Don and his Sketchbooks
Don always had a sketchbook in some pocket that he would automatically take out and start to draw, write, scribble in. Some photographs of Don’s sketchbooks are coming soon…
In his semi-autobiography Come One, Come All!, Don wrote:
“Everything demanded to be recorded, and my own great worry was that the dime-store supply of sketchbooks might run out. They seemed to have only a limited stock and I was practically buying them in carloads. They were small, inconspicuous, leather-bound books which all looked like textbooks. I liked them for that reason. Sketch pads sold in art stores are obviously arty and a menace. Eyes always start bulging, heads twist around, crowds gather, and an artist usually has to give up sketching. It’s a natural reaction; even sign painters are bothered by gawkers. I know that if I ever happened to come across an artist sketching I would break my neck to get a look at what he was doing. But curiosity not only kills cats, it kills creation.”
“That is why these dime-store books gave me the protection I needed. Whenever I started sketching, I pretended to be making out a laundry list of adding a column of figures, mumbling aloud. This worked fairly well as a distraction, though I knew I couldn’t go on mumbling such stuff as “three socks, six shorts, four shirts” forever. Yet I had to keep drawing so as to let the world know what wonderful people I came across - not only the way they looked, but the way they invented lives for themselves out of nothing: carrying signs, fishing for change through sidewalk gratings, shining shoes, peddling gardenias, selling corsets, plugging song hits, washing windows, sharpening knives. They made the streets a feast for artists.” (Quoted from Come One, Come All! pages 83-84.)
I have many of Don’s dime-store sketchbooks. They are filled with backstage Manhattan: the down-and-outers, the artists, seekers, workers, wayfarers, the creators of the rich texture of living New York. Sometimes he scribbled notes on what his subject said to him, some poured out their life stories. Several of these pages from Don’s sketchbooks appear under “Street Stories” and more are coming.
