The SketchBook

The Sketchbook: A Thirty-Five Year Dialogue

For thirty-five years, I have produced multiple sketchbooks each year. Every book has served as a silent witness and a vital, unfiltered capture of ideas and reflections. These pages are far more than mere collections of drawings, they are my primary companions, the keepers of my creative DNA, and the indispensable record of an often strenuous dialogue with form.

In school, we are taught to respect the book as a finished object a tidy repository for existing knowledge rather than a catalyst for our own. We are conditioned to treat the page with a clinical precision that often smothers the initial spark of an idea. My sketchbooks defy this tradition. They are battlegrounds where the ink bleeds and the paper tears, ensuring the first impulse is never the last.

The Engine Room of the Work

A sketchbook is not a portfolio of polite observations; it is a thinking tool the engine room where creation happens in real time. Here, I dismantle the world to find my own "math," a private language of form that exists before words. This "math" isn't numerical, it is an intuitive computation of rhythm, weight, and tension.

I don’t draw blueprints or technical schematics. Instead, I capture the essence of a form the internal torque of a movement or the silent pressure of a balance. It is the moment where the chaos of the world begins to make sense, revealing a hidden structure that I can eventually translate into the physical sculpture.

The Language of Stuff

I draw with intensity, often filling pages only to close the book and never revisit it. The value was never in the paper, the value is in the internal logic etched into my consciousness. Once the "math" of the balance is solved, the drawing has done its job. It has cleared the pipes and solved the riddle between mind and material.

The remaining paper is merely the debris of a mental breakthrough. This process is a reminder to cherish freedom, my memory will hold the specific tension of a void or the exact weight of a mass. I don’t need the paper to remind me I know how the form needs to feel.

The Sketchbook as a Tool

The sketchbook functions as a pressure valve and a site of excavation, digging through past expectations to hit the bedrock of a raw idea. It is a sensory feedback loop where the hand discovers what the eye hasn't yet seen and the mind hasn't yet named.

By treating the book as a tool, I grant myself permission to fail. This freedom transforms the page into a filter that catches clichés and safe thoughts before they can infect the final work. It is the whetstone upon which the logic of the sculpture is sharpened, ensuring that by the time I pick up a chisel, the most difficult part of the battle has already been won.

These pages have lived a physical life as intense and weathered as the works they describe. They have absorbed the quiet, meditative intensity of the drawing studio and survived the visceral, industrial atmosphere of the foundry. They have sat open on the workbench amidst the abrasive smoke and grit of a bronze pour, and they have travelled with me through the rugged coastal landscapes that have served as my inspiration.

However, the books also contain hundreds of unfulfilled concepts ideas that, for reasons of physics or timing, remained in the realm of paper and graphite. To look through them is to see the "ghosts" of my practice: the branches of a creative path that were never taken, offering a profound depth of insight into the work that a polished, finished piece can only hint at.

The Sketchbook as Witness

Beyond its utility, the sketchbook remains a silent witness to the unseen labour of the studio. It is the only place where the struggle remains visible, long after the finished sculpture has been polished into an appearance of effortless grace. It records the velocity of a thought before it is slowed down by the resistance of heavy material, serving as a visceral transcript of a private negotiation with the universe.

In these pages, the sketchbook bears witness to the nineteen failures that were necessary to arrive at the one true form. It captures the physical energy of the search the heavy, frustrated marks and the frantic, light speed scribbles. While the finished work is the final destination, the sketchbook is the path I have taken. It is the evidence of a life lived in constant, often painful, dialogue with "stuff," standing as a testament to the fact that beauty is never merely found, it is excavated.