Art Journaling

Property of Stormberry

Journaling has many reasons and fulfills many purposes for different people. It's not only a record keeping system to collect things that happened, but also a way to record emotions, thoughts and all sorts of memories, expressions, desires, fantasies and so on. One could say that journaling is the free-for-all place where you do whatever you want and/or need to do. Anything goes.

I started journaling at the age of 10, though maybe even earlier, as I always loved to write and always loved to store my thoughts and secrets in written form. From this time on, journaling formed for me as a way to record the many thoughts and conversations I had in my head. (Much like this blog, but holding back nothing). My journals were always worn and battered, with broken spines much like paperback books, but usually closed well. I was never a daily writer, though in my first journal I think I tried that, and as it didn't work, I moved to the system I currently have: "Write whenever I feel like it".

With time, I started adding here and there a newspaper clipping, or a recipe or a nice napkin, though I do have had a "junk box" where I stored all the pretty napkins, postcards, pieces of paper, and stuff I collected through life. You know, the kind of treasures that are usually called "ephemera". My journals still closed and more and more they were packed with words to the very edge of the page. My thoughts got more complex and here and there I added graphs and ideas for formulas on economic issues I wanted to solve.

It took decades and journaling sessions with a friend in Germany for me to start adding more, to paste things, decorate and going to the point where my journals couldn't close, but the pages fanned out and the spines started to rip, the covers slowly bending and detaching from the body. And yet, I still keep mainly writing.

A couple of years ago, through YouTube, I found out about sketch journals and art journaling, and I was astonished. I love watching videos of people art journaling or taking their sketch journals to some place and draw or paing in them and do art, but I often wonder how one looks back at an art journal. Do people fix memories to the art created? How? What kind of memories? Or are they emotions? And can one recall them exactly or that's not even the point?

Maybe I will art journal at one point in my life, but I need words and prose so much for my journaling, that even if I ever get to art journal, I will probably still keep a prose-journal too.

Drawing and painting is something that has interested me for a long time. I used to draw quite a lot back in the day and enjoyed it very much, but then I stopped and decided to give all my time and all my effort to writing, and then to studying. Maybe an art journal would be a way for me, to start getting back into my old, rusted hobbies. We shall see, but in the meanwhile and for the foreseeable future, I will continue putting pen to paper and writing away my thoughts.