Yesterday, Roger Ebert posted a story in his blog which was accompanied by some selections from his own travel sketchbook.
People gushed over his drawings – and they’re quite wonderful, in fact – and he said something that inspired me to comment, something that I rarely do on “celebrity” blogs. He wrote:
Those are not great drawings But they are my drawings, and they evoke being in those places at those times.
The key is to accept ownership of your sketches and not hold them to some arbitrary standard.
And:
Anyone can draw, countless better than me.
And, of course, it made me think of my own travel sketchbooks. I was inspired to take up travel sketching by Craig Thompson’s terrific book Carnet De Voyage (Travel Journal)
. I have one book that’s been with me to China and Italy, and another that I’ve recently taken up carrying on domestic trips.
Seeing Ebert’s drawings and his commentary on them made me think about showing people my sketchbooks, both while traveling and upon returning home. People often see my sketchbooks and say, “I could never do anything like that; I can’t draw.” Which always makes me kind of sad. I’ve long held the belief that there aren’t actually very many people in the world who can’t draw, there are just an awful lot of people in the world who don’t draw. I’m as good an artist as I am (and far from the best at it, but I do believe I’m pretty good) because I draw a lot. Funny how that works. I told this to a guy we met at the hostel we stayed at in Xi’an and as a result he decided he was going to get a sketchbook and give it a try in his travels. I hope he did – looking back through my travel sketches evokes my memories of the trips in a much stronger way than photos ever could. They’re the best souvenirs from my travels that I could possibly imagine.
Anyway, all this long rambling is just prelude to posting a few selections from my travels – with more to come somewhere down the line. Enjoy!
Here are two examples of when sketching can be very useful. Both of these sculptures were guarded by security personnel instructing visitors not to take photos. Yes, you can just buy postcards, of course, if the image is all you want (and we did buy a postcard of the Buddha in order to remember the very striking colors of it), but part of the point of travel photography is to remember not just the image but the moment you were there. When photos aren’t an option, a travel sketchbook can be very useful – in both of these cases, I found an out-of-the-way corner, pulled out my sketchbook and my pens, spent twenty minutes or so drawing, and nobody hassled me. And in looking back at the drawings, the sights, sounds and smells of the locations during the time I was drawing come back to me much more strongly than if I were just looking at a photo.