Something about bottles

Something about bottles. 

I’m not sure what about them , but something about them. 

I tend to keep a half-dozen unfinished sketchbooks around, all different sizes, paper colors, and paper textures. I love it when an artist posts a flip-through video of a finished sketchbook on Instagram, and I’d love to post one myself, but it takes me forever to finish just one sketchbook. And when I do, I realise that the first page might be two years older than my last page! It sometimes feels like two different artists in one book. 

But there are themes threaded through my various sketchbooks and one of the most obvious is the bottle still-life. The image heading up this post is from November 2020, 7 months ago as I write this. I like a couple of these compositions a lot. I’m still thinking about these compositions in these next four sketches, done between January and June of this month. Some of these might be strong enough to exist on their own as “drawings” rather than just “sketches”.

What is it that I like about these? I think there’s clearly some Giorgio Morandi influence, some Stuart Davis, and a touch of Cubism happening. I haven’t studied my art history in many years, so I don’t know that I can articulate what I’m doing beyond compressing some space, flattening volumes and finding the juxtapositions more interesting than the objects themselves. 

All the while as I’m sketching these, I have a vague idea that I’m working out ideas that I’ll use in collages. While I love a sketchbook as a finished project, most of the time they’re an intermediate packet on the way to a “greater” work. 

Sidebar: That’s a whole other blogpost right there - how different medium are valued differently. 

In the case of the bottles, I do think some of these sketches went on to bear fruit in this recent collage, “Flower Shop at 10th & University”. Way back in February I pasted together the base of this collage (it’s hanging on the bottom right). Those three found papers - an old envelope, a portion of a map, and backing board from an old photo album - seemed to offer a solid basis for…something. 

I put it on a shelf for three or four months, drew in my sketchbook a lot, then pulled it back out again (I have easily a dozen more half-finished collages still in the same drawer). The bottle composition here is much simpler than in my sketchbooks, but that’s because the paper elements are pulling more weight. Still, as simple as the drawing here is, to my eyes it comes directly out of all the sketches. 

I don’t think this is going to be it. While my sketchbooks are now becoming less bottle-focused, there are still collages waiting to be finished and I’ll not be surprised to find them full of bottles.