Michael DeForge destroys his sketches. He finishes his sketchbooks and then throws them away. This is a different approach to art than I am used to. For me, the sketchbook has always been a personal object. The closest approximation to an artist’s brain without telepathy. Personal letters to oneself. Sketchbooks are the work behind The Work. Many artists keep all of their sketchbooks, whether they look at them again or not. DeForge tosses his when he is finished. So I rethink what it is a sketchbook is for.
Michael DeForge publishes a lot of work. He has comic books from Koyama Press and Drawn & Quarterly. He self-publishes minicomics. He has comics in various anthologies. He posts things on his blog. He does commercial illustration. I would imagine that for him, the work itself in its final form is the personal journal of his progress. It could be that the sketchbook is merely practice. Raw, unsentimental practice.
If an artist uses sketchbooks for practice and not as some sort of defacto art project in and of itself, perhaps that artist no longer has use of the preliminary work. After all, we cartoonists think nothing of erasing our pencil lines after the ink is dry. What is the difference, now that I think of it? Why should the bound book of rough drawings be fetishized? When the final project is published, the rough work is… ?????
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My conception of sketchbook use was largely based around the idea of something between a diary and a catalogue of ideas. One problem for me is the struggle between practicing artcraft in a sketchbook and allowing the sketchbook to become the artwork itself.
I had a class in art school called Sketchbook Creation. The course was inspired by Alan Gordon, the professor’s travels across the country in which he made his paintings on the go in a bound book. His idea for the course was to help the students open up their imaginations through particular exercises and controlled free-associations. In the end most of us sort of ended up making work that looked like his. Some of us continued for years after graduation, making finished art in books of heavy paper. Portable, but shackled to a relatively restrained format. Sketchbooks weren’t practice anymore. They were the art itself.
Imagine having a sketchbook for your sketchbook.
Imagine sitting in front of the tool which is designed to be an outlet for experimentation and being unable to experiment because it has been recontextualized as yet another Grand Canvas. Sketchbook Creation was my best class in art school but it also shackled me and ruined me in some ways. I hardly doodled anymore. Every drawing had to be good enough to show people. To be fair to Alan, the film “Crumb” had previously contributed heavily to this tendency for me.
Things got better when I started talking to people who use their sketch books only to practice for projects that they were working on. It took a while to overcome the pressure that I had internalized about making “showpieces” in my sketchbooks but I feel as though I’m turning a new corner now.
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As I get older I have been growing more acclimated to the idea of impermanence. Not simply the idea that things change but more the idea that things are never fixed to begin with. Age gives perspective. We see a larger picture as we get older because events and phenomena take up a smaller percentage of our perspective as our years of existence increase. Six years means “since forever” when you are six years old. Six years means “as long as you’ve lived in this city” when you are thirty. Six years probably means very little when you are eighty-six. Your view cannot help but change as you take in more and more life experience. Things were never as “stable” as I thought they were when I was a child, I just lacked the experience to notice the movements.
In many ways an artist’s work has a life cycle as well. It’s “conceived,” no pun intended, it grows as the artist pours more work into it. The work matures and is sent into the world. At this point, we consider the tangible remnants of an art work’s youth. Do we save it in a drawer as humans do with their children’s baby clothes, perhaps in hopes of some future use? Or do we discard the husk as insects do?
I’m neither seeking nor am I suggesting an answer. Ultimately it’s a personality and lifestyle choice. As I stand amid the chaos of my bedroom, I would do well to cast away my preliminary drawings like a snake’s old skin. Being unsentimental about these things could probably spur me forward into being much more productive, as I tend to clutch things I’ve made, things I own. On the other hand, there are artists such as my old professor for whom “sketches” and cast off ideas are as treasured and valued as gallery paintings. Of course there isn’t a right or a wrong answer. The question itself is rhetorical.
Drawing by Michael DeForge
There’s a good case to be made for destroying such things. The finished work is, for me, what I intend to be seen publicly. Years ago an editor I did some work for somehow had some sketches of mine that were done in the process towards a strip I did for his magazine. They should have been returned to me, but weren’t, and I didn’t recall doing them, let alone leaving them in the care of this guy. At some point though he sold his papers to a university library collection and so I had the misfortune when researching something at that library of coming upon these embarrassing doodles in a folder!!! I was shocked, I tell you, shocked to see these unfortunate scribbles! I demanded their return but was told by the head of the collection that they were now the university’s property. Perhaps I could get them back temporarily as a lifetime loan, but they would eventuially have to be returned. If I did what I wanted, i.e. borrowed them back and destroyed them, I could be prosecuted! This clown got paid for them, too! I would have had to prosecute him myself, but even then, the sale was a done deal. I probably will never be able to afford the lawyering it would take to get them declared stolen and returned to me from the library. So, artists beware…burn your doodles. Or live with that they may be ensconced for posterity.
