On looking through a decade's worth of sketchbooks

and being surprised by what I find there.

What feels like a life time’s worth of sketchbooks

There are thirty, maybe forty sketchbooks piled in front of me. The earliest are dated 2015. All shapes and sizes, some super professional with sleek black covers but many handmade, cobbled together from leftover papers and fastened together with string or masking tape. These are my favourites, little collections of scraps or samples and drawings I couldn’t bear to get lost in the pages of a book or moments I wanted to gather together and hold as one.

Looking through them all together, what hits me first is the sense of searching.

Searching for meaning - the pages are full of questions and many, many possible answers spread out in an endless web of thoughts, mind maps, research and further questions: what does this mean? what if I try that? what is this feeling, this material, this line? why does this piece mean nothing to me and this means everything?

And searching for beauty. Maybe this is the same thing as searching for meaning. Having started this journey into visual art with the intention of making ‘beautiful things’, the deeper I go, the more I come back to the idea of beauty and what it really means. In these pages are ten years of exploration of colour, form, ideas and - most of all - process; a quest for materials and actions that will most authentically channel what is in my head onto paper and cloth.

All of this questing, all of this longing, is as vivid as when I first created the pages and I relive it as I look through them.

Once this wave of emotion has subsided, what I really start to notice are the flowers and leaves and birds. The colour, the energy. The huge tomes of my Textile degree sketchbooks are full of intense writing and thinking and deep, deep diving into both emotional and creative ideas so complex they astonish me when I see them all laid out in front of me like this.

But in between these hefty volumes are many smaller ones filled with observational drawings of the garden, leaves, stones and - over and over - the places I love so much in North Norfolk: the beaches, reed beds and birds. Close up sketches of the patterns on stones and endless attempts to capture the movement and energy of the birds over the landscape as they flit and settle, flit and settle.

Very old sketch

It is as though these provide some kind of respite from the intense business of the degree and my quest for self expression. As though I felt I had to separate these out from my ‘real’ work or maybe I kept them separate unconsciously, a quiet and private place to play and rest away from the penetrating glare of assessment.

And the other thing that I notice now is the colour. Apart from the last few sketchbooks of my degree, it saturates the pages; spreading pinks and purples beneath sketches of flowers; intense and moody blues and greys and deep explorations of a natural palette from straw and rust through deep chocolate browns. Exuberant yellows in prints of lemons.

Another very old sketch …

‘Who is this person?’ I find myself asking. More importantly, ‘where has she gone?’ Yet that’s not quite accurate. The carefree explorations of colour I see here echo those that have started popping up in my current sketchbook, the one I started when I was back in Norfolk a couple of weeks ago. Muted sketches of reedbeds that are illuminated by sudden splashes of orange. Open stretches of greyish sky drenched at the edges with all shades of pink.

‘Pink?’ I’d said to my daughter, ‘I can’t put pink in there, it wasn’t pink.’

‘Did it feel pink?’ she asked. ‘If it felt pink, put the pink in.’

She’s 16 and so clear sighted, unmuddled by decades of shoulds and shouldn’ts and can’ts.

But she also made me realise how, in the deep dive into the murk of grief and trauma that accompanied my degree - one death before I started, another a few years in - the pink and orange have been sidelined. They had no place in my explorations or self expression, despite my tutors’ promptings (‘where’s the colour?’).

How delightful, then, to rediscover the colours - undiminished and waiting for me to notice them and reclaim them. To give myself permission to really feel the pink and - as my daughter says - put it into my work.

More than this, I think this is me giving myself permission to feel safe enough - grounded, rooted enough - to explore the full expression of myself. My full colour palette.

Thank you for reading. I hope you find something here that resonates with you. If so, please do comment below. In sharing my own experiences I hope to shed a little light on things we all experience and maybe we can figure some of it out together.