Sketchbook peek: Rachel Walter

In her hometown of Austin, realist painter Rachel Walter graduated from the University of Texas with a BA in studio art, before establishing a fine art career in Dallas. She quickly found a niche in portraying stellar constellations, lightning storms, and resplendent sunrises, as she drew from her formative years observing the wide Texas skies. Her practice builds layers of color and detail into large-scale compositions, to evoke the fragility—and significance—of humanity amongst cosmic forces of nature.

I’m a big proponent of note taking. My sketchbooks primarily serve as repositories for raw data: words, phrases, doodles, clippings, etc. I cast a wide net, then curate what becomes a thumbnail sketch, a drawing, a color study, and finally a painting.

The main thing I rely on sketchbooks for is filtering content for my paintings. Seeing all those rough ideas lined up next to each other, page after page, allows me to explore different ideas and subject matter, while simultaneously registering what may or may not be worth pursuing in a full-scale painting.

I used to be so careful about every drawing I made in my sketchbook, because I wanted it to be a work of art in itself. There are plenty of artists who treat their sketchbooks that way—which is admirable, if not enviable—but over time it grew clear that going about it that way wasn’t useful to my personal studio practice. Nowadays, sketching is far less precious; it's not so much an elegant physics equation to solve for a complicated variable as it is just some hasty math on a bar napkin to make sure I'm tipping enough.