Danny Gregory - An Illustrated Journey: Inspiration from the Private Art Journals of Traveling Artists, Illustrators and Designers

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

Saint Augustine

When I was fifteen, I visited Paris with a group of other teenagers. Everyone had an Instamatic camera and snapped pictures of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame. Being a snotty and contrarian teenager, I complained that all we were doing was taking the same snapshots as every tourist since the dawn of photo-graphy. If we were going to have such a cookie-cutter experience, I would just buy postcards. After all, they were better photographs than my companions were taking anyway.

Like most travelers, I wanted to be able to see the great sights of Paris from my own particular vantage, to have my very own experience rather than a prepackaged, generic tour. I didnt want to read the same paragraphs in the same guidebooks, listen to the same canned narration from droning tour guides, plunder the same souvenir stands as billions before me. I wanted to be like Lewis and Clark, like Marco Polo, like Neil Armstrongthe first stranger in a strange land.

The wonderful artists in this book have solved the problem that irked my younger self. They, too, want to see the world through their own eyes, whether it be a Burmese temple, a Tuscan palazzo or the parking lot of the local Costco. They want to stop and drink it in, refresh their eyes and minds, dismiss preconceptions and replace them with wonder. They know that to truly see the places one has traveled so far to see, one need only pack along a pen and a sketchbook.

The travelers I have assembled in the pages that follow have voyaged all over the world, and they have embarked from every corner of it, too. Frenchmen who love New York, New Yorkers who visited China, San Franciscans in Rome, Italians in Africa, small town folks who enjoy being overwhelmed by big cities, and day trippers and long-distance adventurers. Some are professional animators, designers, illustrators and artists, but equally many are happy amateurs with no loftier ambitions, for whom drawing is a passion and a companion. And no matter where they hail from or where theyre headed, no matter how they earn their airfare, theres remarkable similarity in their experiences and passions.

When we document a journey in a sketchbook, we discover the difference between vacationing and traveling; we become adventurers, discovering new worlds through a thousand tiny details. Unlike those who hide behind a pudgy mystery novel and a pia colada while plopped in a poolside lounge chair, the travel journal keeper clears his mind, refreshes his eyeballs and builds a cache of enduring memories.

Almost everyone in this book agrees. Drawing while traveling has made them more deeply in love with both, has rekindled their love of sketching and has made travel something they plan for and look forward to for years.

They discover the differences and particularities of each destination through drawing: the unique flow of every city, the specific lines that make up each citys signature, the way people dress and park and eat and shop. They record thoughts and overheard conversations, as well as maps of their personal paths, phone numbers for hotels, restaurant recommendations, airline flight numbers.

Eventually, they travel because they draw, rather than vice versa. They learn that drawing is like an excited travel companion who rouses you out of bed at dawn, waving a map in your sleepy face, insisting you get up and start drawing breakfast right away.

For some, drawing is a solitary absorbing activity. Most of us have understanding spouses who are used to leaving us for an hour to squat on a stool and sketch a cathedral or a bus stop while they visit the shops and museums. Drawing is also a great icebreaker, a wonderful way to meet locals who are used to ignoring the busloads of indistinguishable tourists. They want to know how our fresh eyes see their world, made all too familiar and unexceptional to them by routine.

Drawing is also a great group activityas so many in the so-called urban sketcher community have discovered, traveling around their hometowns with a group of new friends to draw and capture familiar neighborhoods made new again.

I intend for this book to welcome you into this community.

I have asked this books contributors to open their journals and share themselves, their personal histories, their trade secrets, the contents of their art supply bags. In turn, they have been enormously honest and generous.

They have come to art through many doorways. Most remember drawing incessantly as little children. All too many lost the pleasures of art in adolescence, only to rediscover it when they grew older and more contemplative. Many were dissuaded from following their calling by concerned parents or cynical teachers but then discovered fresh sprouts of creativity emerging as they embarked on more conventional career paths. The drive to create could not be utterly extinguished. Art became an affair on the side that soon grew into an obsession, one that called them to the romance of faraway places.

This book is full of memories, of autobiographies, of souvenirs. It has few recommendations about where to eat, to stay, to visit, but lots of advice on the brands of paint and pens and paper you should pack in your bags. I discovered in interviewing people for the book that to talk about art and travel is to talk about lifeto learn peoples stories and their loves. Sketchbooks reveal that though we may travel to the same points on the map, we are each actually visiting very different places. These pages show how all of our accumulated experiences make different impacts upon us, create different windows through which we look. Two artists sitting side by side with their sketchbooks produce very disparate records of the experience. And even the same person, returning to a place visited long ago, produces a new impression as time passes. Our sketchbooks become records of these changes and perspectivesinvaluable slices of personal history that we can revisit and look deeper into time and again.

The collection of filled-up sketchbooks becomes the most valuable of souvenirs, sitting on a shelf in a place of honor. And the act of filling these travel journals continues to have an effect on the artist when she returns home. Suddenly she sees her mall or her sidewalk as she saw those in foreign climes, her eyes are opened to the everyday things, she becomes an explorer in her own hometown.

Every artist I spoke to concluded his or her part with a variation of the same advice: Join us. Keep a travel journal and draw the things you see every day on your trip. The point is not to create works of art that will hang in galleries or museums but to form a permanent record of your experience, one that you can return to when you want to recapture the nuance and the revelations you discovered on your trip. Dont worry about the quality of the drawings. Dont be intimidated by the many lovely images you will soon discover within the pages of this book. Make your own images, and you will make your own memories. If you persevere, your persistence will result in a lifelong habit that will take you on many adventures to come.