I keep sketchbooks, currently using them most often to document moments as I wait for other things to happen (the lights to change, lift doors to open, trains to come, etc.). They’re a drawn record of my looking process, and a written record of words I hear while I draw.
As these drawings happen in fleeting in-between times, and I usually don’t know how long I have to do them, I draw most of them unsighted (without looking at the page), so that I am able to spend as much time as possible looking at the ‘thing’ I’m drawing, rather than at the ‘version’ of it that I am producing.
In this way these sketchbooks are a work-around of what Derrida identified as a form of blindness: an inability we have to look, simultaneously, at an object and at our depiction of it.
The drawings here are a random selection from 10 of my sketchbooks.
W P Thomas 