I’m not a big sketchbook user (nor a sketcher or doodler for that matter anymore), but this is next up on my “throw everything out I possibly can” method of organizing my office. I’ve got sketchbooks/notebooks going back to… elementary school. I think I need to just throw them out, but I also don’t want to just toss them as I really don’t want people to find them. Need some industrial shredding… Similar thing with old “original” comic art. All the bristol board from my first 20-30 minicomics are still gathering dust. It’s not like I’m ever going to reprint that stuff. And certainly no one would ever want it (I never will be at that level).
I’ve found lately that I do much better with comics if what I’m doing with them is worked out in process. Tactics as opposed to strategy as one of my painter friends like to say.
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James says:
There’s a good case to be made for destroying such things. The finished work is, for me, what I intend to be seen publicly…
…So, artists beware…burn your doodles. Or live with that they may be ensconced for posterity.
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Why do I have the feeling that those “doodles” at whose continued existence you were so embarrassed by would be considered by most people of artistic taste to be pretty damn good, and worth preserving?
Sure, “the finished work” was what you intended to be seen publicly. But I’ve bought and appreciated many a collection of artist’s sketches (Crumb, Gary Panter, Al Williamson, Frazetta, Neal Adams, John Totleben), and even far more “sketchy” fare often has aesthetic virtues of its own.
While they may have legal rights over their material, many an artist is their own harshest critic: Chris Ware shudders with shame over his inadequacy, Henri Rousseau was ashamed of his technical naiveté and wished he could paint like the slickly ho-hum Bouguerau…
Plus, I believe, the art itself has its own rights. It deserves to “live,” not to be vulnerable to a creator who may get “born again” and destroy all his nude paintings, or a Kafka who asked a friend to burn all his stories after he died. Kudos to that friend who saved those stories, and thus enriched us all, even if the creator could not fully see their worth.
Not “finished work,” but hardly worthless, and fortunately not consigned to the flames: http://www.oldmasterdoodles.com/sales.html .
The art has its own rights? Arrrgh. If I had any doubts, Mike, you now solidified my resolve. I already disposed of many a half-assed sketch and I will make sure to finish the job properly. Of course in the case of preliminary drawings that are sufficiently aesthetic on their own, I preserve those, but there is a fine line. It should be the artist’s decision, not anyone else’s. Toth used to throw away completed or nearly-done pages that most of his fans would cream over and do them again from scratch, it is one of the ways he was able to reach such a high state of development in his art. Strange then that in later years he made his so called “doodles” to all and sundry…while some of them are beautiful and interesting (and I have two such sheets) not all are; I think it is funny that he reversed so completely. I would have rather seen many less of those and a few more finished perfectionist stories!
Makes me think of the fake scandal that attached to Saul Bellow, when he put up the manuscript of his novella, ‘A Theft’, for auction.
Those scummy parasites known as Professors of American Literature immediately organised a passionate petition, whining that this would reduce their access to the material, and thus their hopes of publication, tenure…
The academic assholes were roundly condemned in the press, to the point where the clueless nerds were shell-shocked.
Writers, burn your manuscripts; artists, shred your sketches.
To Hell with any who protest– it’s nobody’s business but yours!
Uh…it hardly seems like a horrible thing for academics to want the works of important writers to be available for scholarship. I don’t really get the vitriol. I mean, the academics weren’t calling for the ms to be forcibly taken from him, right?
And, actually, the public does have an interest in the preservation and dissemination of artistic work. That’s why works eventually go into the public domain. Obviously artists can destroy drafts and sketches and what not if they like, but it’s not insane to suggest that, in fact, other people — scholars, fans, historians, and so forth — have some stake in the matter. I don’t see how it infringes artist rights for either academics or anyone else to say to artists, “you know, I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
Wish all you want. Actually what happened to me was an anomaly. The guy who sold my scribbles profited by work that didn’t belong to him. If someone wants to buy the sketches I don’t destroy, then fine. Or whatever.
And y’know, on the lines of the parallel conversation on Suat’s piece, I have some originals, a Kirby and a few Colan pages as well as the Toth sketches I mentioned and I love them. I do think the pages are incomplete though…they are meant to be printed with color added….they were drawn with the intent that they be colored, so if I hung them for display I would feel the need to frame each of them alongside a copy of the printed color pages…and that’s how I think such work should be shown in an art context.
