Intro to Ebba’s exhibition

Abstract

To speak about an artist’s sketchbook is really to speak about a person’s compelling desire to draw what he or she observes from life; of someone’s very own personal journal brought about by the gathered experience of this journey we call life. A sketchbook provides us with a live record of an artist’s process of visual thinking and reveals the deepest aspects of one’s creative process. Indeed, it finds its parallel in a writer’s urge to describe. A sketchbook is a place where one dialogues with oneself, where one draws, writes and scribbles – it is a descriptive testimonial of some of the most intimate moments of one’s experiences. As novelist Christopher Isherwood put it: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."