The DART Summer Invitational, Pimp Your Sketchbook, continues with pages by Catherine Lepp, a Bushwick-based artist who paints in oils and other media.

My sketchbooks are visual diaries full of notes, scribbles and drawings from life. They are where I work out problems, painting ideas and practice my process. 

I like the 9 x12 hard bound sketchbooks with smooth Bristol paper that are easy to carry and durable. I usually work with mechanical pencils or graphite sticks for drawing. As it becomes a visual diary, I find it important to date and locate the pieces I work on, whether it is a study of a head or a transcription of a Poussin at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

In your sketchbook you are not making work for anyone to look at, it can be about failures, mistakes and re-workings. It can also be about how carefully you want to research a subject or take a quick note of something you see. My sketch book is my own expanded research of the world around me. At the moment I am drawing trees and crows, rivers and clouds. 

This sketch book consists of blind or intuitive drawings, looking directly at the subject and not at the drawing; mathematical drawings...where I teach myself how to draw a head, using geometry and measurements; and more sustained drawings that I work on for months at a time.

For the sustained drawings I work on 5 x 5 squares of Saunders cold pressed watercolor paper that I carry around with me on a small clipboard. This paper can take vigorous work, months of marks, drawing and erasing. The assorted square pictures can be assembled to create a tableau in any configuration of landscape and figures together.

Catherine Lepp is originally from Sheffield, England. She graduated from Manchester Polytechnic with a BFA Honors in Painting and is an alumnus of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture (2003) and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2004). 

Her work is currently on view at the New York Studio School in X-Marks the Spot until August 26th and was featured in How We Remebered It with Orgy Park at Fjord gallery in PA. Her work is included in the Manchester Museum of Art Loan Collection and resides in private collections in the U.S., Japan and the U.K. She currently teaches at the New York Studio School and is based in Bushwick, Brooklyn. 
Website http://www.catherinelepp.com
Instagram Instagram.com/catherinelepp