Friday Finds
Katy Watts’s “Red Book” is a delightful series of ink illustrations of delicately-decorated rural landscapes and multi-colored cityscapes. It’s a sketchbook that feels like an adventure in observation and you could spend all day scanning these pages for all of the little pieces of her immersive world. Over the years, Watts has become well-known for her characteristic minimal, linear style. Working in the United Kingdom as YTAK, Watts has lended her skills to projects ranging from murals to paintings and prints, and has made writing poetry and story-telling a part of her creative practice. You can support Katy’s work by checking out her shop, as well as following her on Instagram and Twitter.
Lauren Matsumoto’s 2015 sketchbook, Dots, takes a simple form and explodes it through paintings and collage. As a form, dots act as compositional punctuation. Matsumoto adorns her pages with these patterns, layering these shapes over botanical illustrations, playing with cut-outs and optical illusions of abstraction and color. Matsumoto’s creative practice is one of hybridity, merging paintings of nature (particularly birds) with found objects to explore humanity’s complicated relationship to the environment. Her paintings have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Brooklyn, Hong Kong, New Haven, and Miami and her artwork has been featured on The Cut, The Jealous Curator, and Aesthetica among others. In 2019, she completed a residency at MASS MoCA and is currently participating in DUMBO Open Studios. You can support her work by checking out her website and following her on Instagram.
Living in Buenos Aires, Veronica Belcher’s self-titled sketchbook is an ode to childhood. The stories of friendship and family she shares through her delicate pen and watercolor illustrations are ones of whimsical mystery. Secrets dance across these pages, each one accumulating into adulthood moments of self-reflection. Belcher writes, “Through art, I connect my inner world with reality. It's a way to be present, discovering the magic and simplicity of daily life.” Belcher has appeared in The Sketchbook Project World Tour book and illustrated the children’s book Miró y Pierre. You can see more of her complete portfolio of paintings and drawings on her website. Keep up with her latest projects and get a look inside her studio by following her on Instagram.
Berlin-based artist Angela Mercedes Donna Otto’s 2012 sketchbook, “Disaster is a chance to grow,” is a stunning experiment in pen illustration. Otto transformed the original blank book by taking it apart, splattering coffee and tea across the pages to add dimensions of color, then creating these delightful ink drawings of creatures from the shapes she saw in the splotches and stains. Through Hoploid, Otto continues to work as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer, experimenting with the processes of drawing by creating subjects from her perception of abstract forms. Her work has been featured in BERLIN WHAT? and Sushi, and she’s exhibited her work in galleries across Berlin. You can check out more of her work through Instagram, Twitter, Society6, and Facebook.
Poet and artist Maxine Silverman focuses on the beauty of everyday objects in her 2013 sketchbook, “52 Ways of Looking.” Silverman spent a year constructing assemblages with sardine cans and found ephemera, and coupled the images of her finished pieces with poems related to collage. These tiny sculptures become larger than life through these photographed pages, and there’s a sense that there are stories tucked into these creations. If you would like to read more of Silverman’s writing, you can also check out her book, “Fragments Shards Artifacts Evidence.” Silverman is deeply involved in Nyack, New York’s artistic community and has earned grants and residencies from NYFA and Millay Colony for the Arts among other accolades. You can learn more about Silverman’s process behind her sardine can project and her poetry by checking out this 2017 interview with Jewish Standard. You can see more of Maxine’s work by reading her many poetry books and checking out her portfolio on her website.