the value of a sketchbook

. . . or how my sketchbooks evolve with my art.
Last month I completed ALL of the pages in a 190 page Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook. I had not kept this sort of "studio" sketchbook in a very long time. When I discovered this sketchbook last fall it was in a way like returning home. Although I have been keeping sketchbooks forever I spent many recent years keeping visual journals, where I practiced drawing and painting from life, honing my skills.

And not unlike the way sketches in my visual journals helped me define my representational painting voice, my experiments with abstraction combined with sketchbook explorations helped integrate and define for me a process for developing an abstract visual language. This sketch above was inspiration for the painting below.

Appalachian Spring, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches
(this is one of my favorites ​from my Mountains Abstracted series)

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