Lockdown sketchbook 2020
The photo shows two small A6 Hahnemuhle sketchbooks. One is unused, pristine and neat. The other is battered, engorged, distorted.
Of the two new A6 Hahnemuhle sketchbooks I already had in my studio, I chose the one I had started sketching in. Only the first few pages had been used. I gave myself permission to paint over them partially, leaving some marks as shadows. The memories shifted and I paused.
Then it began. I started dancing back and forth across all pages, building layers, building memories, marking, adapting, tearing. Textured surfaces started appearing. A new memory triggered by fresh marks on a page would trigger another elsewhere in the sketchbook, and so further layers were created throughout, again and again. It was exhausting, it was exhilarating, it was addictive.
The more I worked in this A6 sketchbook, the more my work spread over and around the edges of the paper, causing them to buckle and undulate, like a geological cross section of a landscape.
Some pages are so thick through manipulation that they are as thick and as stiff as cardboard.
The spine has shifted and stretched.
This is a sketchbook that doesn’t close.
The following shows a selection of these landscape memories that I’ve shared so far on Instagram, will be adding more in due course.
Such wonderful texture…like faded and peeling plaster, Jill Mundy
