My little black book

I have a different problem which is, that I just switch off and stop verbal cerebral exercise because I find it boring after awhile and limited, no matter WHAT words are doing that may even be important to listen/attend to, and it gets more like this for me, the longer I do any type of art and the longer I know musicians….words are just words are just words…I think I am lucky. (Just hope no one is trying to tell me about a tsunami or avalanche in an eloquent sort of way one of these days…)

So does the book self-destruct when we expire?

Those Moleskine books are magic! You want to touch them because they feel good to hold. I can imagine them filled with interesting drawings and notes and when I see them in the store, I want to buy every kind they make. I have stacks of filled ones and love to look over the old sketches and words I put in them. You remind me that I have not picked up my current moleskine for quite a while. It’s been patiently waiting for me. Have I given it up for a hard bound? Maybe I went over to the dark side and am now using a spiral bound? No, I have just been too busy to seek out my favorite Moleskine and write down my thoughts.

On the rare occasions when I read my old journals, I can be embarrassed or amazed by my attitudes, my ignorance, my outrage, my insights, but it always seems like the same day…time is so fluid. Odd.

We are definitely what we think and focus on. Without being a Pollyanna, when we focus on the positive rather than the negative, we are not only helping ourselves but others too. It seals the deal when you write things down, including drawings. It’s like writing your resume. Until you start writing down all of your accomplishments you forget about how much you have actually accomplished. When you go back and re-read them it is confirmation that you are on the right track.

Writing on any available paper, those urgent messages from “out there”, is a practice of storage, as is nurture stored in leaves of trees…to confine them to journals and their ordered habits is ok. I prefer to allow the breezes to scatter them about my personal landscape to be occasionally discovered as food for new germinations.

I’ve been using moleskin books for years. Mostly I like the smallest size that they make. They fit in my pocket nicely. I only put things of personal value to me. Drawings, sketches for future art works, art ideas, quotes, things like that. I am not into journaling although I’ve tried. Just does not do anything for me.

The problem I have developed is becoming an addict to Journal keeping. 1. A personal journal and 2. An Art journal plus sundry work books, sketch tablets and the list goes on. Seems to me I am dissipating my energies by scattering myself too thin. Any reader thoughts on this sort of thing being overdone? On top of all this I now find out I am deprived of a moleskin. Help.

I like to keep a prayer journal, I record the answer to my prayers sometimes 2 to 3 years later…when it finally dawns on me they’ve been answered to His will. Thank you for your thoughts Robert. I share them with my art students often.

I love my little black books and have long used them but I got into trouble when I started keeping separate books for different experiences, i.e. travel, responses to museum trips, lectures, working thoughts for projects, unlined for sketching, graph paper,etc. I think I need to go back to one book and simply label it with the time period covered.Thanks for the reminder about these books and Chatwin’s work.

Your letter on your journal and little black book was very enjoyable. In looking for one previously there are so many lined, unlined etc and a sketch book in the art supply store. I know it is a matter of preference but what do you choose. Thank you.

Many light or fewer heavy pages? I am about to leave on a 7 week journey and cannot decide which paper quality. Any thoughts?

I find two Moleskines are warranted; one a weekly agenda with pre-printed date pages, another small plain black for personal jottings. In the black one I write with a beautiful hand-crafted pen, using green ink! Real ink flows so smoothly on those lovely little pages…

yes~ creating on napkins, whatever it takes to remember the free ~flow of ideas that passes quickly into the Light~!

Thank you for your lovely post, I also use the moleskine ‘little black books’ for sketching, journaling and jotting down notes. I believe Bruce Chatwin was actually English but did travel extensively in the Australian Outback, journaling his perception of the indigenous Aborigine people’s ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘Songlines’ meaning to their culture. I happened to read this book whilst travelling/painting in the Outback, Central Australia and the Northern Territory so I found it particularly interesting at the time. Thanks for all your wonderful insight and continued stimulus and inspiration.

So—–Moleskinners are Buddhists then.

People like you, Sara and Nicoletta fascinate me. I feel like you are a different kind of being. I am terrified of journals and for the longest time even resisted putting down my appointments in a calendar. I always felt that recording my thoughts would take something from me that I can’t spare. Interestingly, I always loved writing letters with intent to explain something to someone, but never just for myself. For example, I am curious why you needed to write that thought which you then erased. How come it wasn’t enough for you as a thought? Do you ever read what you wrote in the past? That’s what scares me the most, as if my old thoughts would somehow corrupt what’s evolving and hold me back. Also I wonder if your love for moleskins has anything to do with your hatred of moles?

