Jo Blaker Sketchbook Talk

Jo Blaker is an artist who is renowned for her unique sketchbooks her collection of sketchbooks is filled with a range of visuals both from mind and observation. She always carries a book around with her, and often has more than 1 on the go. For Blaker sketchbooks are places to paint and draw, where she can experiment with pushing the boundaries from the visual she sees in front of her. It doesn’t matter how it looks or how it turns out, she states “you can always turn the page and forget about the bits you don’t like”. To be able to creating an exciting sketchbook it doesn’t always need to make sense, most of the pages we viewed were blobs of colour, which were then revised weeks later, with imagery. This quick and simple style of creating drawings and markings when observing in public is a great way to expand a log of visuals to be referenced in the future.

I found the talk inspiring in terms of realising the way I don’t need to be precise and perfect with everything when it comes to development. The idea of carrying a sketchbook outside of uni, to gather handmade visuals of everyday life is also one that I would like to start investigating into. This would give me a body of research that I can use as references and get a better visual understanding about the environment around me, and possibly have a greater influence on my work. The talk also inspired me to experiment more with hand techniques to be mixed in with digital techniques. After the talk I asked Jo Blaker how I could go about moving away from the idea that everything needs to be perfect, she suggested only using pen with visual explorations, that way if a mistake is made you can’t correct it. This is something I want to develop in my personal practice.