Sketching: A Visual Diary

From my earliest years as an art student, on location sketching played a pivotal role in my training; it was never an option. It was expected, required and factored in as a component of my development as an artist.

Apart from taking its rightful place as a legitimate art form valued on its own merits, sketching served as a role indispensable for me in an investigative process of tapping into and exploring vast repositories of visual information; i.e., the character of a tawny-stoned Cotswold village; an Umbrian hamlet, haunting and medieval to the core; of landscapes and seascapes, harborscapes and boat yards, etc.

The sketch takes its place quite naturally as a visual shorthand, a notation system which involves special acts of analysis, fact gathering and synthesis. Synthesis? Through an energetic engagement with a subject’s unique visual characteristics my inner eye catches its spirit, grasps the metaphoric essentials of what is before me and extracts from that encyclopedic amount of information a summary of my findings.

As I set to work, I do not merely attempt to report the actuality of physical facts observed but translate what I see into the symbolic language of graphic methodology. The marks in my diary are abstracted equivalents for the observable facts I encountered. They are designed and organized into an arrangement of shapes, lines, dots, dashes and so forth which is my personal response to subject or scene and provides a memory bank of information for future work in any medium.

The activity is exhilarating, captivating, absorbing and essential to the expanding nature and value of perceptual experience.