Awesome random randomness. I went to an information desk at a school, I expected to find older people, but instead I was met by a couple of honors society college guys. We started chatting it up and I told them I was into art. At the end of getting the info I needed, one of them said he wanted to show me this notebook. Apparently some time ago, someone lost this on the campus and they found it and kept it. It's full of sketches and poetry. It's pretty cool. After showing it to me the guy said that I could have it. He figured since I was an artist that I would really be able to appreciate it--how cool!
So this is the first page of the notebook. The book seems to have been from 2011/2012. She (Sophie is the name on the front of the book) seems to have been into theater and the arts, since this is a notebook for movement studies in theater and another class in the modern arts, and cannabis. That may be a picture of her with someone else on the left page there. It looks like she's on the teacups in Disneyland.
There are a lot of taped in and enhanced cut outs from magazines. I noticed that a lot of the magazine pictures were taped over sketches that she gave up on. This one on the bottom, I am guessing, is of the two sides of "Saint Merry J".
It seems like she wasn't from San Diego to begin with...
I'm guessing from the D-land pictures she's from LA or OC. There were also some SF references, but I haven't seen her use the word hella yet so she seems pretty Southern Californian.
...but she did seem to be very excited that she would be moving to San Diego.
When I find little treasures of intimate slices of someone's life like this, I can't get my mind off of how I am simply impatient for the time when people will truly be ok, better than ok even. The overall feeling I got from looking at this notebook was that she was/is a sweet girl, and she probably is confused about what she believes in and thinks about her own life. She doesn't seem to have had anyone to really be there for her or guide her and direct her, but she does seem to want to have self-respect and love what is good. It was this mix of youthful innocence and this feeling of the pressures of life pressing against it, threatening to squeeze it to death.
This drawing from the notebook is from Sept 16, 2011
This one features some Shakespeare. It is from Measure for Measure. It is a speech by Isabella:
O you beast!
O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister's shame? What should I think?
Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair!
For such a warped slip of wilderness
Ne'er issued from his blood. Take my defiance!
Die, perish! Might but my bending down
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed:
I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,
No word to save thee.
For the most part, her drawings were sketches and experiments. I think she did great with markers. I have always had a hard time wrapping my head around that medium.
These were interesting to me. I like the cloud of hearts and the umbrella as a protection. The foot coming out of the mouth could be so many things. But I found it funny no matter what it was. Funny and kind of sad.
What made me the saddest were these though. There is a series of sketches where the women have no arms and their eyes are empty. They are "beautiful" women, but they are not very happy looking. It reminds me of another artist's work that I saw before. She too made figure drawings of "beautiful" women who looked sick and unhappy. She herself struggled with body image and identity.
This was one of the last pages in the book. I thought it was kind of neat and creative what she did with the picture from the magazine, making her look like a mermaid (mermaids seem to be a reoccurring them in the book as well). The book's last pages look to be from 2012, so I guess the guys who found it had been keeping it since then. Maybe they just wanted to get it off their hands, but I thought it was really cool that they were willing to part with something they had for so long and give it to me, someone they just met.
A friend of mine asked, "You think she'll be embarrassed if she finds this, since these are personal?"
I had thought about that too, I honestly had (and it's why the pic I posted of the inside cover doesn't show the picture that might be her in close up), but this sketchbook has passed through a lot of hands in the school already and all seem to be understanding and non-judgmental who have viewed it so far. The only thing that really gave me pause was her cannabis use. It is 'medical' but something in my gut says that her family probably doesn't know about it.