This week I’ve been thinking through the role of journaling in my life, and in Heron Dance’s future. In particular, I’ve been considering the use of more innovative abstract images. I’ve not used images in my personal journal to explore issues of interest and concern in my life or as a spark for my creative process. I’ve focused instead on writing out my thoughts in order to bring clarity to subjects that might benefit from logic. Writing down thoughts, options, concerns adds logic to a process that letting them just flow through my mind lacks.

But this week I’ve spent some time looking at journals by lots of different artists — journals that combine both words and art, though the words are often unintelligible random thoughts. In part I was wondering if this might add something important to my journaling process. Reaching for a thought glimpsed just on the outer edges of understanding is, I’ve found, important in journaling. Is your inner world trying to tell you something?

I was wondering if the creation of journaling pages might, in Heron Dance books and blogs (such as Nurturing), complement my efforts at more abstract art, in combination with excerpts from the journals of novelists, artists, poets, filmmakers and musicians on their creative process. Looking through hundreds of art journals in the last week, I started to ask myself what I was missing. Where’s the logic? Where’s the thought? Many seem like random doodlings lacking skill, thought or a point. Perhaps recording random impulses without thought has value. Maybe a free flow of emotion and impulse is art. Some seem the detritus of mental illness. (I haven’t included those in my examples below. I don’t want to criticize the work of others in Heron Dance. Instead, below I offer examples of journal pages below that I find inspiring or interesting as art).

Notice the similarity of many journal images with a painting pictured below that — one that sold a few years ago at auction for over $100 million. And consider some of Picasso’s paintings. He was out there exploring territory way beyond words, way beyond understanding. But that work, and Basquiat’s below, don’t seem the mere outpouring of emotion, rage. There seems something deeper going on. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is all art, all valid. As I said, there is a striking similarity, at least in terms of abstract shapes, bold colors and stick figures, between many of the artist journal pages I came across in the last week and Basquiat’s work.

I probably won’t start adding images to my own journals. The written process I’ve come to rely on complements my efforts at art so I’ll stick with it. But using images, including abstract images, to accompany excerpts from the journals of creatives, may be a visually interesting way to present to you works and words of creative inspiration. So I’m going to work on that, starting with tomorrow’s post.

In the meantime, below are some examples of artist journals that have got me thinking. These happen to all be from the book 1,000 Artist Journal Pages by Dawn DeVries Sokol.