Pages from my Composition Books, Volume 1

I love making my drawings, but sketching and writing in my composition notebooks is much more enjoyable. And I now have hundreds of them, all filled to the brim with words, drawings, to-do lists, recipes, newspaper articles, print-outs of celebrities I either love or hate, vocabulary words I wish I used more, etc. I started the process of archiving and compiling all this stuff when I was in high school. That was the early nineties in Grapevine, TX.

For a long time, my notebooks shared nothing in common aesthetically with my “real drawings”, aside from them both containing a lot of pencil. It wasn’t until I made “Low American Grace” in 2018 that my work started to resemble my notebook pages. Eventually, both my Hotel Stationary & Cloudmakers series were very much aligned with the amalgamative nature of how I’ve always structured my notebook pages. Not that “structure” is a part of the process at all. The arrangements throughout them all look more like if someone detonated three tiny bombs, one each in my heart, brain & right hand.

I’ll be posting pages from these notebooks weekly from here on out. I’m not 100% comfortable doing this, but something about it seems right. And I always trust when I’m inclined towards a leap of faith.

The thing is, I have a lot more to share than what my drawings have ever allowed. My podcast ME READING STUFF has picked up a bit of the slack for years now, but the way I find, archive and explore Information & Images has always needed an outlet. I may regret saying this since technology comes and goes, but Substack seems like the best way for me to do finally do this. At least, for now.

For instance, I love knowing that the Me who was going from undergraduate school in East Texas to an MFA program in Chicago saw, and was taken with, this Tony Matelli piece at the MCA on April 12, 2000.

Tony Matelli’s “Lost and Sick”, 1996.

I also remember marveling at how much my dad appreciated “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” by Jeff Koons that day. (so did I)

And although I don’t remember who this fatigued-but-smiling man I drew was, I know this was a message about my best friend in college, Linsey. She was my first ever roommate and one of the funniest, kindest, strangest, and most wonderful all-around human beings I’ve ever been fortunate enough to meet. I still miss her every day.

I can only hope that one day I’ll gain the maturity to do something about missing a dear friend that goes way beyond making a drawing like this, hidden in a pages of a notebook amongst notebooks.

Love, Robyn