When i was young i remember digging into the colset in the laundry room, for no particular reason.
As i was lifting up a short stack of towels i noticed, just undearneath them, the white glossy corner of
a dust jacket caught my eye. I put the stack of towels down and dug out two books. They were old text books
of my fathers when he was getting his bachelors taking night classes years ago. The books where from his
renaissance course. I remember eagerly thumbing through the pages and glazing over the images. At one point
i remember being still and really looking over the images. They were replications of Leonardo DaVinci's sketch
books. I just marvelled over the texture and composition of the text in juxtaposition to the images of anatomy,
portraiture, and schematics of inventions. Ever since that momment, and going to see them on display, i have
always made every mark in any of my sketch books with the thought that some day they might be displayed
behind UV protective glass, and atomosphereically controlled enviroment, while masses of bodies march
by in euphoric passive stares. I just find it funny that the sketch book, this left over relic of an individual can be
fawned over. We have seen so much of his imagery, his entire catalog but, he has been so established into
the dogma of culture that we scrap at the bottom and hold on in quiet disposition. The sketch book is the
before, not the after, eventhough I still might daydream about the lime light of hermetically sealed containers.
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I have a sketchbook that I used years ago (don't use it much now) but whenever I do collage workshops I take it religiously with me to demonstrate how artists "use sketchbooks to develop ideas for their work." It is true that there are designs and notes that have informed pieces I've made, but I also really like the mythology and magic of a sketcbook and am doing my part as an educator to propogate the myth...
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