📝 One Year Drawn
Learning from the process of documenting your travels
“I found that the sketches became more than a way of recording the details of the world. They began to search for something more. They began to suggest an essence rather than the detail of a subject - to try to discover different and even new ways of expressing such an essence.” — Pete Bossley
In previous posts, I mentioned a special book I was reading: One Year Drawn, by Pete Bossley. I found this little gem at the Art Fair in Auckland last March, and it’s been such a great companion I keep going back since. One of those books I have read slowly.
Pete Bossley is an architect who traveled to Europe in his early 30s and documented his travels in a series of sketchbooks in a chronicle manner, during that year he traveled overseas. One Year Drawn is the compilation of these drawings and notes.
It is a very curious event that this book found me at this moment in time.
I felt our paths crossed at the right time for me to take over the task of drawing and documenting an adventure and personal experience in the antipodes. There are many similarities and a similar mindset of chronicling the travels, but also contrasts between Pete’s book and story, and me and my Kiwi Chronicles: we are both architects the same age when doing such a trip to the antipodes, although I am traveling in the opposite direction, to his country of origin. He is a Kiwi that goes to Europe for a year to travel and learn from the city, the people, and the old culture. I am a European that comes to NZ, Aotearoa, for a couple of years to work, yearning to learn more from the land and experience nature.
Documenting your travels for a whole year, both in the form of sketches and words, is such a rewarding task. These are three key learnings I extract from this special book:
Practice makes an artist. Or anything you want to do/be.
It’s truly remarkable to see the evolution of Pete’s drawings: proof that by practicing any craft, in his case looking at and drawing every day, for a whole year, one can improve so much. Abstraction, marks, light, colour… he got it all in his drawings. The drawing on the left is from an early book. The drawing on the right is from a later one.
Change style and media to pay attention to different things.
If you want to pay attention to and discover different things, change the lens you use to see the world. In the case of artistic expression, change the media you use to do a picture and you’ll start seeing different aspects of reality. Pete uses a soft pencil to sketch the drama of a distant mountain and Florence’s dome, or pastels to see the contrast between light through colour, to try to discover different and even new ways of expressing such an essence [of the world].
Drawing is seeing.
And the more you draw, the more you see. Pete’s drawings evolve from purely describing what’s there in a detailed manner, to capturing the essence of a subject.
The drawings were slowing down. Time and heat brought space to the page, erasing the desire to draw everything. He now understood that empty paper could be as eloquent as busy lines. (…) Finally, was he starting to see as an art, wanting to interpret the world around him rather than merely record it? But he could not stop thinking as an architect. — Pete Bossley, One Year Drawn
Bossley’s book is such a treasure. His drawings and notes are an inspiration to look at the world with eyes open, to sketch and experiment with different media, and to record our journey and the people and places we find along the way.
If only I had half of the drawings, observations, and notes he produced at the end of my adventure here in New Zealand…!
Look, look, look. And draw it all.
✏️✨
Happy sketching!
Ana
This book is a fantastic find, Ana, it's such an inspiration. When did he make his journey to Europe?