To Sketch, Perchance to Dream…

When I was teaching at Harvard, a good friend of mine used to come to my apartment in Cambridge to sketch me (and my chihuahua Anubis) for several hours each week. I’ve always loved sitting for artists — I find it incredibly meditative, and I enjoy observing their process and progression. Since we had previously spent a great deal of time together tracing hieroglyphs in ancient Egyptian tombs on a Brown University-Cairo University excavation at the Great Pyramids in Egypt, we were very comfortable spending hours together in silence while she sketched me for long stretches at a time. We never had any set plan of what we would sketch — because from sketch to painting, there’s no single clear path. I came to really appreciate sketching as a practice — requiring time set aside every week to observe, experiment, and play. Aside from its artistic benefits, sketching can be also be incredibly healing (drawing and sketching apps attest to its popularity). Looking over our sketches from that time, I am reminded that sketches can be art in their own right — there is something delicious, to me, about a sketch that is unfinished, unpolished, and raw. A triumph of process over product.