There is a book in my bag that nobody is allowed to see. It is full of bad drawings — lopsided cups, hands that look like gloves, strangers at the bus stop rendered with more hope than skill. It is also, without question, the most important object in my practice.
The sketchbook's power comes from its privacy. A canvas carries expectation; a sketchbook page carries none. On paper that ordinary, in a book no one opens, the hand is free to fail — and the hand that is free to fail is the only hand that learns.
Ugly drawings are compost
I tell my students that ugly drawings are compost. You pile them up, day after day, and they look like waste and smell like effort — and then one morning something green pushes through. Every finished painting I have ever made grew out of a heap of pages I would be embarrassed to show you.
The sketchbook is not where I make art. It is where I make the artist who makes the art.
The habit itself is unglamorous: draw something, anything, every single day. A steel glass on the kitchen counter. My own left hand. The neighbour's bougainvillea climbing its wire. Ten minutes count. Twenty is a festival. What matters is not the length but the unbrokenness — the line from yesterday to today to tomorrow, like a pulse.
People ask how I improved, expecting a course or a secret. The honest answer is a stack of cheap books on a shelf, each one uglier than the paintings it made possible. Draw every day. Forgive the page. Keep the book closed to the world and open to yourself.
