On January 7, I took a full day to return to some artmaking. I had a deadline approaching to hand in a sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project. To be fair, it’s kind of a vanity project where you pay a fee to register with the company that runs the project in New York. They send you a blank sketchbook and you transform it, then send it back to them and they digitize it, put it online, and also on a van for a travelling exhibit through a few cities in North America.
I had fun though, challenging myself to create a book with cutouts and transparent paper. I took the original sketchbook apart and rebound it using additional sheets of coloured transparent paper that I bought in a craft shop in Berlin.
I’ll just post the cover and some interior spreads here. The book became a bit of an improvised, free expression art book about my trip to Berlin and also about visiting the Berlin Hamam for women, which I enjoy, and which embodies some of the multi-cultural, creative Berlin experience for me. I also think that Berlin, and all of Germany, owes a lot to Turkish people who helped facilitate Germany’s “miraculous” growth in the 1950s by coming in first as guest workers, then to raise their families. Berlin has been incredibly enriched by Turkish culture. As it has been by many other cultures who continue to contribute to its diversity.

Berlin Hamam is the title of my book for The Sketchbook Project. I drew this graphic in one line and one go, not knowing what I was going to draw when I put the pen on the paper. But type as well as an image emerged.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A one-line drawing that I started at G.’s family’s house in Osnabrück. G. was nice to make room for me on a big table in the guest room where we stayed and encouraged me to make some art, so I did. I did the complete drawing there and then traced it with a thick black pen when I was back in Berlin. This is quite large, about 3 ft wide by 2 ft tall.

I taped the drawing temporarily over a framed picture in my Berlin rental pad because it fit there perfectly.
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