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

My Mom is a retired college librarian. My Dad is a retired high school art instructor. Maybe that’s why sketchbooks have always made a lot of sense to me.

Making a drawing in a sketchbook is like going to the movies, waiting in suspense, wondering what all of these strange characters will end up doing on the page. Where might they go? Who might they meet? Working in a sketchbook is sort of like sitting in the front row of a theater performance, a private performance put together just for you as you move your pen back and forth across the blank pages.

My senior year at Minnesota State University Moorhead I sent out a single graduate school application because I figured I had to do something. My application to Marshall Arisman’s graduate program at the School of Visual Arts here in New York City was accepted and that fall (1996) a taxi dropped me off in front of the George Washington Hotel at 23^rd Street and Lexington Avenue. 

I stood there on the curb with my two suitcases and watched the cab pull away. I was terrified. The next day I got a slice of pizza at the pizza place across the street, and then hurried back to my room. The day after that I walked two whole blocks towards the East River along 23^rd Street, and then doubled back quickly to the safety of my dorm room. 

For the first year students in Marshall’s program a Drawing On Location class is one of the core courses. It was originally developed by Robert Weaver. He handed the reigns over to Carol Fabricatore in 1994. For a kid from Bismarck, North Dakota, the class was like being handed the keys to a car that could never run out of gas. Chinatown, Coney Island, Battery Park City, a nursing home in Brooklyn. My sketchbooks in those early days were my courage, an excuse to get outside of myself and go and see the world around me. 

The other thing working in a sketchbook allows is documenting those places that we can’t see with our daytime eyes, that world that our brain easily enters when it’s dreaming, but is harder to find when we’re wide awake and our brain’s Editor is on the clock. Drawing from the imagination in a sketchbook is like dreaming in the middle of the day when you’re wide awake. 

And EXPERIMENTATION! This past February, Danny Gregory’s Sketchbook Skool crew visited my studio to shoot an episode called Stretching for a semester of their on-line program. It seems that the idea of drawing pictures in a sketchbook, even if you’re not an “artist” with a capital “A,” is catching on. This is a good thing. 

Back to the sketchbooks. Always, back to the sketchbooks…

Jonathan Twingley’s work appears regularly in many publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic, among others.  His first illustrated novel, The Badlands Saloon, was published by Scribner in 2009. He lives and works in New York City. You can see more of his work here: www.twingley.com. Framed sketchbook prints are available here: http://society6.com/twingley.

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