Why "THE SKETCHBOOKS" - I

I have always loved sketches and drawings and small, intimate works, rather than finished, stunning Key masterpieces. I've learned evrything I know about devotion, composition and time from playing beginners Preludes and Fugues; and I still cannot emotionally connect to the great symphonic works. But I do, oh I do love the opera !
Everything I know about life, sexuality, drawing, looking - I've learned from the drawings and sketches of the great masters (I wont start namedropping now, we all know them).

A small anecdote:
We were young, starting our lives. He has finished Film academy, I was starting my first year at the art academy. We were in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The great hall, The Night Watchers beaming radiantly at us, in all their magnificence. Well, I suppose.
I felt nothing. But then, the Milk Maid hang there, in the same hall, on a side wall, small, disappointing and dirty. Oh, how this gaze, this sun light, this eternity encapsulated in a blink of an eye.
We talked about this, 30 years later. I remembered that he disliked the smaller one and marveled in the huge masterpiece. He told me that he loved them both and that he still tells his students this story.
A lifetime in a drop of milk; both our lives.

I can say I still love him.

The Sketchbooks. I have quite few of them. Started when I was 16, more than 40 years of images and drawings. In a way I am unable to produce a Finished work. Lines are always added, another thought, being erased, another image.


 

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