Secretly, (not sensibly) I hope that the things I write in big or little journals will be read and that they will go on record to great acclaim accompanying my enormous fame when people see the secret masterpieces I have not put out there for the world to discover. I am sure I will die an undiscovered starving artist, and I am sure I have written about this fantasy somewhere. My books contain bright things, but also dark things. It’s good to get the dark things out on paper so they can’t hurt me, you know. What I really believe will happen to the moleskins is that some nostalgic member of the family will collect them in a box and stash them away, unwilling for these personal writings to be lost, but also unable to spend a lifetime full of hours reading them. I have my mother’s little books. I look through them, but have never read all the pages. It would take a lifetime! Do people go back and read these, or is it that there is always a fresh page to write on? I have bound notebooks from my college years that document all my avant garde “aha’s” and the Sturm und Drang of young adulthood. Later, children got in the way of my self-absorbed writings. I collected kids’ art in piles of disintegrating paper, though, and won’t part with them. Now I blog instead. Does that count?

I lost one of those Moleskine sketchbooks the watercolor version. Well not lost more like stolen right out of my car. I was upset for at least two weeks because i had some really good watercolor sketches in there. It also had my professional watercolor paint in there along with the $40 zippered leather case that’s extremely hard to find. Luckily I found another but it’s just not the same as the first. I have a whole drawer full of those sketchbooks. Even made some of my own with Fabriano watercolor paper the good stuff :) Now my sketchbooks are more like 5×7 or 6×8 planks slathered with oil paint :) Let’s see them take that.

The archeological dig in some future time makes me giggle – “some of them were documenting everything.” People do this with cameras, too…get off some form of transport, all other senses lost, buried, or suppressed, and click, click, click, documenting it instead of living the moment or sharing it?! I think we are all mad – no one really meets anyone else, too much in a rush to go some place and text, email, facebook. It is like making sure we are not really here.

I am a cancer survivor (6 years). Being a watercolor artist and teacher greatly helped my recovery along with the support of my family, friends and students. I was planning on starting a note-sketchbook this year. Your suggestions are so very helpful I am getting a Moleskine sketchbook.

I find ideas flooding up when sitting strapped in a plane. Notes from these trips are very useful. Perhaps we should convert a small room or closet into simulated aircraft interior for convenience and to save cost of flights.

During the 70-90’s, preschool teachers like me were taught to push self-esteem, and today we have the second generation products of those years. Teens in my Art Classes in high school are so full of themselves that they rarely value, much less heed, artistic instruction, sometimes feeling that education of any kind is worthless. If they have a cell phone and a computer, they are ready to face whatever comes to their lives. I somehow wonder if I felt that confident when I finished my first “typing” class and faced the new working world of women of the 60’s. I teach high school Art now and I encourage my students to keep their dated artworks forever, no matter what they think of it. When they ask “Why?” I respond with “for your posterity.” I’ve been saying this for many years, and yesterday one student said, “I have drawings my grandmother did in high school.” Her eyes glowed with pride as I asked her what she thought of them. “She was very good,” was her reply, but there was an overlying strength in her words, a confidence built by that other generation of “artistic journaling.” I’ve begun to save, date, and catalog my artworks and photos of my artworks, meager and amateurish as they are, for my granddaughter, who is still an art education major here in a Texas state university. Someday she may be able to use them as samples in an Art class, but more importantly, she will have inherited the strength of my years of experience and see and have examples to show her classes the small steps of growth through a lifetime. Word journaling was one of this New Year’s Resolutions, but I’ll continue to encourage artistic journaling. The only artistic inheritance I have are pieces of molded ceramics done by both of my grandmothers. Each example is amateurish, but a priceless treasure to me. When I put my hands on these pieces, I can see their faces, smell their fragrances, somehow feel their hearts. Artistic journaling, indeed!

Violetta hit the nail on the head for me. I don’t journal and I don’t use social media. Friends that I used to socialize with are not available any more – all too busy “with life” – be my FB friend they say, or read my tweets. Some do daily paintings and want me to read their blogs. It’s getting awful lonely around here. I would like to see my friends, go for a walk together, or for a cup of coffee, go gallery hopping as we used to. Everyone is too busy for that kind of stuff, but hours go by clicking the keyboard… They seem happy with their devices, and there are fewer and fewer of us who prefer to communicate directly with humans.

