Unexpected Finds

One of my most favorite places to go in any city I visit is the library. The quiet and the rows and rows of books is so enticing.

Sometimes I go to read magazines, sometimes I go to wander up and down the aisles waiting for something to catch my eye. It doesn’t matter if it is a garden book, an architectural book, an art book, a fiction book, even a medical book (yes, anatomy and all things medical fascinate me.)

Most of the time the books in the library are older books, and I actually like this because sometimes the older, more dated books can be the most interesting.

For example, yesterday I was browsing the small section of art books in the Bainbridge Island library and I pulled two of them out to look through.

One is titled This is Pollack. It’s a small book and I’ve never seen it before. It’s short, which I love because I want to skim things sometimes and this is perfect.

Once I read the first sentence, I knew I would be spending several hours getting comfortable reading it.

Jackson Pollock looks like, as his friend Willem de Kooning put it, “some guy who works at the service station pumping gas.”

And so went my afternoon…

Another book that caught my eye was a large book on one of my most favorite artists, Richard Diebenkorn. And what was so special about this book, which I’d never seen before, is that the entire book is a collection of his drawings from all his sketchbooks. It’s called The Sketchbooks Revealed.

Now it turns out that Diebenkorn kept a sketchbook with him at all times. It was like a portable studio. The book is about 300 pages and it’s filled only with pencil or ink drawings, and mostly of figures.

Well, one look at it and I knew I had to check it out and it was coming home with me so I could pour over every detail of every single page. Since drawing is my first love, I just knew this book would inspire me to get back to doing some figure drawing of my own.

When I got back home and was enthusiastically telling my husband about my find I also told him that I would love to have it, but I just knew it would probably be too expensive to purchase even if I could find it online.

Does that happen to you, where you see something and want it, no, HAVE to have it, but it’s totally out of your budget? What to do?

As it turns out my sweet thoughtful husband ended up surprising me and gave it to me as a birthday gift. What a great guy.

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