Nature Journaling

Most of us have experience with journals. They come in many forms. Blank journals with interesting covers dominate the shelves near the door in gift shops and bookstores. Some people organize their lives with daily journals filled with appointments and to-do lists. Others keep diaries and gratitude journals to capture the highlights of their day. An artist might keep a journal of sketches and thumbnails to support or inspire a later project. And of course, there are travel journals, gardening journals, and bird List journals. The list could go on .  

Nature journals share a common theme in subjects drawn from the natural world. In this, they might seem quite the opposite from the interior subject matter of process painting. Why have I brought them together under one roof in Root Woman Studio? I think they share the qualities of "not knowing" and "being curious" that I find central to creativity.  

In process painting, we begin open and not knowing what is going to bubble up through the course of our painting time from within our psyche. With our nature journal we take what is real in the present moment in front of us and become increasingly curious as we begin to actually see our subject deeply and without preconception. When looking with a nature journalist eye at a collection of twigs, dissecting a piece of fruit, or studying the colors in a crab's back we are looking not with the intent to identify, generalize and label what we see. Instead, we are looking to see the questions that arise. We might ask ourselves why does it bend like that? Or what does this remind me of? Or are they all the same? What kind of spot in the landscape does it seem to like? We might be subject to distraction from our initial subject by the scent of something coming into our awareness or a call from a bird. All of this material is fair game for our nature journal, a recording of our attention at a certain time and place. In process painting we learn to follow the energy, to pay attention to what is wanting to happen, wanting to be painted. In nature journaling, we learn to heighten our awareness of subtleties in a particular space. We learn to drop out of time and into the particulars of a moment.

Nature journals can be messy, disjointed, mixes of colors, notes, ink. They are not designed in advance or built with an audience in mind. They are personal responses to an experience and reflect the sometimes frustrating gap between what we see and what we know how to capture or convey to our own satisfaction. They encourage our inventiveness. I find a complementary aspect between process painting and nature journaling; both creative engagements fascinate me.

• Melinda Nakagawa's online classes: https://sparkinnature.com/
• John Muir Law's great tutorials: https://johnmuirlaws.com/
• Process Paint Studio for supplies: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ProcessPaintStudio
• Quick Draw for warmups: https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/
• John Retherford for macro insect and bird subjects: https://www.instagram.com/retherfordjohn/