“ They are artworks by themselves, just on a smaller scale.”  –  Dieter Buchhart

Sketchbooks are as varied as the artists who keep them.

Keith Haring used early sketchbooks as a repository for video projects and ideas for future paintings and sculptures. Jean-Michel Basquiat favored the composition notebooks used ubiquitously by American students. Words and images were combined throughout, affording viewers an insight into Basquiat’s process at his most enigmatic. Pablo Picasso, left with limited access to art materials under pressures from the Gestapo, was forced to scale down his practice and purchased notebooks from the local Hachette bookshop to use as sketchbooks.

For Purvis Young, sketchbooks were the foundational platform – his sole creative outlet at the beginning. Suggested to him as a way to focus his talents, Young began by inserting loose pages in bound books, eventually affixing the loose pages with glue – and in the process created a hand held repository of literary sculptures of image, vernacular and word.