Keep looking, keep notebooking, keep growing!

The following post is written by OCA student Deirdre Ni Argain. She participated in a local culture event which drew attention to sketchbooking and the importance of it. Relevant to all OCA students please give it a read;
Culture night – a small Dublin based initiative in 2006- is now an all island celebration.
Taking the summer off between OCA assignments I wanted to keep sketchbooking , it was serendipitous when a mailing from a local gallery offered a chance to take part in ‘Clare 2014-a summer to remember’.
One hundred notebooks were available on a first come first served basis. The invitation was to keep them in whatever way you wanted but to bring the notebook back at the end of September for a culture night get together.
I have kept visual notebooks for years and I was very excited to have the opportunity to participate in a local arts event. But as the thought that what was usually the most intimate part of my art making process would be made public dawned on me, it influenced how I felt about the lovely, black bound, creamy paged pristine volume that I returned home with.
I wanted to make regular beautiful entries, I wanted it to have a theme, I wanted others to admire it. Consequently I didn’t touch it for a week.
It started with a piece of overheard dialogue ‘…she has unrealistic expectations’ which rattled around my head until I realised that it had a home in the notebook. And despite by best intentions to fill it with nothing but well observed drawings of my surroundings, the notebook collected all the flotsam and jetsam of things glimpsed, remembered and felt. It wasn’t a diary or a journal but some events had a visual edge to them that I needed to record and after such drawings there was a sense of relief. I didn’t draw every day and I didn’t ‘finish’ the notebook.

60 notebooks came back out of the original hundred.
There were notebooks with two pages filled to ones bursting with extra pages stuffed in, reflecting how creativity is not uniform and everyone’s rhythm and output is different. Participants ranged from children to established artists, uses ranged from confessional to observational. I looked at scribbles that became scenes, musings on creativity, motifs repeated and explored, photographs, pencil marks, collage, crayon and marks made with blood.
Even where people had put their name in the book, there was no way to hook this up with a face in the room. Everyone’s note book became like a little piece of them that travelled around so despite the anonymity the sharing was intimate and immediate.
Sharon Young used her notebook to visually record a 30 day de-clutter challenge that led to both personal and artistic insights:

‘It was a powerful project, with some results I could not have imagined.
One was it showed me that I am wealthier than I ever knew as I was able to give away things that so many world citizens would never be able to own in the first place.
It forced me to think about what really mattered to me vs what was just taking up space.
It brought me to an emotional space where I could finally delete computer files that were tying me to a person who is no longer part of my life.
And I even believe it helped me to come to terms with the realisation that it was time to make the difficult decision to say goodbye to my elderly dog. My beautiful boy…
And it taught me that anything you want to do, the most important thing, way beyond talent or innate ability, is just doing it every day. The drawing of my growing piles of stuff became easier each day I did it’
One of the stand out books for me can be seen below. It stopped me in my tracks when I found the pages were carved to resemble surf across sand .

This image delighted and moved me. The leaves of the book were transformed into the edges of waves, the contrast between where we store the details, lists and stories of our particular lives being transformed into the universal and unceasing passage of the tides.
I went on a quest to find its creator and met Jane Glynn, a graduate of the National College of Art and Design who is embarking on a MFA. I was impressed to find out that this intricate work had been done while travelling.
Jane described experimenting with the folding of paper to make booklets. When she folded the photograph of the surf, she noticed that some areas of the surf were lighter/denser than others which she likened to reading a book. In the areas where there were large bubbles, she could clearly see bubble layers below.
From this observation she wanted to make some correlation between the turning the pages of the cut surf to the passing of time/the trace of time/memory and tidal flow. It was fascinating to get this glimpse into the process that leads the artist to look at things very carefully, more carefully than other people and to then make something about what they see.

My excitement and enthusiasm for sharing creativity and the inspiration it gives me to keep in looking and exploring and finding time to work in different conditions contrasted with the need to shine which had done nothing but stifle my creativity at the start. Keep looking, keep notebooking, keep growing!