One more about sketching, thinking about Robert Motherwell and his 1988 Dedalus Sketchbooks

I was over visiting a friend the other day, who handed me a beautiful copy of The Dedalus Sketchbooks by Robert Motherwell to peruse. The drawings therein were fluid and almost lyrical. His writing about the process of sketching made me think.

From The Dedalus Sketchbooks, Robert Motherwell, 1988

It occurs to me, in thinking about sketchbooks in general, that they seem to contain mainly studies for paintings. Mine are never preparatory studies. If I were to make a preparatory study for a painting, which I rarely do, I would not do it in a sketchbook. For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d’esprit, and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them; I also have no plan to make them. Occasionally, maybe a dozen times a year, I find myself with a sketchbook in my hand doing it, to my own astonishment… Robert Motherwell, 1988

This gets to the almost gestalt process of sketching, where the artist is not sketching to create a picture. The artist is sketching to learn something or capture an impression. The automatic, almost subconscious drawing that can happen when sketching is somehow fresher, sharper, less laboured.

It is drawing that the artist does to express something immediate. It is a process where looking at the scene is more important than looking at the product of the study.

The drawing in the sketchbook happens faster, looser, and even the pencil is held differently, moved on the page with a wild abandon.

And again from Motherwell:

Usually, in painting, I revise and revise and revise. Come to think about it, maybe that is what I like so much about this particular type of sketchbook. The rule of the game that I set for myself is no revision… The procedure is a marvelous release when one is so often battling one’s head against the stone wall of painting. Robert Motherwell, 1988

This idea of no revision is key to the process of sketching. You might use something from the sketchbook to inform a piece of a finished painting, but they are such different approaches that this is rare for me. Because the sketches are not to be framed and displayed, they remain in the book as a record of an experience I had of seeing and drawing. I don’t even remember doing them, really.

A current challenge I am reflecting on is to get the immediacy of the sketching into the paintings, which sometimes seem so still and confined. Some people have suggested working bigger as a way to loosen up. I am tempted to go back into something and just add marks. This will be an interesting process.