While flipping through my sketchbook yesterday, I came across this picture, which I sketched exactly four years ago to the day. My wife and I were on sabbatical in Milan, and our daughter and I were drawing plants on a sunny day in the Brera Botanical Garden – a quiet green nook in the middle of the city. There, we met a local artist, who came over and mentioned that he used to have the same kind of sketchbook. We chatted and looked through each other’s sketches – mine on paper and his on his phone. It was one of those fascinating “one chance – one meeting” moments, which I often go back to in my memory. Actually, it turned out to be not just one meeting, because we later had a chance to visit the artist’s home studio, being somewhat overwhelmed by his and his wife’s hospitality.
I took thousands of photographs and video clips during our six-months stay in Italy, but the sketches, which I got into a habit of doing fairly regularly, definitely carry more emotional content for me personally. On reflection, this makes me want to pick up the sketching habit again.
