I snapped the photo below in the shop at the Aldrich Museum about 2 years ago and then forgot all about it til I was trying to organize my unwieldy photo archives. You can see why the photo and the book caught my eye, with that lovely pile of notebooks and sketchbooks on the cover! … Continue reading Mark Dion’s Notebooks
I’ve posted before about Ellsworth Kelly’s Sketchbooks: see A Wonderfully Messy Sketchbook. I had to return to the topic after seeing a wonderful reel of sketchbook images on the Instagram page of EK100.org, which is celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ellsworth Kelly’s birth. A couple of screen grabs below: Apparently he kept lots of sketchbooks, … Continue reading Ellsworth Kelly Sketchbooks
The MoMA website has an interesting feature on Rashid Johnson’s sketchbook practice. In a conversation with Samantha Friedman, the organizer of MoMA’s exhibition “Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury,” Johson talks about how he uses sketchbooks, some of the motifs in his drawings, and how the pandemic inspired him to think back to how he’d used … Continue reading Rashid Johnson’s Sketchbook
Roy Lichtenstein is best known for his Pop Art comic book style works, so I was quite surprised to come across this page from one of his sketchbooks, which is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum. Not comic-y at all, these seem to be studies of perhaps architectural moldings and patterns. I was … Continue reading Roy Lichtenstein’s Sketchbook
I bought this cute little notebook at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. There is no branding on it, so I’m just calling it a “rainbow edge notebook.” I liked the way the museum logo was quite subtle on the cover, and the slim size and eye-catching rainbow-colored page edges seemed quite unique. … Continue reading Review: Rainbow Edge Notebook
The notebook image below is from an interested blog post from the V&A Museum in London. It’s an example of a pattern book: “They are reference guides for production. Maybe they show things made by the company in the past, maybe images by competitors, maybe historic objects – all intended to aid in further design. … Continue reading A Pattern Book from the V&A Museum
I was so excited several months ago when I heard there would be a big exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum all about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s notebooks. I’d seen some of the images of the notebooks and pages and thought it sounded really cool, but then I read that the notebooks had been carefully disassembled so the … Continue reading Basquiat Notebooks
Here’s the stash of notebooks I brought back from my Amsterdam/Paris trip. First, two little notebooks from a local newsstand/bookstore near where I was staying. They had a nice selection of school supplies, and other notebook brands such as Moleskine, but these two were inexpensive and not like others I’d seen elsewhere. The blue one … Continue reading Notebooks from Paris and Amsterdam
Artist/illustrator Lisa Congdon has a new line of notebooks commissioned by MoMA, featuring her drawings of objects from their design collection: See more at New Notebooks for MoMA! – Today is going to be awesome..
A review of an interesting art exhibition, based on a collection of Moleskine notebooks: Don Maynard’s Take Note exhibit was a bit like climbing a mountain. Slow and tedious at first, but well worth the required time and effort. Housed in Modern Fuel’s State of Flux Gallery, the installation consists of 18 artists’ notebooks chained … Continue reading Moleskine Monday: Take Note Exhibit
