Cultureshock

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Video transcript

A sketch pad has always been an important thing to me. I have filled literally hundreds of them.

And as I have moved from place to place I’ve left this sort of snail trail of sketchpads that I’ve no idea where they are now. Sometimes I would quite deliberately leave them on buses and trains and wonder what people thought about when they found them. Did they hand them in? Did they keep them? Did they pass them on to someone else? Did they end up in a landfill, in a bin?

I wasn’t really sort of precious about them then but I think as I’ve got older I’ve begun to get a bit more precious about them. A sketchpad is not often seen as a piece of art, it’s seen as a means for the artist to record ideas towards a finished piece of art. I disagree. I see them a as a piece of art in themselves.

When I go to art galleries and museums where a famous artist’s sketchpad is displayed I feel sort of frustrated that I can’t touch the sketchpad because it’s in a glass box. I want to sort of pick it out, look through it and feel a direct connection with the artist in a way that you don’t get with a famous piece of art, a painting etc.

A sketchpad has always been a very spiritual thing to me. It connects me with me ideas, helps me work out problems. It entertains me. It has a number of jobs really.

At school I was told that sketching would get me nowhere and that I wouldn’t learn anything from it. At school I would sit at the back of say the maths class and just draw and the teacher had sort of given up trying to teach me math and would look at my sketchpads at the end of the class.

It wasn’t until later on in life that I discovered that I was dyslexic and that this was my method of working, of understanding the world.