Sketchbooks

Photography and painting were Jonathan Harris's first loves. During his time at Deerfield Academy and the early part of his career as an artist, he collected all his ideas in sketchbooks. He made drawings and small watercolors, and stuck dried leaves, insects and used cinema tickets in them. He supplemented these collages with comments and stray thoughts, and the sketchbooks became his reservoir of ideas. While traveling in Central America in 2003, Harris was robbed of his luggage at gunpoint. In his bag was a sketchbook containing nine months’ worth of material, all gone in a flash. This traumatic experience proved to be a turning point in his career. Harris stopped keeping sketchbooks and abandoned painting, turning instead to computer code as a medium of documentation and expression. He now realizes that something got lost in this radical digitization process, so he has recently shifted his focus to making physical art again.