BEING HERE: SKETCHING THE MOMENT

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned "rediscovering" an article by Robin Olsen in my art supply basket -- an article from the fall 2008 issue of Cloth Paper Scissors, called Being Here. In it she talks about the path she has taken from traditional journaling with words, to adding doodles, and eventually jumping into the whole mixed-media and extreme journaling thing. Then she got to a point where "sometimes it seems I spend more time searching through my hoard to find four perfect buttons for a finishing touch than I spend actually creating the piece", and though she's not quite ready to put all those buttons, papers and ephemera in a giant garage sale, she is now finding that, more and more, she is deriving great pleasure from "the simplicity of working with only a pen, paper, and a few watercolors." Over time she noticed that while her mixed media involved a "pouring of emotion and memories onto the page",  her sketchbooks had a much lighter, prettier, happier feel to them. It finally dawned on her that they had become a sort of "visual gratitude journal", capturing the joy she feels being angst-free and present in the moment.

I never really did much sketching myself, other than my very occasional "to-do" lists, until I took that Art of Wild Abandonment class from Junelle Jacobson -- the woman who changed my world by making me sketch an entire page full of radishes! She's a big, BIG fan of sketching. In fact, she believes that the more you sketch, the more ideas you will get. It's like, once you get the current idea you are obsessing over safely down on paper, where you know you can come back to it later, then you open up space in your head for new ideas to flow in. Anyhoo, she insisted that we keep a sketchbook, and had us start each of our projects with a whole page of brainstorming sketches. Which is why I now know exactly what Robin is talking about when she refers to the sense of calm and presence that comes over her when she is sketching, because of the focus required -- about the gift of being in the moment. About Being Here.