Sketchbook: April 1, 1985 - October 14, 1987

Sketchbook page landscape study — Sketchbook open to page with landscape study. Ring bound Strathmore “Sketch”. 400 Series. Page size: 8 1/2” x 5”. 100 sheets

My sketchbooks are composed of preliminary drawings and watercolors, as well as more completely realized images. These are perhaps even more indicative of the range of directions I have taken in the course of my work as an artist than are my hand bound books.

The sketchbooks are generally more spontaneous, often unfinished, recordings, as well as ideas that may not be fully developed. However, many are in essence finished even as they stand, in a state that might be thought of as incomplete… the “enough said” category.

I consider drawings, watercolors, and stamp art done in sketchbooks and on individual experimental sheets to be among my best and most important works.

In the interest of posting this updated edition of my comprehensive “Archive for Sale” before much more time elapses (it has been a long journey), I will let this one sketchbook stand as a sample of the nature of the roll sketches play in my oeuvre as a whole.

I wish there were more. I find it a deeply satisfying way of working, once I am in that particular zone, so different from larger, more finished pieces. But I am not at all a prolific “sketcher” – Picasso a phenomenal archetype – indeed most artists have filled a great many more sketchbooks than I have managed to turn out.

Then again, I don’t know of any who took many months of many years to wander wetlands, keeping field notebooks on turtles and their wild environs.

The division of time among my three main pursuits has dictated that, for the far greater part, when I turn to my visual art I work on something more in the way of a complete, more highly resolved work.

In time I will add other sketchbook material, including pages that have been removed for exhibitions or other purposes, to serve as pieces destined for the expansion of a core archive collection and/or for sale as individual objects.

As mentioned in other accounts of my archive material, I will be adding content in all categories to this site as time goes on.

Accordingly, I invite viewers to return to look in on future postings of past work, as well as new content, as I continue to follow my path(s) as artist, naturalist and writer.

I have reserved this sketchbook to be an inseparable component of a core archive collection.

The content here ranges from a few pages with no more than color tests for my painting on underglaze on pottery and tile murals; several designs for such works; to cubist drawings I have done from Laurette’s sculptures of female figures; nature studies including hatchling spotted turtles and the wing of ruffed grouse; and pencil and watercolor studies for larger botanical paintings.

There are ten or twelve pages of no consequence that I have chosen not to remove.