THE ARTIST’S DAYBOOK: A PRACTICE OF CREATIVE ENGAGEMENT
Ages 16-29
Summer 2020, Online
In this distance learning workshop, student fellows will create and maintain artists’ daybooks, daily diaries of impressions and discoveries drawn from their surroundings and from the world of arts and letters. In hard copy notebooks or on their phones, they’ll collect quotations; images; snippets of conversation; brief notes on people, places, the weather; whatever they encounter that resonates with them. They’ll be introduced to the work of poets, storytellers, and visual artists representing a range of cultures; and they’ll share their own canons of influence, inspiring each other to find new favorites, explore new forms. The daybook will become a resource for their creative work, but will itself emphasize items taken from direct experience, and from their reading and browsing. Social distancing may keep us out of libraries and museums, but the internet offers a nearly bottomless encyclopedia to dig into. In developing a practice of seeking, recording, and curating, fellows will cultivate their curiosity, their observation skills, and their active presence in their own creative and intellectual lives. As their daybooks build, fellows will draw on the assembled material to make their own art in text and image. Final projects will be shared on the program website and through a virtual exhibition. Fellows will connect with the group weekly via Zoom, and upload material to a shared folder at regular intervals between meetings. They should expect to spend at least four hours per week on this workshop. Limited to 9 student fellows.
Lucy Bucknell teaches film studies and screenwriting in the Film and Media Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. She is the founding director of Writing Outside the Fence, a writing program for the formerly incarcerated and their extended community.
