Taught online via Zoom
Classes: Thursdays, March 7 – 28, 2024
Informal Studio Sessions: Tuesdays March 12 – 26, 2024
6 – 8 pm ET
$145 Patreon Members / $165 General Admission

Please note: All classes will be recorded for those who cannot attend live

This March, join Eleanor Crook (artist and Morbid Anatomy European Attaché) for a sketchbook group that meets regularly and coaxes, encourages and inspires you to develop an enriching, consistent and peculiar sketchbook practice grounded in the inspirations dear to the Morbid Anatomy community.

Picture this - Self as sketchbook! If your subconscious could be bound between soft leather covers and fitted with a clasp, its contents drawn and painted on the perfect pages, and confessions, observations and curious findings interwoven… that is the ideal sketchbook vision many of us artists of the morbid persuasion secretly desire. A compendium or visual grimoire of private art reverie and spontaneity waiting for a sympathetic soul to stroke its spine and finger its pages. Something to capture our precious thoughts and time, and somewhere to plant the seeds of our projects. Something to look back on in the future and see a reflection of the creative soul you’ve always been.

The reality may or may not measure up; we probably have a stack of half begun, half-finished and abandoned sketchbooks from different periods of our lives, or a pile of beautifully bound books – many of them gifts I suspect – that we are intimidated from making a single mark in; books that don’t follow through, false starts and roads embarked on and not quite followed. That’s human! This course is designed as a companionable safe vessel for spending time thinking about how sketchbook practice can actually serve us, how the physical book or books can become a consistent place of art development and play.

Each week Eleanor will present some inspirations – sketchbooks of the famous, clues from art history, the morbid pages of our ancestors – and set an atmosphere in the form of morbid literature and music. We will use this time to work together in our books, with time for sharing and discussing how best to use these tools to grease the wheels of our imaginations and productivity. Our “mentors from beyond the veil” will include Delacroix, Hugo, Poe, Baudelaire, Bruno Schulz and others who found their imaginations free to wander in ink and paper.

There will be an online sharing page private to the group and weekly homework. Each week there will be a taught session and an informal online hangout, 7 sessions in all – lots of working online as a group for accountability and morbid togetherness. Your sketchbooks will flourish!

And – If you’d enjoy making your own sketchbook with some homespun bookbinding or book customizing, now is the time to explore that too!

Eleanor Crook is a sculptor and wax modeler who works between the UK and several international medical museums. She is an art tutor a number of UK's major art schools and an art educator in various European medical museums. She trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools, working from life and as a medical artist in the dissecting room. She is artist in residence at King’s College’s Gordon Museum of Pathology and the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam. Her work is in the collections of the Science Museum London, Gordon Museum of Pathology Guy's Hospital, the Museum of Pathology at the University of Padua, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society London and the Hunterian Museum Royal College of Surgeons of England. Her specialism is handmade effigies, baroque bronze and eerie lifelike waxes.