John Berger's "Bento's Sketchbook"

For Chanukah this year Ted gave me John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook: How Does the Impulse to Draw Something Begin? I have loved reading it for all sorts of reasons. But perhaps the main reason is that it has reminded me of the pleasures of sketching. At the beginning of the year I always think, “I should sketch/draw/paint more.” (Although “more” is the wrong word here since I don’t, in fact, sketch at all.) And at the end of every year I think to myself vaguely, “I didn’t sketch this year,” and recommit to trying to sketch more the following year. This year, prompted by Berger’s book, I decided to bind my commitment to a blog. Perhaps, then, I will really do it.

The second thing I love about Berger’s book is the way that it combines sketching—its basic doingness—with philosophical thinking (specifically Spinoza, but implicitly other philosophers as well). I am drawn to sketching for the ways it takes me out of thought but sketching (not the act of it, but the idea) also makes the think.

But still: why would I want to sketch every day? Here are some reasons: it will force me, for the time that I sketch, to slow down; it will force me to concentrate and notice things in new ways; it will serve as a record of things noticed; the act of sketching will later, possibly, make me think about the idea of sketching; and perhaps most of all (and related to all of the above) it is a huge pleasure.

I have only read the first third or so of Bento’s Sketchbook thus far and I am finding myself liking best his descriptions of drawing. Here is one: “Finally I open my sketchbook and pick up a stick of charcoal. I see his low brow, his two eyes, the bridge of his nose. The rest is concealed by ski-mask and cap. I let the charcoal, held between my thumb and two fingers, draw, as if reading by touch some kind of Braille. The drawing stops. I blow fixative onto it so won’t smudge. The log cabin smells of the alcohol of the fixative” (10). This is both an explicitly political text—Berger is drawing the Zapatista, Subcomandante Marcos—and a description of drawing. It is the not the political text that grabs me, though, but rather the simplicity of drawing.

In general I will try to post a visual sketch. But, for today, these words are a short sketch about sketching everyday.