The first in a weekly series from Sketchbook Skool co-Founder, Danny Gregory.
This week's books:
All by Hannah Hinchman
• A LIFE IN HAND: Creating the Illuminated Journal Paperback: geni.us/lMUjxC (Amazon)
• A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place
geni.us/1myd2Rr (Amazon)
• Little Things in a Big Country: An Artist and Her Dog on the Rocky Mountain Front geni.us/DsiY6 (Amazon)
By Danny Gregory
• An Illustrated Journey: Inspiration From the Private Art Journals of Traveling Artists, Illustrators and Designers geni.us/U4e2Aa (Amazon)
Hannah Hinchman's "Scale of Journals":
On one end is the Informational journal, the true naturalist’s field journal. It concentrates on the quantifiable and identifiable, gathering names, facts, and observations with an impartial thoroughness. It contains drawings, but they are meant to be explanatory. There is little room for the personal in this kind of journal, though I admire it for the valuable role it serves in adding to the body of knowledge.
On the other end of the scale is the Reflective journal. It’s purely personal, mostly concerned with human-generated culture, investigations of the psyche, relationships, responses to art and writing, dreams, memories”as in Anais Nin’s diaries. The self is the subject rather than the world. The art in this journal might look more like William Blake’s paintings.
In between the two poles are two other kinds of journals that have become more and more central to my interest. The first is the Investigative: It documents the outer world, but includes many unmeasurable and unnamed phenomena, like the effects of light, ways the seasons change, patterns and textures in nature. It goes outside the categories of the Informational journal and finds links between apparently dissimilar things. Thus it includes more of the person making it, because it’s up to that person to invent new categories. Art in this journal would look more like what we find in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.
The other is the Resonant journal, so called because it acts as the place of interweaving between the person and the world. Curiosity extends both inward and outward: You are a naturalist on the trail of your own life, and you search for insights in the more-than-human world as well as the human. These two kinds of journals, as embodied in Goethe and Thoreau, seem to me the richest of all. The art included in them might look like anything from Albrecht Durer to Paul Klee.
25 апр 2017
