Why are we sketching and what are we trying to do? It may seem like an obvious question, but maybe not, the answer will affect how we approach a sketch.

All artists, of any medium, are motivated to do art for a variety of reasons – why do they want to paint? But that is not the issue here. The idea here is, what is the artist trying to understand or reveal.

My mantra is “capture the moment” as a reason for travelsketching, but what about some other famous artist, what were they enthralled with?

• Monet – fascinated by the changing nature of light and how it interacted with the scene, not so much replicating the scene.
• Vincent van Gogh – color as an expression of emotion beyond just a representation of the scene.
• Edward Munch – his quote, “I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I saw” indicates that he is interested in how a scene changes when it is remembered, after it has been filtered by the emotions.
• Paul Cézanne – studied structure and form, and how color influenced perception.
• Georgia O’Keeffe – painted large flowers in order to emphasize the details that we miss – “Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—and we haven’t time.”
• Edward Hopper – he was interested in sunlight, “What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

For travelsketching my emphasis is to Capture the Moment. The goal is to put something on paper that will recall the time and place at some future time when I look back. That is why the exercise some have done of just putting down a color with a few words is travelsketching, even though no actual image is there, just an emotional trigger.

The above sketch of the conservatory at the botanical garden in Helsinki evokes the time and place. As I look at it now, I remember the warmth of the sun, the bench I was sitting on, and can re-experience the feeling of being there.

So as I so often say, just capture the moment.