The 2015 Summer Invitational: Pimp Your Sketchbooks, continues with Ken Carbone, who lives and works in New York City.

While working on the signage for the I.M Pei expansion at the Louvre in the late 1980’s, I was shown some of Paul Gauguin’s sketchbooks, in the museum’s collection. They contained drawings, personal letters, collages, paintings and were visually spectacular. From that experience, I was inspired to start keeping my own sketchbooks.

The sketchbooks I've kept over the past 25 years are a chronicle of life, art, the times we live in, a collection of ideas and obsessive experimentation. Ordinarily, my work in these books has no commercial purpose. However, once I put something on a page, it is "locked" in my mental database of inspiration and often resurfaces at the just right time for the right project.

I consider my collection of journals as “5000 pages of beginnings" nothing finished, nothing too precious. On occasion I'll use these books to sketch out a specific concept for a Carbone Smolan Agency project. I like to challenge myself to find a solution to a problem within a single two-page spread to capture the essence of an idea. This constraint is both terrifying and exciting.
 

Apple a Day: On February 5, I did a quick painting of two Granny Smith apples with some left over green paint I had on my palette. I posted this on Instagram and titled it “An Apple a day. No. 1.” I decided that this would be a daily art “drill” to see how many variation on this theme I could create. Why the apple? There are said to be over 7500 varieties and as a universal symbol, it is irony free and loaded with good meaning. The form is simple and allows for broad experimentation in material and technique. [Ed. note: see Fast Company here].

I sometimes work in my sketchbook but given that I do one everyday I make art by any means necessary. This includes drawing, watercolors, collage, sculpture, photographs and digital paintings on my iPhone. This is a welcome whimsical distraction to all of the heavy lifting we do for our clients on any busy day. I intend to keep posting these daily on Instagram and Facebook for a year because I’m just having way too much fun. I soon hit the mid point in this experiment and will have created 180 unique images.

Ken Carbone is a designer, artist, musician, author and teacher. He is the Co-Founder of the Carbone Smolan Agency, a design and branding company in New York City. CSA creates strategic design programs for a world-class clientele that includes W Hotels, Credit Suisse, Christie’s, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, CanonU.S.A. as well as celebrated institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and the Muséedu Louvre. 

Ken is a professor at the School of Visual Arts and frequently lectures on design and creative inspiration. He is a featured blogger for Fast Company's Co.Design as well as Huffington Post. Twitter: @kencarbone Instagram: @kencarbone

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