The Sketchbook Project

In my first spread for the Sketchbook Project, one of my "better angels" is launching a paper boat through waters that I anticipate will remain anything but calm.

For the first time I am participating in The Sketchbook Project,  an annual project wherein thousands of people from across the world make a sketchbook to be included in a traveling exhibit of artist books, coordinated by the Brooklyn Art Library, a branch of the Art House Co-op based in Brooklyn, NY.

 

Participants pay a fee to the library for inclusion and are then mailed a small sketchbook to use during the year prior to the project’s ending date which this year is January 15, 2013.  An additional fee allows participants to have their books digitized and included in an on-line display. Sketchbooks are the main attraction for this project, but all kinds of handmade books are welcome as long as they conform to a few basic guidelines.

 

I am planning to use this book as a way to loosen up a bit with my drawing.  I anticipate that it will be a place where I will work more personally and spontaneously than I usually do, and yet in a way that is refined enough for me to feel comfortable with its public display.  I plan to doodle, ramble and play, and to explore themes that  I am working on in my daily art making process but that are not worked out yet. In my first spread I drew over a newspaper article that I glued down.  The article is about the new healthcare law that was recently upheld by the Supreme Court yet still condemned by my state’s governor. I’m interested in making relationships and connections between personal experiences and the bigger world of politics and culture as seen through the media, particularly my daily newspaper, and especially during this year’s presidential campaign.

Two Mothers, Two Sons

The EnchanterTwo Mothers, Two Sons, at the Lawrence Public Library (April 2007) included the work of two artists, Lora Jost and Sara Stalling, and their sons Nicholai (age 5) and Maya (age 6).

Lora Jost writes: “I enjoy making art about experiences that move me, be they mundane, whimsical, or socially urgent. How can one not be moved by the everyday, sometimes dull but never predictable world of parenting? The work I show here is based, in part, on life with my family, from the odd experience of standing together at night in the light of a search helicopter, to watching my husband and son tend a burn pile, to the process of sketching my son while he plays and draws. I love to watch him draw, and making art together, an ever-evolving process, is a great joy. Nicholai likes to try out the tools that I work with; he experiments with new ways of shaping and placing expressive marks. Often when we make art together, we each do our own thing yet share the quiet moment. Nicholai also enjoys drawing with his dad, and their drawings show an interplay of ideas and imagery shared from their playing together.”

Sara Stalling writes: “I am an art teacher, a student of art therapy, a mother of one, and an artist at heart. I believe that the making of art has a profound way of describing through image what most of us feel but cannot quite explain. My art is about emotion, that invisible but palpable force in our lives that asks us to look deeper into ourselves in order to see what we need and want from our living. Maya Spitzer, my son, is six years old and loves art. It is and has been a blessing to watch him make his art. He has reminded me that for a tender time in our lives we are able to create without the restraints of self criticism, a fleeting time where we are free to let the line be a line and a space be the whole, without the fear of failing or the thought of a “product,” a time where we are free to simply enjoy our ability to create.”

Here’s the link to the Lawrence Journal World article about the exhibit: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/apr/10/mother_son/