Burn your sketchbooks.

If I go too long without drawing something, I feel bad.

I conspired with a friend to tear up my most recent sketchbooks and use his high-quality scanner to immortalize the good pages in a digital space. This was a bitter-sweet process.

He asked me how many pages we would be scanning. My conservative guess was 50-70 pages of drawings I wanted to preserve for the purposes of online display, though in my head, I estimated I would have maybe 40 “good” sketches and illustrations. On the day of the paper massacre, I cut out around 110 pages from five sketchbooks of varying quality. Front to back, that gave me around 220 pages to scan, a majority of which I considered “good enough” to boast about in a labor market. The cutting took me longer than I originally estimated, which I expected.

Though I was mixed about the carnage I wrought upon these sacred pages, being able to attach a numerical value to my efforts was reassuring. It was more than reminiscing on previous art – a practice I despise – it was an unbiased measurement. With cold objectivity, it points to an X value on a grid, draws an averaging line across the quadrants, and confidentially declares the Y value to be greater and further than its previous vector.

“I get it.” My confidant and scanner-owner was helping me sort through a killing field’s worth of butchered pages. This, it should be said, was the closest thing he has ever paid me to a compliment in the nearly 20 years of friendship, at least directly to my person. I don’t read into the absence of complimenting my work, whether conscious or unconscious on his part, because at the end of the day it wouldn’t matter. I don’t produce pictures because I want to – I do it because I have to. Upon reflection, I think this is by and large the most fulfilling waxing someone on the outside has said to me. There are always people who can draw better or worse than me. I will always have good days and bad days in my sketchbooks. The layman will be impressed. The professional will be hard-pressed. To look upon my hundreds of hours of compulsive picture making and empathize without ego or bias is something I didn’t know I needed.

Anyway, burn your sketchbooks.