Sketchbooks or Notebooks or Diaries

 Written 2^nd May 2013

I began keeping notebooks on 10/6/2012 – not really very long ago. I’ve always had a problem about keeping a sketchbook. I tend to resort to destroying  anything which I do not consider (at any given time) to be’ right’. And that given time or state of rightness is never a measured response.  Rather than face what I might perceive as negative criticism, or indeed self-criticism,  I would rather destroy any evidence of the thing,  if I consider it to be anything less than a valid conclusion.

This destructive behaviour is mirrored by periods of intense production. Sadly without sketchbooks I don’t then have any means of recalling any of the ideas and thoughts produced in the productive periods.   So one of the challenges I set myself back in June last year, at Carmen Mills’s suggestion,  was to keep a notebook/diary of ideas during a productive period. That seemed to be more manageable than something with the label “sketchbook” attached. I do realise that this may just be semantics, but I thought I’d give it a go – and if it worked, great, if not, well it was just semantics and why did I think it would be any different anyway!.  A sketchbook seemed too intense, too easy to spoil. A notebook is just that – a place for notes (sometimes sketches too), but something I felt I could use without pressure.

I love the format of the small square book. To me it’s not intimidating, somehow it’s friendly and the spiral in the middle means even if you want to be neat, you can’t be. It actually won’t let you write neatly on the left page. But, I wasn’t at all sure to begin with. I thought it might just be a gimmick (like the relationship I‘ve formed with this blog may be going!)  and what would I write anyway! Well I very quickly filled 4+ books and then found that I had started three new pieces of work!

 My work and energy tend to follow in cycles and the 4 notebooks were made during a high of activity. I call it ebb and flow like the tide, but its not quite so regular or predictable.  When the low began, I sadly destroyed one piece of work  “Quilt or Bed,  Art or Craft” but managed to shove the notebooks and 2 other half finished  pieces out of sight and into a corner.  (I may try to rebuild "Quilt or Bed, Art or Craft.")

 This week I’ve got the notebooks out again. Mainly because I need to work on something for North Yorkshire Open Studios 2013 , but also for a critique I have agreed to later this week, and the fear of opening myself up to the world. Without the notebooks though I would have lost the ideas in the maelstrom of the mania, or the ideas would have been victims of the depression. So I’m really glad to have them now and to have benefitted from something which not only gave me a real sense of achievement and pleasure at the time, but they can now go on to inform the work I had started, and maybe even hopefully finish this time.

I completed Year 1 of an MA in Canterbury  before moving to Scarborough, and one criticism which was made of me at that was that I shouldn’t need to prepare a speech, I should just let the work talk. But when the thing I am talking about is so important to me, I want to get it right. I’m very happy to answer questions, but I really need the structure and security of being able to say my bit first. So why do I need prepare. Why do I need to present. Why can’t I just talk or why can’t the work speak for itself?  Well I think the answer to that is that if I was showing one of the very rare finished  pieces of my work – I believe and hope that it would be able to stand on its own.  I’ve got hardly any  finished pieces in 50 years, and I still don’t know if either of the pieces I’m working on from these noteboooks are ever going to fall into that category.

 I think that when a piece is finished  I somehow take a mental step back from it.  Detach myself emotionally from the rawness and responsibility of its making.  I consider  finished pieces to be like my children. They have a life of their own.  One quote I really like but don’t know where it comes from is that “A mother’s role is to provide a child with roots for stability and wings for flight.” I like to replace the word mother for artist and the word child for idea. So “An artist’s role is to provide an idea with roots for stability and wings for flight.”  I hope I can give my ideas roots using  research and intellectual debate, and wings by using the processes and materials for making visual art. One of the hardest things for me is to control the ideas for long enough to manage them and attach the wings!

That is where these notebooks have been so valuable, and I hope that I may now, on revisiting them, be able to control  the ideas held within them without feeling the need to destroy the outcome.

 Helen Birmingham