Every year, the Brooklyn Art Library receives bundles of Moleskine notebooks from around the world. These are then cataloged and digitised, before being exhibited at their gallery. Thriving in the heart of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, the library is home to a unique initiative, The Sketchbook Project, whose aim is to create the largest collection of crowd-sourced sketchbooks from across the globe. On one of the walls of the library, 34-year-old Poornima Vaidyanathan’s Moleskine is on display. The Bangalore-based art director of a global production and deployment company heard about the project through her sketchbook buddy from art school who lives in the US. “She sent me an email asking me if I would like to participate. Typically, artists store their sketchbooks in their closet and they don’t really talk about it,” she says. Made entirely of countless tiny dots using a pen, Vaidyanathan’s sketches stay true to her chosen theme —“First thing in the morning, last thing at night”. It follows her life in a metropolitan city, from daybreak to nightfall. Daily morning rituals such as picking up a milk packet and newspaper, brewing filter coffee, a bucket-bath, the dilemma of what to wear reel into her literally crushing commute. Later, as dusk falls, the images indicate family time spent watching television. Once the doors are locked and the alarm is set, she prepares for another day. “I looked at my everyday life as a little story, as there is so much I come across in a day. I wanted to illustrate Indian life for those living in the US.” With contributions from artists from 135 countries, The Sketchbook Project is a constantly evolving library of sketchbooks and is fuelled by creative people of all ages, from all walks of life. Conceptualised by two art students Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker in 2006, the project began when Peterman, 29, was a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. Frustrated by the traditional gallery system, he realised that he didn’t want to “create art for art’s sake”. “I knew I was never going to be a professional artist, I wasn’t that good, but I still wanted to create. I knew there were others like me who felt the same way. They weren’t going to be among those who would end up selling their works to museums and have big shows,” he says. At the time of inception, he didn’t have any clue where the initiative would lead them and about its far-reaching consequences. What started out with merely 500 entries in its first year has amassed nearly 33,823 sketchbooks in less than a decade, from countries such as Croatia, Argentina, South Africa, Japan, Dubai and many more. The enrollment process for the process is simple: sign up on The Sketchbook Project website (www.sketchbookproject.com) and receive a Moleskine notebook for a fee ($28 or Rs 1,800). The digital library on their website is a virtual extension of the Brooklyn Art Library, containing 17,118 complete scanned contributions to the project. Another interesting addition is a mobile library, a food truck which travels with many of these completed sketchbooks, and annually exhibits them in cities across the US and other countries. The crowd-sourced library of doodles, drawings, and scribbles features works on light themes such as the greatest story every told, a list of ex-lovers and favourite songs, as well as subjects such as revenge, loss, grieving and death. Take the case of Lydia Vltolas from Wichita, US, who was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer in 2013. Her sketchbook from last year chronicles her journey through her mastectomy and chemotherapy. In her description on the website, she writes, “Most of my art represents the emotional and physical journey a breast cancer patient must endure. My treatment is not complete and I have not won the battle with cancer. Radiation and breast reconstruction surgery will be next”. Most of the pages are dotted with a collage of words in different fonts — hope, strength, beauty and inspire. In one of the pages drenched in pink, she quotes Gandhi: “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” Peterman recounts a similar heartwarming incident in California during one of his annual tours with the mobile library. “There was a sketchbook by a man who had lost his father. The family members would come back every day to read the book together, laugh and cry after browsing through its contents. Another sketchbook contained the newspaper clippings of the things a father had done during his lifetime, put together by his son. You get teary-eyed for a person you haven’t even met,” he says. Sachin Karle from Mumbai is another eager participant from India, who has a humourous take on the traffic situation in his city. He sketches a traffic light intersection, where vehicles weigh in from all four corners, and draw to a standstill. An India Tours bus stubbornly refuses to move from its chosen spot, an overloaded truck’s driver shouts at a vegetable vendor for blocking the road, and a child riding behind his mother on a Scooty enjoys the drama unfolding on the street. In his other sketchbook, Time and the Way We Travel, local trains spilling with commuters, vehicles zipping past on the road and an aeroplane flying in the sky, are Karle’s protagonists. He writes, “Each sketch is an expression of how time and our mode of travel are intricately interwoven; how we often choose our mode of travel, based on how time-challenged we are.” Peterman now hopes to publish an anthology of drawings from sketchbooks from different countries. A book featuring a collection of sketches, handpicked from the library, was released last month. “The project is quite similar to Facebook and Instagram, but what is missing on these social networking sites is the human connection and we fulfill that. This is one way you connect intimately with the audience, where you have someone physically holding the work, which is hard to find in a faceless digital world,” he says. The Sketchbook Project is now on the road again for its American tour.
