I love this image of the artist Richard Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks. Such an interesting variety, and they’re all digitally archived at Stanford.

“The Cantor Art Center completed the digitization of all twenty-nine books, making them accessible in the exhibition on touchscreens and here on the museum’s website. With these, one may now leaf through the books digitally and see every sketch in the order conceived, gaining insight into the way Diebenkorn experimented with line, shape, form, and perspective and creatively tackled challenging subjects.”

(Source: Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed)

The interactive flip-throughs on the Stanford University website are fantastic.

Throughout his long career, seminal California artist Richard Diebenkorn (Stanford BA ’49) always kept a sketchbook—a “portable studio,” as he called it—to capture his ideas. The books contain 1,045 drawings that span the artist’s career and represent the range of styles and subjects he explored—both gestural renderings of mundane, everyday items and powerful vignettes of intimate family moments. In the pages of these books, we see brief visual meditations upon vistas encountered through travels, carefully built-up studies that would become the large-scale Ocean Park paintings we know so well, and a multitude of renderings of the people who surrounded him over the years, revealing his fascination with the human figure.

A couple of Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks are “Clipper” sketchbooks similar to one I used in high school.

I wondered what had happened to the Morilla Co. There isn’t much information online about them, but it seems they were acquired by Canson, though there is no mention of them in Canson’s company history. The Clipper sketchbook has sailed off over the horizon…