The Private Eye

The Gallery has in its collection some two hundred and fifty sketchbooks by Australian artists. The majority of this collection is centred on the twentieth century, particularly the period from around 1910 to 1950, when sketchbooks were used most avidly and most widely. Several artists from this period are represented by a large number of sketchbooks which often act as a key to their other work of the time. The collection includes important and comprehensive groups of sketchbooks by Robert Klippel, Grace Cossington Smith, Eric Wilson and Blamire Young; and the only extant sketchbooks by Thea Proctor and Adelaide Perry.

Sketchbooks by Australian artists of the nineteenth century are rare, and the Gallery's representation of this period is small but diverse. Sketchbooks by Emma Minnie Boyd, John Glover and Tommy McRae represent very different approaches to drawing in the late 1800s.

The absence of sketchbooks by contemporary artists can be attributed to two factors. Firstly, the role of the sketchbook as a travel diary (dominant throughout the 1800s and up to the 1940s) has been usurped by the availability of photographic and electronic media. Photographs and video tapes can be utilised when the artist returns to the studio. Secondly, sketchbooks that are used to record studies, visual notes and ideas, are constantly referred to by artists as they work.

Drawings, as they appear in a sketchbook, convey a particular moment – people in the street or in a cafe, an interior in the diffuse light of morning, clouds above the ocean. That moment, existing in the "real" world, may also find its expression in a thought, so that the sketch may facilitate the record of an idea.

A string of moments a sequential progression, becomes a narrative. Drawings made during a journey at different (and necessarily subsequent) times, become a diaristic record. For many reasons, one of the primary reasons artists have used sketchbooks is used to record a journey. When a sketchbook is used an idea, a narrative may still be discerned, as we may witness over the sketchbook’s pages, over time.

A sketchbook is, course, limited by scale and is reliant upon the perception of art as two-dimensional image-making (although the hegemony of drawing is challenged by Mike Brown and extended by Robert Klippel in their sketchbooks. The conceptual parameters around the idea a “sketchbook” have shifted markedly in the past fifty-or-so years with the advent of the “artist’s book” and the “photo-book". Finally, the sketchbook as an object itself remains as perhaps the most important consideration. A sketchbook is a practical object, a sculptural object and a conceptual object.

Christopher Chapman