# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BUzeWwbByPD
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16046922-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/f6b2e42602.jpg
- **Posted:** 2017-06-01T16:50:39.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Every Thursday, we are sharing our favorite books about drawing and artists working in the medium. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I FEEL LIKE A CITIZEN IN THIS PARKING LOT COUNTY FAIR

IT’S TIME TO GREYHOUND AND COME BACK A DRIFTER

PUT IT ALL IN ONE BAG” - Jean-Michel Basquiat
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the most important figures of the New York art scene in the 1980s. Throughout his career, Basquiat inventively explored the interplay between words and images, first as a member of SAMO, a graffiti group, and eventually as a painter with his unmistakable Neo Expressionist style. For years, he filled numerous notebooks with drawings and handwritten texts. The Princeton University Press’ publication, “The Notebooks” reproduces the pages of eight of these and provide us with a glimpse of the artist’s ingenious and whimsical mind.

The cover of the publication resembles the composition notebooks Basquiat used as his medium of choice for his writing. The pages, reproduced with no interruptions or annotations, are filled with images and words that recur in the artist’s oeuvre: drawings of crowns, hatch-marked hearts accompanied with handwritten texts, and poems touching on culture, race, and life in New York. Basquiat used the notebooks to grapple with the world around him: capturing the ephemera of urban life and filtering it back through his pen. For him, the notebooks functioned as an incubator for his artistic process as well as a finished product in their own right: while some pages seem more like sketches than final products, much of the writings were not tests for ideas to be finalized in paint. The notebooks then became a way for Basquiat to continually reuse words and phrases as a an essential part of his practice.

#DrawingBooks #JeanMichelBasquiat #Basquiat

Images:

Cover of ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Notebooks’

Spreads from ‘The Notebooks’

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## Tags

basquiat, jeanmichelbasquiat, drawingbooks

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