unbearably difficult in my studio work. It took me another year and a half before I finally figured out how to merge the bright energy of my sketchbook with my still life paintings, but in the meantime it became a place for me to escape. As soon as I started, my hands couldn’t keep still and I filled the pages with deep thoughts and scraps of nonsense from an uncertain period in my life. I had never experienced that level of energy in my creative work before. I didn’t know what I wanted to make and yet, I continued to fill pages with half thoughts and random bits of color.
Five and a half years later, I recognize that first sketchbook of grad school as a sacred relic; an untidy portal that transports me back to a time when I knew less and hungrily devoured whatever I could. There was something magical about that moment in my life - I was eager and unaware of how anything would play out, but so excited to simply begin.
