Between the Covers: An Artist Looks at the Sketchbooks of Cecilia Beaux
THE ARTISTS COMPELLING desire to draw what he or she observes of life, particularly the kind of drawing found in sketchbooks, has a parallel in the writer's urge to describe. As Christopher Isherwood put it: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."1 Drawing has been part of my life since early childhood. However, it was not until I moved to New York City from the Midwest, at the age of twenty, to study at the Art Students' League that my sketchbook habit began in earnest. Life as I had never seen it unfurled about me, and I wanted to draw all of it, especially the people: street vendors, gaggles of elderly women and men convening on benches in Riverside Park, children swarming over Jos6 de Creeft's Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park while their nannies looked on, restaurant patrons, theater-goers, subway riders, the homeless, the forgotten, the famous-I recorded them all. My first efforts were tentative, self-conscious, and clumsy, but I continued to carry a small sketchbook and fountain pen every day, determined to create a visual diary of New York as I experienced it. Twentyfive years later, I look at these drawings with great pleasure from time to time, to see what they now reveal to me. Because pages bound within the covers of a sketchbook imply a certain privacy, it is here, perhaps, more than anywhere else that an artist's work