The small drawing of my cat above was on a old library card tucked into a pocket in the moleskin like sketchbook I took with me to Cumberland Island last September. As I mentioned earlier, it was stolen by raccons and recovered by nice people who returned it to me. The book is more beautiful to me because of it's history of lost and found and because the water, weather, and bacteria obscured some images and highlighted others. Below are the best images I could gather of the most interesting pages.









Keep your sketchbooks dry friends, never leave them out at campsites with granola, and put your name and number in the front. Other than that, what we draw will be whatever kind of record is willed...

take care and happy new year!
Rachael

It amazes me daily to see how many mazillion emails I have, pieces of paper, ideas floating in my head and sketchbook. As the end of the year crees closer, I am frantically clearing out and so it seems right to share some of the stuff I found...

Ideas on the web (sent from friends and comrades and well worth exploring):

Unknown Sitter matches memory, story and idea with images

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay about Circles

a New York Times review of a show I wish I'd seen about amateur drawing

The Rubin museum's Explore Art website

ze frank's Draw Toy

this one reminds me of my fantastic newly 10 year old red-headed neice who loves this stuff
clearing out is good work
next will be re-connecting
and then, maybe, sleeping...

take care
Rachael

Nice to sit around and stick candycanes in coffee cups, talk about the whatevers, watch the tree sparkle and know that this is another year we didn't have to run around airports. My brother draws me drawing him and we both geek-out in appreciation of our new sketchbooks. We'll drive back home later tonight, eat leftovers, tease the cat, and go to bed early.

For the holiday, two bathtubs in one week, file under oddly related ideas:

A book of poems I gave my mom, Pity the Bathtub it's forced embrace of the Human Form by Matthea Harvey and

and then following the forced embracing of bathtubs and other lingering water thoughts...This surprising little Amy Jenkins video installation I stumbled upon at the Johnson Museum last week...

so then Merry Christmas, happy new

Rachael

I'm spellbound by this drawing by Zou Fulei at the Freer collection. It's hard to imagine spring growth under the blanket of snow outside my door, but this drawing is spectacular...
Rachael

The box came in the mail today with my sketchbook and all of the random things in it's pocket. The book was wet (I'd been warned) and smelly but I can't tell you how happy I was/am to get it. I spent almost an hour hair-drying it and carefully dabbing it with disinfectant cloths. The thing might smell forever. A lot of the pages had blurred into their neighbors and few of my thoughts were clear but I'd forgotten how many memories, ideas, and images were set in those pages. And now it's home again.

For the next week or so I will be in the last throes of writing my papers for the couple of graduate classes I took this semester. It's a matter of trying to articulate my ideas about three books about drawing and trying to put the last little touches on my paper about a once pretty well known and now fairly forgot printmaker and the three prints he made in 1935 which have set themselves in my imagination. As I struggle to concentrate, put in the footnotes, and chop up all my run on sentences, I know this has been a good little exercise for me. I've certainly learned from my professors, my fellow students (some of whom truly understand the dead French theorists), and the books we've read. Among the books was one, Feedback by David Joselit, that included a four point manifesto at the end. I have to say I was inspired and so I'm sharing my manifesto, from the final reflection for the course. It makes a lot of sense to share it here on my soapbox...


If I began as a fence-sitter and I am now writing a manifesto. This four point-er is inspired more by a bunch of radical art historians in 1971 and the Bread and Puppet people, than Joselit, because I intend to stand behind it. Although, like anything else it is open to revision.

1. Value experience that comes from more than just “book learning”, see the rigor of the image making process. If visual studies could connect theory and practice, if a study of drawing could be drawn, wouldn’t that allow us to learn more? Those comfortable with art making processes could be challenged to step out of conventions, and those comfortable with the text based archives could learn to understand making.

2. Speak in more than one language, plain English and academic. If we are committed to starting and engaging dialogue, we need to be aware of who is let in and left out of the dialogue. With most academic context, those left out are those who have not read the same things or had the same privileges of learning. A truly radical and relevant approach to the study of anything speaks more than one language and tries more than one way to dialogue.

3. Value commitment to collaboration and community over self-interest and competition. We are all always learning and nobody has the answer book, but we can all help each other. Open dialogues can exist in all sorts of places (from coffee shops, to art studios, to city streets to public libraries) but they often need participants to come with their defenses down, their ambitions in check, and willing to work together.

4. Bring passion, humor, play and the ridiculous back to the process of looking, thinking and connecting. We can have a sense of joy in our work and that can resonate with others. In the same way, we need pathos, pain, anger and sorrow. But I see plenty of that in the books and journals already.

So now it’s on to mobilizing the troops, I guess. Thanks!

Are you in?
Let me know, I certainly don't intend to storm anything but dinner parties and organizing committees might be nice. Certainly drawing circles would be fun. I love drawing circles...

goodnight,
Rachael