Sketchbook Journals
I first started painting in books in 1998,
when I chose one from a huge pile on a street in Watertown, Massachusetts. An Armenian social club was moving to a new location and had discarded them for the trash pickup. Just my luck! I had been toying with the idea of using a regular book as a sketchbook, so when I came across this pile of books, it felt very serendipitous.
Like most of us who are trained as children not to deface a book, I felt a little guilty at first, but the fact that it was being thrown away helped to assuage my conscience. I then found a ready supply of books at the town dump in my town of Newton, which had a “library shed” of discarded books. And through the years, often when moving or decluttering, friends have given me books or allowed me to scavenge their shelves.
In most of the images in my journals, I have played with a similar technique that Leonardo Da Vinci used to spur his imagination.
He would throw an oil-soaked rag at the studio wall and in the stain that it left, he would start to see landscapes or whole battle scenes.
My process begins with the layer of text in a book, then adding swipes of color, left hand, right hand, or with my eyes closed, so as not to influence what might come later. A rich layering is built comprised of colors and marks overlapping one another on the paper. This first creative encounter will then be put aside, sometimes for quite a while.
Later I’ll return, and rather than allowing my mind to rush in and impose preconceived notions on the page, I give my unconscious time to see what it can find.
Gradually, I will see parts of images taking shape out of the interplay of text and paint.
I draw out these dancing figures and creatures, connecting the missing parts, never knowing where the forms will take me or what the final composition will be.
From this chaos of gestural movement, my imagination sees what is lurking there in the paint, moving just under the surface, waiting for liberation. Letting the paint lead the way, I find that this technique is endlessly creative, fun, and surprising for both myself and the viewer.
Much later, occasionally, I can see a relationship between the final image and something that was happening in my life at the time.
There is a mysterious, sometimes joyful, often strange glimpse of another plane of awareness, portals into the archetypal, mythological or the underlying, partially hidden, current zeitgeist that the rational mind may only partially understand, or not until years later, or never.
In some of these images, I now realize that my unconscious had been influenced, not only by mythological half-man, half-beast creatures in antique sculptures and paintings but also by seeing magazine photos from the 1970s of the decadent parties of the rich and infamous wearing stag-horned animal heads, devils, and other dark creature masks.
And interesting that I was creating (uncovering/disclosing) a lot of these around the time of 9/11, the evilest act in modern times against the American people, until Covid and the vaccines were used against the whole world in the 2020’s.
Now I see that there was a soul level of knowing, beyond what my mind comprehended at the time.
But aside from these prescient occurrences, what I love most is the process of discovering what is expectantly waiting there to be found, and the sheer joy of bringing it into existence.
