Sketchbookism
I’m honored that Jacob Rabinowitz featured some of my sketchbooks in his online journal, The 96th of October. Jacob’s grasp of What Matters in culture and history is about as intense and down to earth as it gets. I’m also touched because Jacob is a living link to Allen Ginsberg, who was a huge inspiration to the books in particular.
I’m dumb. In high school, when other art students were getting their portfolios together, I was staring at a leaf and trying to reach satori. Not kidding. I found Zen and the Art of Seeing by Frederick Franck in my local free library and was convinced that art could be a type of meditation. Looking back, Franck seems like a sweet dude, but when it comes to meditation, it turns out actual meditation works better than drawing.1 That whole sad chapter in my life can be summed up in two words that fatefullly caught my ear years later: “Spiritual bypass.”
Ouch.
Many years passed, and I learned that religious art and music has a much more complex relationship to its spiritual traditions than one might think. Art and music, for me at least, makes more sense when viewed as a discipline of the Soul, not the Spirit.2 Art might not be transcendence, but even amidst the fog of postmodernism, secularism and spectacle, I still believe cultivating it is useful to breaking out of the mass hypnosis that conspires to make us dumb and cruel.
Sketchbooks are awkward to exhibit or sell but they can break rules other images have to follow. Put a bunch of disparate images on a canvas and you’re a pretentious postmodernist jerk, but do it in a sketchbook and our brains seem to have no problem with the dissonance. They don’t even require a coherent style, that absolutely essential ingredient in all other art. Somehow, images in sketchbooks can do things that the hordes of images attacking us from everywhere else can’t. In this disenchanted age, when everything in the art world’s already been done to death, holding someone’s sketchbook and leafing through it never fails to bring me a shiver of frisson.
Anyway, sketchbooks aren’t brain surgery3, so enjoy! And thanks Jacob!
I recommend Daniel ingram’s Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, under whose influence I’ve had some very interesting and truly bizarre experiences.
See James Hillman mostly. His essay “Peaks and Vales” in particular.
See Appalachian Institute For Creative Learning for more info:
Sketchbook Brain Surgery
Phil Blank
Where is memory? Emotion? Perception? the Soul?!? We'll use sketchbooks and drawing practices as a way to tour the brain and learn about how we process different sensations and how they process us! Pack lightly and prepare to have fun (note: x-acto knives and rubber gloves not required.)