Drawing From Life is a collection of short biographies and journal pages. The journals keepers come from diverse backgrounds, working as architects, photographers, writers and of course artists. There's even a retired engineer who's 103!
The writeup explores the lives of these people, specifically focusing on the relationships with their journals and where they find inspiration. Carol Beckwith traveled to 36 African countries. Lynda Barry prefers yellow legal pads to remind herself she's messing around.
The chapters are organised by how the journals are used. Some use their journals to record memories, others to create imagery. There are sketches, drawings, watercolours, photos collages, etc. These journal pages aren't as inspiring as the biographies. Some of the images are just scrawling. Some are pretty abstract.
The biographies are definitely much interesting to read. I'm glad I borrowed this book from the library. Probably would not have bought it if I was able to see what's inside.
This book should appeal to selected journal keepers.
List of contributors
- Lynda Barry
- Julie Baugnet
- Carol Beckwith
- Sophie Binder
- Erwin R. Boer
- Erica Bohanon
- Gary Brown
- David Bryne
- John Clapp
- John Copeland
- Mike Figgis
- Hannah Hinchman
- Rick Hoblitt
- Steven Holl
- Maira Kalman
- Jenny Keller
- Anderson Kenny
- Marcy Kentz
- Christopher Leitch
- Nakano Masayoshi
- Thomas Oslund
- Lyle Owerko
- Robert ParkeHarrison
- Michael Roberts
- Denyse Schmidt
- Tucker Shaw
- Brian Singer
- Andrew Swift
- Renato Umali
- Idelle Weber
- Martin Wilner
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3 Comments
Your photos of the book are
Submitted by Dennis Lim on
Your photos of the book are very nice. What sort of camera do you use to take these photos/videos?
@Dennis Lim The photos are
Submitted by Teoh Yi Chie on
@Dennis Lim
The photos are taken with a Canon 7D with 50mm f/1.8 lens. The 7D is an overkill for this, seriously. My previous Canon 400D is also perfectly capable of this.
More important is the lens, in this case is the 50mm f/1.8, which is equivalent of 80mm on the Canon cropped cameras. It's just nice for me to stand straight and shoot with the book at bed level. Usually I shoot at f/4 to get the image relatively sharp in the centre.
The videos are from Panasonic GF1 with 20mm lens mounted on a tripod so I can have free hands to flip the pages. Panasonic cameras have very good video quality at default settings. Usually when I choose the correct exposure, I don't have to do any more editing other than adding text captions to the videos.
Why I don't use the GF1 to take photos of books is because the 20mm lens produces some strange moire effect when shooting against white pages. The effect only appears for books, strangely.
I'm probably going to get another lens to test it out on the GF1. Hopefully I can downgrade from the Canon 7D and use just one camera.
thanks for the info.
Submitted by Dennis Lim on
thanks for the info.
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