More stuff artists need: a Scrapbook
June 22, 2008
Artists need books for storing all the scraps of paper that have pictures they like. In this respect, artists are basically like squirrels. Some people have a very Romantic idea of the artist as a person swept along by passions. Keeping neat little notebooks doesn’t jibe with that idea of the mad genius.
Aspiring artists needn’t fear. Having a scrapbook (or books) will not hinder you from losing your stuff. Quite possibly it may even broaden the number of places where you can hide things from yourself. Certainly I can assure you that merely storing favorite images in scrapbooks will be no guarantee that you can find the image that you need for whatever project you have at hand. I hide stuff from myself all the time and never realize that I’m doing it. Or why.
These are mysteries of the mind and its hidden ways. Anyway, you don’t keep scrapbooks to be organized. You just keep them. To keep.
[Top of the post: one of the author's scrapbooks partly assembled. Photo by Aletha Kuschan]
Tags: art, artist, artists, autobiography, collecting, collection, copy, copying, creativity, culture, decor, decoration, design, drawing, emotion, fine art, forgetfulness, forgetting, genius, great artist, hide and seek, history, hoarding, how to, idea of the artist, ideas, illustration, imitation, innovation, invention, journal, keepsakes, life, logic, memory, memory places, motif, nostalgia, notebook, organization, painting, passion, personal, preciousness, psychology, random, rationality, reason, Romantic, romanticism, saving, scrapbook, sketch, squirrel behavior, squirrels, thoughts, time capsule, writing
June 22, 2008 at 7:08 am
I have a whole collection of scrapbooks. It’s almost a mini-library.
June 22, 2008 at 12:28 pm
yeah!
June 24, 2008 at 4:01 am
I’m bad at this, I grab anything I can get my hands on and start drawing.
June 24, 2008 at 2:23 pm
I put ideas out on my blog that I think will be useful to other artists — particularly to a young artist just starting who may be at odds with the trends of the moment, as I was when I began. But there are no rules. Things work if they work for you.
I usually don’t just grab something and start drawing. But perhaps I should! I could stand to be more spontaneous. Comments from another reader, Kisume, have made me think I should do more drawing from imagination. I almost always work by looking directly at something (though the something is sometimes a drawing, a collage or other work of art).
One reason I began this blog was to teach. But the other reason is to learn. It’s really interesting to see the broad spectrum of reasons why people make images.
Thanks for dropping by and come back again!