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Bento's Sketchbook

by John Berger - £12.99  Verso Books (2015)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9781781688199 | ISBN 10: 1781688192

A meditation, in words and images, on the practice of drawing, by the author of Ways of Seeing.
 
The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza — also known as Benedict or Bento de Spinoza — spent the most intense years of his short life writing. A sporadic draughtsman, he also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes — but no drawings.
 
For years, John Berger has imagined finding Bento's sketchbook without knowing what its pages might hold, but wanting to see the drawings alongside his surviving words. When one day a friend gave Berger a beautiful, virgin sketchbook, John said “This is Bento's!” and he began to draw, taking his inspiration from the philosopher's vision.
 
The result is Bento's Sketchbook — an exploration of the practice of drawing and a meditation on how art guides our gaze to the world: to flowers, to the human body, to the pitilessness of the new world order and the forms of resistance to it.

(Price & availability last checked: February 2015)