I don’t care for any kind of writing – paper or computer. I like to talk and to listen – that makes me feel alive.

The only thing I read is this thing.

I regret not keeping a journal of my journey in art. As a young man I thought it pretentious of me to consider anything I had to say about art meaningful. I struggled and suffered in silence trying to figure it all out. I didn’t relate my life as being equivalent or as important as the great artists I admired and aspired to paint like. I didn’t keep a journal. With time and experience, as a young man researching the history of artists, I began to understand that if these artists hadn’t recorded their thought and beliefs, the world would never have known their struggles and triumphs with creating their art. The inner turmoil most suffered to achieve the successes we now take for granted in churches and museums. Works we see so often we forget the origins of what it took to create them. Many of these artists didn’t have the means to create without the generous monetary contributions of nobleman and clergy, so they wrote into journals their ideas for a time when they could get the opportunity to show their talents. I now know of their disappointments and suffering, because of their journals or the journals of those who knew them. Great works were hard to create and many masterpieces would not have been had it not been for their struggle and perseverance–of minds that also thought they too were not worthy of doing great things. The men and women we consider masters painted works that attempted to explain the world they lived in and their place in it. They were concerned with the mystery of humankind and tried to put a face on the unknown in nature. They portrayed man as he should have been; as he strived to be– to live up to the notion that we are created in His image. Society today moves so quickly, many don’t take time to sit and record our thoughts. To be an artist in any era was not easy. It is not easy today. The purpose and reason for creating art today has altered irrevocably. Much of what has been created before and after the Renaissance is considered passé today– clichéd or antiquated. After all, we have unraveled the human genome; traveled to other universes; replaced body parts and have–within our grasp–the possibly to create life itself. We have discovered most of what there is left to be discovered. So what purpose is there for art today if not to postulate these questions? How do we get to the artists that produce work that only reflects our mundane existence and doesn’t ask important questions? What are the questions for today’s artists? What purpose should art now occupy? In this fast paced disposable world, who is taking the time to record their thoughts about art? If no one is writing down what it means to be an artist in today’s world–future generations will be more in the dark than they realize.

Rick, you can still write your memoirs. Many people did that and many of us are grateful for that. I think that art is important and valuable as ever. If you look at any of the portraits you have done for example, look at the face you have created – nothing and nobody else can make that. Our art may be a drop in an ocean, but so is any of us. Some genius convinces the world that he is bigger than he is, makes more money, gets more breaks…so what – we all are moving in the same direction, we all die and get forgotten. How many kids these days know who mother Teresa was? How many people any of us touched, with or without journals and memoirs? Have no regrets, all that matters is that we do the right thing that we can.

I’m confused. I spent three weeks in Europe in October; was on a 12 day cruse which visited 12 major cities and spent a week between Florence and Venice. I painted 108 pages of watercolor and filled a sketchbook. I met no other artist sketching on site or journaling as I was not even on the ship. Yet many locals curiously came over to see what I was drawing or sketching which leads me to believe I was a rarity. Yet I get the feeling that there are so many journaling artists. Where are they if not in these populated European cities? I must be blind!

I journal for several reasons. It’s cheaper than psychotherapy, quieter than screaming, and it’s funny when you read it back after the fur and feathers have settled. It’s corrective when you read it to your spouse, sharing your feelings as you dare. Throw out a “ladyfinger” and see how he reacts, then go for the roman candle. I don’t read my journal to Paul my hubby that much. My husband is dyslexic and cannot read. One more reason I can journal to my heart’s content and not worry about loss of privacy. Yes, be grateful, be positive, but pepper it up with your true feelings and then later review just what tics you off and promise yourself to correct the situation if you can. Pray about it. So, this is my take on journaling. I have make-up bags with colored pencils, stationary, and other drawing, painting instruments in them, which I throw in the car and take to the restaurant or coffee shop and embarrass my spouse by taking out and doing indoor landscapes. This also is way to journal. It is a record of where I have been, in pictures.

I have a visual journal. I don’t use it every day, but I draw and write at least 5 days a week. I have made a choice to keep it as positive as possible because I need to be reminded that things are often far better than I think they are. In the years I have been doing this, my drawing has gotten better and so has my outlook. I am more forgiving of my errors and definitely more confident in my drawing skills.