Friday Finds
Julio Panisello’s 2014 sketchbook, “Miss Havisham Portraits,” celebrates one of Great Expectations’s most iconic characters through expressive, colorful portraiture. As part of his project, The Havisham Hour, the California-based artist created a sketch inspired by the Charles Dickens novel and published them each day at 8:40 AM PST, totaling over 500 sketches. Since his creation of this sketchbook, Panisello has become director of Postcards-From-LA-Museum (PFLAM), which, through the travelling art education and exhibition atelier Roofless Painters, shares its permanent collection of California postcards with snail mail-hungry viewers. Panisello continues to work as a painter and illustrator, creating works that bring beauty to slices of everyday life. You can see his newest pieces through his Instagram.
In her 2012 sketchbook, artist Stephanie Bird recalls her time growing up on a farm in New Zealand. The book is an immersive experience of textures and materials, playing with colorful collage and cartoon illustrations to share funny, delightful anecdotes about agricultural life. On the first page of her book, Bird writes, “This is a sketchbook about a farmer and his sidekick from a sheep farm in the hills of the east coast of New Zealand.” It’s a beautiful story of a pastoral childhood, rich with life lessons the artist learned from her father.
Ashley Blanton’s 2014 sketchbook, “Seedlings,” transforms the female body through immersive monochromatic fields of painting and collage. Created over the course of three months, Blanton writes that her nonlinear sketchbook “is a story about fallow, fruition, destruction, creation, burial, transcendence, embodiment, dysmorphia, the feminine, nature, isolation, interconnection, instability, and cycles.” Blanton’s creative practice continues to explore these themes of being, the environment, and embodiment through the detailed layering of materials. Her alchemical stories come to life through small, delicate paper works which you can view on her website and in her other Sketchbook Project book, “uncharted waters: coronary cartography.” Now working in Ashville, North Carolina, you can support Blanton by checking out her Etsy shop, and you can see her latest artistic experiments on her Instagram.
Swedish artist Lena Hakanson decided to turn the blank pages of her 2016 sketchbook into a documentation of her process of rubber stamp carving. Each new stamped pattern acts as the perfect accent of Hakanson’s minimalist, geometric style. A professor at Linnaeus University, Lena works with a wide variety of materials and she has created textile, toy, and pattern designs for companies like IKEA, Strömma, and Färg & Form through her studio, Non Stop Design. You can see more of Hakanson’s adventures in stamp carving, crochet, textile work, and bookmaking on her Instagram.
In his 2014 sketchbook, “strange neighbours strange encounters,” gives us a look inside the collection of postcards he has amassed over the past 50 years. Combined with his skills of collage, Herring presents a series of juxtaposed images to the viewers, inviting you to consider the pairs across each spread. Herring’s antique images are not just rendered black and white. Rather, these vintage postcards explode with a kaleidoscope of color, botanical motifs, and playful interactions between human figures and their transformed historical surroundings.