THE SKETCHBOOK MINDSET
/
What happens when we truly commit to something, set ourselves up to succeed by being accountable to others, and show up regardless of what might be getting in our way? Much more than we could have expected is often the answer, at least that has been my experience, and seems to be the experience of many others that have done the same.
As I write this I am on the final day of the 30 Day Sketchbook Challenge. I started this Challenge as a way to help me reacquaint myself with my studio after a break and invited any other artists that also wanted a Challenge like this to join me. The response was unexpected, and welcome. I had a wonderful group of artists from all over – including many that were familiar with my coaching work and many others that were not – join together and form a supportive and encouraging Community. Each day we have shared our work and thoughts on Facebook, Instagram and in my private Groups. It has grown beyond any reach I had imagined possible, and that became a strong, driving connection to continue day after day.
I’m so incredibly grateful to all the artists that dedicated 30 days of their creative lives to this Challenge and offered me so much feedback and support along the way. I know that by travelling together we gave each other added strength to make it to the finish line. Some may continue, while others are catching up. Either way you can ride the wave of this energy to where you want to go. You have a community behind you and alongside you...cheering you on.
Throughout the 30 Days I shared my work and my thoughts about what was arriving for me – what I was investigating and bumping up against. I haven’t shared this openly before about my process and I so appreciate the many comments and emails about how much this resonated for you. Thank you so much. Today I am reflecting further on what this Challenge has given me, as one last sharing and offering for you.
I want to talk about the Sketchbook Mindset and how I believe this mindset tells us everything we need to know about making our art.
I have known the gifts of having a dedicated sketchbook practice for some time, but this practice and commitment went even deeper and I have been considering why that is and what allowed it to be such a powerful practice for so many artists. And, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well.
One of the things that I have been asked about is how to leverage this practice and use it to inform our studio work. So let’s unpack this a bit and then see what strategies can be used.
Observations on the Sketchbook Mindset:
By its very nature, working in a sketchbook immediately dissolves our attachment to outcome and product – or at least it should. We know that these pages will remain in our sketchbooks, so that gives us freedom from outcome. But we often catch ourselves beginning to like a sketchbook page and even start to think that perhaps we can actually cut this page out and use it somehow. This is our attachment to outcome showing up and it’s good to be aware of.
Because we are not making a “work of art” we can be more attentive to and indulgent of our impulses, wild ideas…and even more accepting of any failures, if they happen. “It’s just sketchbook work, it doesn't matter.” This is tremendously freeing for us. And, we get to practice being unattached, uninvested and wildly risky.
When we decide to share our usually private and personal sketchbook work, that potential for feedback changes our relationship to it and we may not be as free. But if we were able to share our work, we also got to practice and notice how that could be managed, or not. Did you not show the work that you felt wasn’t as good? Did you do more of what was getting good feedback? How did the feedback change your relationship to your approach? This is also really good information.
Each day’s efforts in our sketchbook took us through the entire process and stages of making a formal piece of art – condensing it into a shorter time frame and pushing us to make choices more quickly, with less deliberation and more intuition. We practiced starting, being in the mucky middle and, most importantly, finishing. What did you learn about how you approach these stages? Did you engage with them differently in your sketchbook than in your studio work?
We also had to make our art in small, sometimes rushed, pockets of time. If we were committed to accomplishing our goal of one piece per day, then we may have only had 30 mins or less to make a piece of work. Were you surprised at what you were capable of in shorter, broken periods of time? How does this information help you in your studio work? Can you do more in less time?
A daily practice like this – not too demanding, but engaging – really begins to build connections through that repetition. We start to really recognize the benefits of regular visitation – a habitual and disciplined approach to our art-making bears fruit. If we commit to that and let go a bit more of the bigger pieces of what art-making is about for us, we do the work without even trying.
The more we show up on the page, the more we see ourselves – our voice, our style, our interests, our compulsions, our habits and our sensibilities. When we take time to reflect on each day’s work with writing and investigative questions, we find even more of ourselves and can build on the loose structures that are starting to form for us.
When something new arrives we don’t shut it down because it’s not the work we’re making right now. We let it arrive and become curious about how it relates to our existing work, or consider if it is a new direction popping up. Inspiration finds us working, so that next idea or body of work might arrive while we’re diligently working on the page. It’s okay to spend the next sketchbook session exploring that further to see if there is something there for us. We don’t judge it or shut it down. We remain curious and trust the process we’re in.
Working through an idea or impulse in your sketchbook can be helpful before bringing it to your formal work. It gives you a place to safely explore something new without feeling the emotional pangs of discomfort that often come when we bring it into our studio work before we understand what it fully means for us. The sketchbook allows us to connect in with this newness and make it more like us so that when we bring it into our art-making it has relevance and connection to what we’re already doing. We can also take anything that has arrived consistently in our sketchbooks to our studio work. It will happen naturally, but we can be more intentional about it.
The freedom we experience on the sketchbook page allows for our most personal and potent imagery to come forward. We allow ourselves to play and access our subconscious. We move more easily into “the zone” and flow state. Our work becomes more truthful and authentic as a result.
This is the Sketchbook Mindset – and this is how we want to approach all of our work, not just the sketchbook page. When we practice in our sketchbooks, we are training ourselves to “feel” the mindset we need to embody. We’re able to connect with that mindset more easily as a result.
What would happen if you saw every painting the way you see a sketchbook page? What inner-state do you need to hold in order to do that?
Can you recognize that the only difference between the sketchbook page and the panel or canvas is the meaning you’re giving to it – how much importance you're placing on the materials, the investment of your time, and the desire for results?
The work we can do now is to reflect back on this focussed, informative time and truly leverage it. Writing out what we discovered and creating an understanding of these truths. What are your truths that you are now keenly aware of through having gone through this experience?
We can also revisit our 30 Sketchbook pages and look for what we were most engaged with and consider how that could scale up into more formal work – not only in size, but in our thinking. We can do this by making notes of what we most enjoyed doing, what themes seemed to repeat, what we were most excited about investigating, what surprised us, and what we learned about ourselves come through this process of reflection. And what we want to develop more of in our studio work, that we may have discovered or touched on in our sketchbook.
The Sketchbook Mindset allows us to engage with the creative process from a place of complete freedom and trust. This is an invaluable gift we can offer to ourselves – a powerful practice to develop our connection and take our work further.
If you’d like to see my daily posts from this 30 Day Sketchbook Challenge – including images of each day’s work, my thoughts on the process, and a prompt that you can work with – please visit my Insight Creative Coaching Facebook page or Insight Creative Coaching on Instagram.
Prefer to listen? Click on the link below to listen to and/or download the audio version of this Blog post.