sketchbook journaling: part one

the early years

I have kept a sketchbook and/or diary since I was about 10 years old. I have always liked to record, document and write. My early diaries are just full of writing, the normal stuff when you are growing up.

As I got older and attended sixth form for my A Levels, then art foundation course, I started sketching  the objects around me, many of which were members of my immediate family, either sleeping or watching TV, The objects in my family home were also documented on a regular basis. All of these sketchbooks have gone, they served a purpose but were the sort of thing to leave behind, they weren’t really that interesting as objects in themselves.

It was only when I went to Canterbury Art College  that my sketchbooks really started to develop into something important that I would want to keep hold of and they were a big part of who I was creatively. I used three sizes, A4, A5 and A6. It is the smallest ones that I cherish most, there are so many memories, ideas and ridiculous fun in them all. Somehow, small cartoon strips of me as a pig speak a lot more to me about my state of mind back then than pages and pages of over-wraught, student angst in a diary.  I still have all of these, I could never get rid of them and still enjoy looking at them. At my degree show private view, they were the things that got most comments and admiration. I have never forgotten that.

When I left art college, there were a few years, especially when I lived in Hull in the early 1990s, when I kept largely unreadable diaries  and most of my sketchbooks were taken up with ideas for the paper maché objects I was making, with the occasional in-situ sketch in my flat or outside.