Study Abroad Sketches

by Kate Toriseva

I’ve never been one for sketchbooks, despite the hundreds of unused journals I’ve got laying around. As an artist I work very heavily with pencil and paper, my notebooks are covered with doodles, but it’s never translated into the deliberate act of sitting down and drawing what I see, of my own free will. Maybe it was all the free time, or the fact that for the first time in years there was no class for which i had to create art, but on the way to the University of York I picked up a small, black sketchbook. I never guessed that a quick sketch of a staircase as I waited for a train would lead to 100 pages of the best experiences I could imagine, all stored in the hasty lines of that book. My little sketchbook, beaten and torn, is the amalgamation of my experiences in York, and by far, the most prized possession to come from that trip.