Why not, then, when displaying a finished painting, hang up beside it the preliminary sketches, color studies? Isn’t what came before, by the artist’s own hand (unlike most of the “printed color pages” in comics, where tones and lettering are routinely added by others, halftone screens are involved), important clues to the artist’s intentions, creative process, choices made (i.e., a hand moved from the side to over the heart; an extra figure removed)?
Aren’t those Jack Kirby original pencil drawings for comics pages, although needing to be inked, lettered, and colored by others, then dealt with by the printing folks, more truly, fully, “Kirby” than the final, badly-printed throughout most of his career, result?
One of the most delightful parts of a book devoted to the fantasy artist Brom was a lengthy sequence of images showing his artistic progression from early childhood to amateurish ineptitude to mediocrity to “OK, but not special” competence to the talent he would become.
Rather than making me look down upon him (“He wasn’t always this good! He could do crappy stuff too!) that Brom was confident enough to display his lesser efforts serves as an inspiration to striving artists; a fascinating study in how the work of a competent, but hardly inspired artist jumps to a new level of significantly greater imagination and achievement.
When an artist or writer destroys work they don’t consider their best, aren’t they attempting to maintain a facade that “they are always this good,” like the Hollywood glamor star that insists on only being photographed on their “best side”? Heaven knows, unless they’re a top name, the chances that lesser efforts, scribbles and doodles, will be seen by anything other than dedicated researchers is infinitesimal.
Imagine if a bunch of crappy doodles by Rembrandt were to be discovered. Would the reaction be this:
“Whatta loser! I thought everything he did was perfect, but now…”
“These drawings stik! I’ll never be able to respect anything he did again!”
…or not?
Mike: “Why not, then, when displaying a finished painting, hang up beside it the preliminary sketches, color studies?”
Since Pablo Picasso was such an important figure in this modernist view of “the process is more important than the finished work” I remember seeing a long row of preliminary drawings on the side walls in the Casón del Buen Retiro in Madrid (near the Prado Museum) before reaching Guernica on the back wall. That’s how Guernica was exhibited just after it arrived from the MOMA (where the painting waited, according to Picasso’s will, Spain to become a Democracy). Unfortunately that’s not how Guernica is displayed in the Reina Sofia Museum today.
More’s the pity…as I recall, it’s not how it was displayed at MOMA, either.
I don’t throw out old sketches. It’s not in my nature. I do go through my old sketchbooks sometimes, and I find old ideas I’ve had. I find it interesting and useful. If I abandoned an old idea, it’s not always because it was bad; sometimes it’s because I didn’t know what to do with it, or how to do it right.
I also think it can be useful, as an artist, to see other people’s sketches. It helps understand their processes, which can help us improve our own. I don’t know… to hide you sketches is to hide your process. Which is fine, I suppose, if you want to do that, but I’m glad not everyone does.
Look, it’s not about hiding process, its about what the artist chooses to show the public—personally, I choose to show finished work. I keep sketches that I haven’t done anything finished with yet….they are steps in a process which may take years. But the sketches of themselves are valueless except to me…they often take the form of notes written in a personal code, counted window, color indications, a few detail articulations. That is, sketches for wall art pieces….I don’t do sketches for comics, the pencils are the sketches and they are destroyed in the process of inking.
Anyway, yes I have some original art and as I said given my druthers I’d hang them with copies of the finished color pages, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with putting sketches for Guernica up with the painting….!!!???
At any rate, it should be the artist’s choice to decide what they want their legacy to be—it seems to be to be a sort of “art garbology” to presume that scribbles not done by oneself have “a right to be seen”.
Picasso said: “A painting isn’t planed in advance. While it’s being done, it changes in the same way as our thoughts change.” As I put it in a coda to this post: “it’s a pity that this incredible innovator couldn’t get rid of the single image (a western tradition since the Renaissance) juxtaposing images instead of superimposing them.” Picasso could have been the greatest comics artist ever.
Picasso DID do comics….I put one of his pages in my Schulz post:
https://hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Picture5.jpg
Oh whoops, I see Domingos already posted that one. Hmmm, when Marguerite was putting images together for a piece, she found another one of those odd Picasso strips….I wonder how many he did of those?…they all seem to feature that bandaged-head character, who is drawn on-model in all of the panels.
Picasso was a comics fan;Gertrude Stein used to clip the funnies from the Paris Herald-Tribune for him.