A pandemic sketchbook becomes a prompt to design activism.
Text and images by Daniel Winterbottom, FASLA
Daniel Winterbottom, FASLA, sketching outdoors. He calls urban sketching a public act, one of vulnerability and frustration balanced with unique opportunities for dialogue, discovery, and fulfillment. In these conditions, the scene, weather, and stamina are always shifting. Focus, adaptation, fortitude, and luck become some of the best assets.
In The Thinking Hand, the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes how sketching is a multilayered process of interpretation, one that requires rapid decisions and adjustments. For example, the darkening of one form affects our understanding of those around it, or when we notice the foreground object is a certain size, we understand that a distant object must be half the size, and so on. Through this continuing dialogue a memory is imprinted.
Observation and contemplation of the phenomena and nuances of a scene are critical skills honed specifically through field sketching. The father of neurobiology, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, required his medical students to enroll in drawing and watercolor classes because he believed the act of depiction strengthened attention and obliged us ?to cover the whole of the phenomenon studied and preventing, therefore, details from escaping our attention which are frequently unnoticed in ordinary observation.?
Sketching as a form of activism, the documentation of societal injustices through the pen,...