The Missing Sketchbooks

The joy of looking into others' sketchbooks, Midsummer reads and a 1970's tv treat

You would think that over the months that I have been looking at the work of neglected women artists, the penny would have dropped earlier, but it didn’t. Just as I relish reading the letters and diaries of writers, as we gain an insight into their unguarded moments, I love peering into the sketchbooks of artists, not just the edited, selected images, but those that reveal the drawings that didn’t quite work or have leaves or tickets pressed into the pages: they are more than just a collection of drawings, but a window into their working life.

And yet, as I thought back to the women artists I have researched, there was scant reference to their sketchbooks. They surely must have had sketchbooks? Of course, not all artists do, but looking through the archives of the museums, there are endless examples of the work of male artists, indeed the Tate are currently digitalising all 280 of Turner’s sketchbooks which chart his compulsions, his progress and travels. And they are compelling documents.

Were the sketchbooks of women artists not saved? Were they not considered worthy of conservation by their loved ones or executors? Although, the Tate holds several of Mary Potter’s paintings, there is no record of anything else in the archive, certainly not working drawings.

There is one exception where such work has been preserved and that was the case of Evelyn Dunbar. She died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of 53 in 1960, and the contents of her studio were preserved just as she left it. Her heartbroken husband couldn’t bear to sort through it, so it was gathered in its entirety and put away for another day. Artists always find it difficult to threw away old work, and so we are able to see all that she left, not just a polished version. It was scooped up and placed in the roof of a Kent oasthouse until it was rediscovered in 2012, in its entirety.

You can see a facsimile of her sketchbook from September, 1941 when she was in the midst of her work as the only female salaried war artist during the Second World War. The drawings are rapidly made, in pencil, capturing the movements of the workers as they went about their tasks.

Drawings from the above sketchbook. Those to the right appear to be working drawings from “Gardener’s Choice”.

Evelyn Dunbar, Sketches of Picking Fruit, Pen and ink on paper

With the bit between my teeth, I carried on hunting and I discovered this, a forthcoming sale of three of her sketchbooks. Dunbar often worked on sheets of cartridge paper, rather than in books, but sometimes made drawings in cheap notebooks, such as these, to work out her ideas. And then this appeared in my search, a small film from the Tate archive which gave a glimpse of another sketchbook, as an example of what they have in store, but there seems to be little else of the women in their collection.

There is a sketchbook made by Barbara Hepworth of her holiday in Greece, in 1954, that contains sparse drawings and blank pages of preprepared grounds, that were never used, but it contains mostly written notes describing the colours, “indigo sea” and “monastral purples”, and pressed leaves, but it tells us of how she was thinking about this fresh landscape, noting down its differences and how these observations might inform her practice. But even these blank pages, flushed with watercolour in readiness, tell us something: that either she was enjoying herself too much to work or that they were no longer appropriate for what she found.

Pages from Barbara Hepworth’s 1954 sketchbook from Greece, with a pressed fig leaf and detailed colour notes

In 2004 of the total number of artists in the Tate collection, only 11% were women, whose works makes up only 7% of the collection. That has increased, but there is no official figure on record. In the US, the figure is 13%, with 55% of working artists stated as women.

In the V&A archive there is a similar picture. There are the sketchbooks of Beatrix Potter, containing observations of the natural world and the Cumbrian landscape. They show her developing draughtsmanship, we see her learning and understanding. We can view her very first sketchbook, aged 8, handsewn, from whatever scraps of paper she could salvage, which reveals not only her love of drawing but her embryonic love of natural history: it is filled with crawling caterpillars chomping leaves and tiny studies of bird’s eggs.

A page from Beatrix Potter’s 1875 sketchbook from a holiday in Perthshire

A study for “The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin”c.1903 , one of several pages that were torn out of sketchbooks and put together in preparation for illustrating the book.

There is also the “sketchbook” of Angelica Kauffman (1741 -1807) which contains 137 drawings compiled by print dealer, G Vallardi, into a single blue bound book that contains plant studies, landscapes, and portraits, all exquisitely rendered and made during the period 1762 - 1766. But this is not a collection of working drawings, there is no sense of continuity or progression. They have been grouped together at the dealer’s whim and it seems some are not even Kauffman’s. This was the frequent fate of sketchbook pages, they are ripped out and sold individually on the artist’s death as they sell better that way. Kauffman’s drawings would not have been private studies, but examples to showcase her abilities to prospective clients on the Grand Tour, and although provide an interesting record, they are not what I was seeking, a glimpse into the working mind of a woman artist.

