Post-it sketches (x3) by Eleanor Gates-Stuart ©

Post-it sketches reflect my thoughts and capture snippets of my daily life. They have been something that sit in the background to my artist practice – more of a distraction to what I am actually doing and sometimes an enjoyable gift to send a friend and share with family.  Drawing has always been part of my life but I never really regarded any of these sketches as an influence until I was in my final year at art school. It was then that they became part of my work having gained the confidence to put them out in public. A tutor had seen one of my letters that I was writing to a friend and asked about all the sketches that I was adding into the letter and asked if this was something that I enjoyed. Much of my earlier work show signs of this approach as I fluctuated through various stylistic methods to tell a story – more often to deflect the viewer from the real story or the images being personalised. A bit of a contraction really as everyone knew they were my drawings.

I still add drawings to my letters, enjoying a fountain pen and smudging my sketch with my fingers. These days I do not write as many letters as I would like to send as email is so much quicker and I guess that is why I started using the post-it notes as they are always on my desk. A thought will be put straight onto the note and then my iphone would send it off to a friend or add it up to my facebook page where I enjoy sharing the sketches with friends. I always placed them on my personal page rather than my art pages as I still wanted to keep them close, especially as they tend to be about my friends or my personal life.

So why make them more public? Interestingly, they have become part of my research study in a discussion relating to the framing of ideas. More so…… it has been great to receive lots of feedback from folks and that is as enjoyable for me as sharing the sketches. I do not have many early ones as they were all sent out in letters – you never know they might still have a few around if the content was directly about them or if they are as as much a ridiculous a hoarder of things as me.

Post-it sketches by Eleanor Gates-Stuart ©