DART launches the New Year with a celebration of sketchbook art and artists. Jonathan Twingley, whose sketchbook habit was explored during the 2015 Summer Invitational, emailed to tell about a recent project for Amtrak that originated in his sketchbooks. This is what he wrote:

We seem to be in the midst of some kind of Global Sketchbook Craze. Everybody from stay-at-home-dads in Des Moines to architecture grad students in Vietnam are drawing on location in sketchbooks, or drawing that world we can’t see with our eyes. Some have speculated that this analog fad is a direct (if subconscious) reaction to the hyper virtual reality most of us find ourselves living in. But maybe working in journals and sketchbooks is a natural complement to our Digital Age, where so much of what we want and what we think we need is available instantaneously. If a central pillar of the Digital Age is the Now – What’s happening now? Who’s it happening to now? How can I get it now? – what better extension of that notion could there be, ironically, than a bound book of blank pages and an instrument with which to make a mark? Few things put one in the moment like making a mark on a blank surface. Ask the folks hunkered down in those caves in the south of France 15,000 years ago.

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My Dad is a retired high school art instructor who had a handful of books in his studio when I was growing up. One of them was Claude Marks’s From the Sketchbooks of the Great Artists. It’s a survey of artist’s sketchbooks, beginning well before bound books of scribbles were even considered “sketchbooks,” on through to the private visual ruminations of the artists we all know. Though written in the early 1970’s, Marks’s Epilogue to the collection still rings as relevant:

 “The purpose and character of sketches and sketchbooks have varied considerably over the centuries, depending on the artistic aims of the period and the particular interests of each artist. A medieval miniaturist’s pattern-book, a Renaissance painter’s repertory of poses and gestures, and an Impressionist’s sketch-pad filled with rapid notations of people on the beach or in cafés might appear to have little in common. All these informal documents, not intended for exhibition, give us an insight into the creative process, and as we leave the ages of collective beliefs for more individualistic times, they convey frequent intimations of an artist’s private vision.”

The images in the story were taken from my sketchbooks, illustrated with hand-lettered words to help tell the story. It appeared on Amtrak’s blog the weekend of the Fourth of July, the analog and the digital strolling hand-in-hand, New York to Philadelphia. Two of the original sketchbook drawings from this series will be a part of the Society of Illustrators 60^th Annual Exhibition/Part One. The opening reception is January 5^th. Info

Jonathan Twingley on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jontwingley/)

Jonathan Twingley (www.twingley.com)
A Carefully Contained Universe: An Amtrak Story http://blog.amtrak.com/2017/06/a-carefully-contained-universe/
From the Sketchbooks of the Great Artists, by Claude Marks https://www.amazon.com/sketchbooks-great-artists-Claude-Marks/dp/0690319991