After 15 years strong, I am a proud-ish Parisienne. (Or 15 years of thickening skin. Hello pachyderm!) “Are you happy to be in Paris?” is not just a throwaway Beyonce lyric, but what French people ask when they first learn that I am American. This will sounds insanely pretentious, but Paris isn’t just home. The passage of time has buffered most of the romanticism. It’s just my life.
Like in most international capitals, friends have come and gone, but luckily I have an acid-free box of dusty sketchbooks that document my early days in Paris. I no longer have a family home so my own sense of past lives is tucked away snuggling into this box of ticket stubs and ancient fragments of unrequited loves from my early 20s. I’ve never been much of a serious sketchbook keeper, not in the sketchbook as artist book sense which always frustrated me. My very first Parisian sketchbook is filled with messy watercolor sketches of lonely old people sitting in stinky Parisian cafés, drawings of my own hands (a right of passage for any young artist yet to find their own voice) and disenchanted sites from this city that everyone at home kept reminding me how amazing it was. I can’t forget to mention that there were pages filled with the telephone numbers of my friends back home who I would ring with my calling card in piss-perfumed phone booths. And passive-aggressive Post-It notes from my host mother about my mistake of the day.
Looking back with the luxury of retrospect, even it is far from being an Artist sketchbook, it was filled with fragments of those early days in Paris, ideas and a host of underwhelming drawings. Isn’t that good enough?
At the end of my first year in Paris, I had a grad school interview at NYU. Even if my feelings toward Paris as a broke jeune fille au pair were lukewarm at best, I was committed to using my gap year to get into a good grad school back home. I enriched my portfolio with my muddy sketchbook portraits hoping it would be enough to get me into my dream school. “Being in Paris is the best thing that you can do right now,” was how one of the professors wrapped up our interview. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? I don’t wanna be in Paris. I wanna study at NYU!” I thought. Sure enough, their answer was a big fat no and I was back on a plane to Paris.
It’s just a reminder that my sketchbook set me on the long, winding road to becoming a professional artist. It’s sad that taking up any long-term art practice requires letting go of the ghost of some gremlin art teacher in your head who tells you your work isn’t good enough. Or that preconceived notion that making art isn’t a valuable pursuit of time. Or that everything you make must be museum-worthy without taking stock of all the drafts, sketches and years lived to make something meaningful. Start small and just start somewhere. I see you!
Food for thought
How do you collect your ideas? Visually? Written words? In a mood-board? A sketchbook?
How can you decomplexify your relationship with a sketchbook being a perfect document? Jotting down a crazy dream or a scratchy fragment of an idea is valuable enough. Maybe buy a cheap lined notebook instead of a pricey sketchbook so you don’t feel too precious about using it?
Looking back at an old sketchbook or drawing, how can you connect or see a younger version of yourself more clearly? How can you mine any old sketchbooks for ideas? I recently shared a story about an illustration 10 years in the making here.
Stay inspired, dear reader. And don’t drink the watercolor water. -jkw
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I think a sketchbook can definitely be a time capsule for your style, but I also have a love/hate relationship with it.
I have so many pretty sketchbooks I wouldn't dare open and ruin because they're... too pretty. The paper is too nice. I wouldn't want someone to open it one day and go "Really? This?? Woof."
The most effective system I used when I did a daily comic strip was yellow legal paper-- not being precious about the pages, and giving myself permission to scrunch them up and fill the waste paper bin. (Very satisfying, that scrunching up feelin.)