Angelica Kauffmann, Page No. 11 Plants, Ink and wash

Angelica Kauffmann, Page No. 82 Hand and arm, Chalk

Angelica Kauffmann, PageNo. 54 Woman in a bonnet, in oval, inscribed in margin 'self-portrait'

The sketchbooks of Mary Fedden are very different. All her paintings originate from their pages which provided not only ideas and visual information, but cemented memories of travels and experiences. This allowed her to work imaginatively, to be one step removed and less reliant on representational detail. She always worked in black and white, in pencil or ink, with no colour references, to allow her to make her own choices back in the studio. Some might grow into paintings, others may not. Of twenty drawings made, only one might find a new life, to become a backdrop to a still life.

I feel that if I work away from from the landscape …I can, so to speak, tell lies about it. I don’t feel restricted by what I am looking at; I can use my imagination more, with regards to shapes and colour. Mary Fedden

A page from Mary Fedden’s sketchbook photograph: ©Andrew Sanderson

Mary Newcomb worked on separate pages of cartridge, that she would gather together with coloured pieces of paper under the prospective picture. These would be aide memoires of a passing moment, sights seen while she was out walking or spotted from the deck of a bus, that would reform into new images. They would be drawn very quickly, with only the slightest information, along with written notes to remind her. Below you can see the gestation of these along with the resulting painting.

Mary Newcomb, Man with red flowers on a bicycle, pencil on card, 19 x 12.2 cms . 7.5 x 4.8 inches

Man Cycling Madly Down a Hill, 1988, oil on board - a painting that perhaps developed from the drawing above?

Notes from her Mary Newcomb: “Today a man cycled madly down a hill between yellow rape fields, head down, trousers flapping. There was a grey church on a hill, a farm house tucked into a corner of trees – a typical East Anglian scene perpetuated from spring to spring.”

‘a man hurtling downhill on his bicycle, just like a squirrel with his elbows sticking out. And men and women carrying bunches of flowers too big to carry on their bikes’.

Insects on Hogweed, with the artist’s pencilled notes

Mary Newcomb, At the Show, 1995, Watercolour on paper, 10 3/4 x 8 inches / 27.3 x 20.3 cm I love the very particular colour notes to remind her, especially “deep soft raspberry”.

The life of an artist is contained within the pages of a sketchbook. They are a place for trying out ideas, for learning to draw, for enjoying drawing, to make mistakes, to secure memories and to understand the world around you. If there was a fire, my sketchbooks are what I would grab, not because of the quality of what is in them, but because they contain my life. When you have drawn something, you never forget it, or the circumstances in which it was made.

At the foot of this piece I have put together my favourite examples of sketchbooks and some resources to encourage you to begin a sketchbook of your own, or to flick through the pages of others. I hope you find something to light a spark.

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Over the past few months, I have been learning to draw again. I had accepted that linoprinting was now probably no longer possible, but I didn’t expect my hands to worsen to the extent that drawing too would be affected. My joints suddenly stiffened, my thumb and fingers inflated, and my hands looked alien and unfamilar. I was given splints and grips from a specialist hand physio, but my inability to secure a pencil firmly made the type of drawings I used to make - very detailed and intricate - out of my reach. I decided that there was little point in lamenting what was lost and that instead I should embrace the lack of control. Using a dip pen, a brush and a pot of black ink, I opened a new sketchbook, sat in my garden and began again.

It took several drawings to feel my way, but day after day, page after page, my shaky new voice became louder. I filled the first sketchbook in a couple of weeks, and I have kept going - only pausing in the heat of the last few days. At the moment I am using the same materials, keeping it simple and allowing this new looseness to find its way.

There was one major hiccup…on a day when the sun was too bright, I decided to draw in the living room, using an old camping table to prop my kit and to view the garden through the patio doors. All was going happily, when suddenly the table collapsed. The water container and a full pot of Indian ink merged, seeping over the carpet, my feet and sandals, creating an enormous ink blot. I leapt in the air to get a cloth, not thinking that as I ran I would leave a trail of inky footsteps in my wake. Needless to say, a cloth didn’t help and each day the two foot blot glares at me from across the room.

