How I made a new start

These Little Books got me going

When I was forty-one I quit my teaching job. I was trying to balance family life, teaching, and art but art had been slipping to the bottom of the list and that didn’t work for me. I went back to the Art Students League—Rosina, my friend and the school’s director, insisted I study with Leo Manso, an abstract collagist. I resisted, as I am not abstract and never will be and the thought of going abstract makes me feel totally untethered.

But I gave in and showed Manso my work and he said, “Well, I can tell you’re a very conscientious person…” I had never been called conscientious in my life—I cannot remember one day in my life as a student that I showed up for class prepared— but he also said, “I see a lot of skill here.” So all the work I’d done in life class was not in vain and I thought, well, I can build on this. And maybe I should try something new. Here’s a note I wrote to myself-

This little book was my starting place and my springboard; I said I’m just gonna fill this with stuff that nobody else needs to see.

I started with Leonardo Da Vinci’s last words; “If I could make…If I… It sounds like he was always planning, never quitting right until the end and I liked that.

I wrote down some beautiful words that I’d kept in my mind, like this statement from Louis Sullivan;

“Whether it be the soaring Eagle in his flight or the open apple blossom, the toiling work horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function and that is the law. where function does not change, form does not change.”

Did you know that was the full quote for Form follows Function? I’ve always thought about illustrating it.

Then this beautiful passage from Willa Cather’s My Antonia.

Whether it is sun and air or goodness and knowledge, at any rate, that is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great.

I also started gathering random images just because they caught my eye—maybe I’d draw them but maybe just think about them.

Like this Holbein drawing of Lady Cecily Heron—I just love her and I wonder who she’s looking at. I made a bunch of copies and had fun with her.

And this sequence of Ricky Henderson, stealing a base; I was seeking a way to incorporate Baseball into my work and it was a while before my grandmother made that life changing remark—”Did you hear Tommy John got traded to the angels?”

But another note I made in the book worked for me here—”Fortune favors the prepared mind,” Louis Pasteur. I did a whole series of these shots, working on my drawing skills.

I even started to show some abstraction. I played with color, line, texture, scale, everything. I worked with focus and intensity, a new feeling for me.

I filled 23 of those little books and then Daley Rowley stopped making them! That was a blow. I’ve moved on to decorating my appointment books but I really miss those little books getting a new one, writing the date and then just playing. They remain a valuable resource for me. The work I did in them gave me the freedom and authority, well, confidence, to say, “Two rhinos in Trafalgar Square?”

Why not?