The words and images in a sketchbook are by-products of Correspondence. As a botanical artist, my sketches are quick studies of landscapes, details, and botanica in and of nature, such as plants, blossoms, leaves, and bones. They are studies from models in a natural area, botanical garden, greenhouse, or natural museum. As I draw with graphite, ink, or colored pencils or paint with watercolors, the image emerges on the book’s pages.

In this exploration, I draw from images of correspondence in the sketchbook I drew and painted at the Reed Turner preserve in Long Grove, Illinois.

Then I explore correspondence with a favorite quotation about the creative process as I review by-products from my sketchbook. Eight pages are created by finding correspondence within the words and sketches. In this active correspondence, I alter the sketches and write the words.

I use this quotation from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.

The vision, I stress, is no marvelous thing: it is the work’s intellectual structure and aesthetic surface. It is a chip of mind, a pleasing intellectual object. It is a vision of the work, not of the world. It is a glowing thing. a blurred thing of beauty. Its structure is at once luminous and translucent. You can see the world through it.

You know that if you proceed your will change things and learn things, that the form will grow under your hands and develop new and richer lights. But that change will not alter the vision or its deep structures; it will only enrich it. But you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing, or in the actual painting, you ae filling in the vision. You cannot fill in the vision. You cannot even bring the vision to light.

The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly as it is, by the time you are finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work.

From Pages 56 – 57 (Kindle)