A few pages from my new inky sketchbook.

Something to read

Going back - Penelope Lively

Remembering is like that. There’s what you know happened, and what you think happened. And then there’s the business that what you know happened isn’t always what you remember. Things are fudged by time; years fuse together.

I have been in a bit of a reading slump. For a couple of weeks, nothing quite suited, I would pick something up, then after a few pages drop it. I wanted something new but familiar, something to bring comfort. And then I saw this on the shelf. I have read almost all of Penelope Lively’s books, and especially love her early novels, but somehow I had missed this. A slender novel, written originally for children in 1975, and then republished for adults 15 years later, because she realised that “it was never an apt offering” for young readers. It forms a bridge between her children’s fiction and her adult work, where she is exploring the ideas of time and memory. She calls it “flexing her muscles”.

Lively tells of Jane, and her younger brother Edward, and their life during the Second World War at Medleycott, their home in Somerset. She captures perfectly the impotence and lack of agency in a child’s life, how the seasons of each year merge and all the while we sense an unease, that something will poison this precious place.

It contains the best of Lively, in particular her descriptions of the natural world and its intrinsic backdrop to childhood. This, in particular, struck me:

Autumn. The hedge outside the gate has blossomed with spider-webs. All over, they are, from top to bottom, multi-faceted, slung between blackberry sprays or tacked to the dried heads of cow parsely. Some lead into deep funnels that plunge into the depths of the hedge, and down there lurk malevolent presences that will come groping up after a probing twig.

If you already love Penelope Lively, or if you are yet to discover her, this is not to be missed. Another I should mention is the autobiographical work, “A House Unlocked”, about her childhood home of Golsoncott, upon which this is based, if you want to explore further.

Summerwater - Sarah Moss

Set in the Scottish Highlands on Midsummer’s Day, this was the perfect alternative to the heat here in Norfolk. We shift between the voices of the holidaygoers that inhabit the chalets that circle a Scottish loch, as the relentless rain pelts down. The claustrophobic atmosphere builds, and we know that something wicked this way comes. Moss is brilliant at capturing the tension of family relationships and each chapter is intercut with unsettling descriptions of the watchful, natural world that borders the park. A gripping, brilliant read.

Something to watch

When the Boat Comes In

This is rather left field, but bear with me. Last year, I discovered in Oxfam, a box set of the 1970’s television series “When the Boat Comes In,” containing all 51 episodes. I knew of it, and was curious, but had no idea of the treat that lay ahead. It begins in the aftermath of the Great War in the fictional North East town of Gallowshield and ends, four series later, with the Second World War on the horizon. Created by James Mitchell, writer also of the brilliant “Callum”, it focuses on Jack Ford (James Bolam) and the Seaton family and their rising fortunes against the poverty and decline of the industrial North East. There are fascinating glimpses of the back to back terraces and the remains of the shipbuilding industry, which were clinging on in the 1970’s. I cannot imagine something like this being made now, the focus being entirely on the drama of the family, and the quality of the writing and performance is outstanding. I am bereft now it is over and if you have the chance to watch it, do - it is an extraordinary piece of television. ( If you look it up, beware of spoilers as you really don’t want to discover what happens.)

Drawing Resources

David Hockney’s sketchbooks are marvellous, especially A Yorkshire Sketchbook and another here and here. Watch the Making of Bigger Trees and see him developing his initial sketches into completed paintings.

The sketchbooks of the printmaker Norman Ackroyd are my favourite. He worked so rapidly that he would have two on the go at the same time, while out drawing in a boat, so that one could dry while he painted the other, never a second wasted. They are reproduced by the Royal Academy here and here.

This compilation of the sketchbooks of Cornish landscape painter Kurt Jackson is stunning.

The London Drawing Group present drawing sessions online, often inspired by interesting artists. They are great value and I especially enjoy the classes of Jo Blaker.

Landscape artist Sam Boughton has produced an excellent online course which encourages you to be expressive in your work and to let go of perfectionism. It is delivered in short chunks and is currently at an introductory price.

Thank you very much for being here and supporting my work. I love to read your comments so do drop me a line if anything connects with you. Do press the heart if you enjoyed this, not only does it help others see it, but it lets me know you have visited! I look forward to seeing you again in a couple of weeks.