What the Sketchbook Already Knows
There are paintings off the walls right now, stacked against each other. The studio is shifting — smaller space next year, different light, one of those changes that makes you take stock. I've worked in guest bedrooms before, corners of apartments, small rooms around other people's schedules. I know how to compress. I'm not afraid of it, exactly, but I've been in a strange holding pattern these past few weeks — more aware of the space I have because I know it's not going to be mine in the same way much longer.
So I've been watching where the work actually happens.
It happens in the sketchbook.
There's a color combination I've been circling back to for years. Two specific colors — where they sit relative to each other on the color wheel, the tension of it and the resolution when they land right together. I deliberately try to break myself of it. I'll spend weeks finding other combinations, following other tensions, and I do — I make genuinely different work, I go somewhere else. And then somewhere in a sketchbook page three months later, there they are again. Not forced. Just present, the same way they always are.
Elizabeth Gilbert puts it this way in Big Magic: curiosity is "a tiny tap on the shoulder — a little whisper in the ear that says, 'Hey, that's kind of interesting…'" That's what these colors feel like. Not a calling. A tap. Something worth following. I keep thinking about that with these colors. You can decide you're done with something. You can try everything else on the color wheel. But if it keeps showing up in the sketchbook before any pressure, before you've decided what you're making — that's not a failure to evolve. That's information about what you actually love.
What I'm noticing about this current stretch — a lot of ideas in motion, not a lot of finished work — is that the ratio, which used to make me anxious, is starting to feel like the point. When nothing's wrapping up, you can follow a side road without guilt. You can try something that's probably going to fail. You can keep returning to a color combination that defies any logical explanation for why it still works. The pressure drops out and what's left is the thing you were doing it for in the first place.
The sketchbook doesn't have an agenda. That's why it's honest. What I find there is what I actually care about before I can edit myself.
Right now there's The Flock, The Day Before, Lowcountry Mythology — none of them series, all of them alive in sketchbook pages before they're anything else. And across all three sets of pages, those same two colors keep appearing. The part of me that makes decisions before I can overthink things clearly hasn't gotten tired of them. I'm choosing to trust that.
The studio will be different next year. The sketchbook comes with me either way.
Back next week with whatever wouldn't leave me alone this week.
— Shelby
