The keeping of journals has been around for a very long time. Some point to, Ma Dubo (马笃伯) who kept record of his experiences during his travels from the city of Luoyang to Mount Tai around 2,000 years ago. It’s one of the earliest known journals depicting the daily lives of the people living in China at the time.
The act of creating art clearly goes back to the very beginning of human existence. In January of 2021 on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi deep in a limestone cave a drawing of three pigs was discovered. These images were dated to around 45,500 years ago.
As far as we know, it wasn’t until the Renaissance that sketchbooks were used to keep the renderings of artists bound together. Artist had these books made to order. By the end of the Renaissance blank sketchbooks were produced for purchase.
When I was a junior in college I had the privilege to study in Florence Italy for a semester. I studies Art History and had the luck of stumbling into a gallery that was setting up for a show of Da Vinci’s machines from his sketchbooks. The curator invited me to look around while they set up the exhibits. I was able to get up close and personal with a number of his sketchbooks (eyes only of course) and the enlarged reproductions of the pages were hung throughout the exhibit. I lost track of time in there and had to have one of the workers inform me that they were locking up for the evening.
This would have been in 2001, and I had been religiously keeping an art journal since 1997 when I learned about the work of Dan ****. His sketchbook was published posthumously after murder in***.
Dan *** kept a diary sketchbook while he traveled as a photographer for ***. He documented the last few years of his life as he engaged in activism for the LGBTIQ community in ****. His work and his devotion to the cause of what we phrase as social justice left a profound imprint on my mind.
Although as I grow older the time I have to dedicate to my journals becomes more and more limited, I find that when I feel rudderless and ungrounded I turn to processing my thoughts and feelings through a hodgepodge of writings and image making. I will use whatever I have on hand. Photos, magazine clippings, fabrics, paint, chalks, pencil, ink, tape, dried flowers, mud… If it leaves a mark I will use it to create, to process and to make sense of my own self.
Do I have a bookshelf dedicated to these swollen books whose covers can barely contain the contents? Yes, I do. The images within these books aren’t refined or even well rendered. Often they are sloppy and incomplete. They are a solid representation of the chaotic internal experience of my ADHD brain. The beauty lies in the fact that once the idea of feeling is laid out on a page, in a book, with a hard cover that can contain and hold it, I can move on. Less burdened than before.
There is something unique in the artists’ sketchbooks and art journals that people keep. I find that it gives the viewer a far more complex impression of the lived experience of the creator. More than words or images alone could accomplish. Even when one is looking through their own sketchbook from a previous time it brings a stronger sense of remembrance and even, in my experience, the ability to reflect on what it has taken to move through some of the hardest parts of life.
What I find disheartening is that so many folks feel that taking time to journal is childish or even a reward to be earned or a task to be put off because more important things like dishes and laundry have to be done. Dishes and laundry always have to be done. Another big challenge that gets in many people’s way is the mistaken idea that art needs to be pretty or good to be worth doing or worth keeping. They stop doing art because they assess themselves to be a “bad” artist.
If I could help people understand one thing about the personal creative process is that it is not about being pretty it’s about increasing the understanding of self. The creation of art builds self esteem, introspection, reflection and perspective. It also decreases the body’s production of stress hormones that will cause havoc on all the body’s systems.
I will be doing a monthly entry on how to keep an Art Journal. Please follow along and get inspired to get creative.
