TRACES OF ART: ARTIST DIARIES AND NOTEBOOKS

Diaries are the most private objects that do not aim to be published and write about the feelings, inner worlds of people, in short, the way they perceive life. Diaries are just like Fayyum portraits. Just as those portraits were not made to be seen by the audience, diaries are not meant to be watched, like artworks. Every person has their own unique approach to journaling. Since ancient times, many artists have expressed their experiences, artistic progress, and the ups and downs in their art and life in the form of sketches and drawings, as well as writing, which contributes to their creativity as a source material, in describing their works created by personal or intuitive processes. In addition to technical details such as which paints and brushes they used, these diaries contain different things such as dreams, drawings of people and nature, notes about important events in their lives, their relationships, plans to do, shopping notes, and sketches. Undoubtedly, Leonardo Da Vinci is the first name that comes to mind when it comes to sketchbooks and artist diaries. These notebooks, which include his inventions, anatomy drawings, and notes, have survived to the present day. In the notebooks in which he conveys his impressions, artistic experiences and observations of nature and living things, there are notes and sketches from architecture, science, anatomy and optics to ordinary everyday things. In addition, diaries sometimes turn into sketchbooks in which thoughts are transferred quickly, and then take place in the background of another artwork. Just like Joseph Beuys. When the notebooks containing these drawings and notes of Beuys, whose total number is unknown, are considered to exceed ten thousand pages, are examined like a diary, it will be seen that they are quite consistent with his autobiography. Frida Kahlo is one of the artists whose paintings are, in a sense, her autobiography. Kahlo shows her own life, which she sometimes masks with symbols in her paintings, in her diary full of esoteric scribbles and notes, albeit obscure at times. The family he was born into, her mother-father relationship, her loves, the pain she went through after the operations, her identity as a painter, her artworks, her dreams, her poems and many other experiences are very passionate and emotionally charged in her diary. Diaries of many artists have been unearthed after death. However, while Janice Lowry was alive, she did allow a few of her diaries to be used for an exhibition. Lowry, who started keeping a diary from a very young age and continued this habit until her death, includes drawings, collages, observations about herself and the world, to-do lists, and notes on historical events such as the September 11 attack. These 126-volume diaries of writing, drawings and collages are creative expressions of Lowry's life. The diaries and notebooks, which all these artists did not see as an artistic element in their own right, have turned into Art Journal today. In this research with descriptive scanning model; artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Eugène Delacroix, Vincent Van Gogh, Joan Miró, Frida Kahlo, Janice Lowry ve Louise Bourgeois who stand out with their diaries and notebooks, were included and their art and perception of life examined.

Keywords

Artist diaries, artist notebooks, art, diary, notebook.