The visual journal: When every page becomes a map of the inner world
Imagine a notebook lying open on a timeworn wooden table, bathed in the golden light of an autumn afternoon. The pages, yellowed with age, bear the traces of a mind in motion: hasty sketches sit beside scribbled notes, watercolor stains mingle with pressed flowers, while half-erased words seem to whisper secrets. This is no ordinary notebook—it is a visual journal, a territory where the artist, the writer, or the dreamer charts their thoughts day by day. A practice as old as writing itself, and yet still very much alive, from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks to David Hockney’s iPad drawings.
By Artedusa
••9 min readWhy this need to capture the fleeting? Perhaps because a visual journal is never just a collection of drawings. It is a mirror held up to the invisible: ideas born and dying in a second, emotions too complex for words, fragments of reality that slip from memory. As Frida Kahlo wrote in her own journal, "I don’t know if my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know they are the most honest expression of myself." What if the true masterpiece were not the finished work, but this intimate trace of the creative process?
01Leonardo’s lost notebooks: when science and art danced together
It is midnight in Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop in Milan. The flickering light of a candle illuminates the pages of an open notebook, where sketches of mechanical wings, studies of moving muscles, and notes written backward—almost as if to guard their secrets—intermingle. It was no accident that the Florentine master wrote with his left hand, in mirror script: his notebooks were both laboratories and sanctuaries. In the Codex Leicester, purchased by Bill Gates for the astronomical sum of $30.8 million, one discovers pages where science and art intertwine with an almost magical grace. A study of water vortices sits beside a sketch of a flying machine; an observation on moonlight rubs shoulders with an unfinished portrait.
What strikes one most is the absence of a boundary between the "beautiful" and the "useful." For Leonardo, drawing was not a pastime but a way of understanding the world. His notebooks overflow with inventions that would never see the light of day—tanks, diving suits, ideal cities—but also with poetic details, like that study of a sleeping cat, or those clouds whose shapes evoke faces. Today, researchers use advanced imaging techniques to reveal the hidden layers beneath the ink: erased drawings, corrections, ideas abandoned midway. Proof that even a genius like Leonardo doubted, turned back, started over. His visual journal was not a collection of answers, but an endless quest.
02Frida Kahlo and the journal as exorcism
Pain is indelible ink. In the last years of her life, bedridden and ravaged by the aftermath of her accident, Frida Kahlo transforms her journal into a space of resistance. The pages, covered in vibrant watercolors and scrawled words, become the stage for an intimate battle. Here, a broken spine morphs into an Ionic column; there, roots entwine a bleeding heart, symbol of her toxic love for Diego Rivera. "I am not dead, and what’s more, I have something to live for," she writes in 1953, as doctors warn her of an impending amputation.
What makes her journal so devastating is its very materiality. Kahlo does not merely draw: she acts upon the page. She glues dried flower petals, bites the sheets until her teeth leave marks, uses her own blood as pigment. Some pages bear the traces of her tears, others are stained with coffee or wine. As if every element of daily life—a spilled cup, a searing pain—became part of the work. The colors, too, tell a story: cobalt blue, the color of hope, dominates the early pages; blood red, the symbol of suffering, invades the last.
And then there are the words. Unfinished poems, insults hurled at Diego, lists of medications. "Nothing is more precious than laughter," she notes one day, before adding, a few pages later: "Pain is not a part of life, it can become life itself." Her journal is not merely a record, but an exorcism—a way to tame suffering by turning it into art. Today, psychoanalysts study her pages as one would decipher a dream, searching in her symbols (the monkeys, the roots, the eyes) for the keys to a soul in turmoil.
03Cy Twombly: the art of scribbling as naturally as breathing
In a small apartment in Rome, a man sits at a wooden table, tracing lines with apparent nonchalance. His ink-stained fingers glide across the paper as if following some inner melody. Cy Twombly does not write, does not quite draw: he scribbles. His notebooks, now displayed in the world’s greatest museums, resemble palimpsests where fragments of poetry, names of Greek gods, and strokes that evoke graffiti or mathematical equations overlap.
For Twombly, the gesture takes precedence over the result. His pages are not preparatory sketches but works in themselves, where the unconscious surfaces with every mark. "I don’t know what I’m doing until I do it," he once said. His notebooks brim with classical references—quotes from Homer, allusions to Bacchus—but also with mundane details, like a hastily scribbled grocery list between two drawings. In 1994, one of his notebooks was stolen from his studio. The pages later resurfaced, sold separately at auction. Proof that, for Twombly, each sheet was an autonomous entity, a fragment of a larger, elusive whole.
What fascinates in his work is this sense of absolute freedom. No rules, no hierarchy between text and image. A sentence may break off to make way for a doodle, which in turn gives way to a splash of color. As if Twombly had captured the very essence of thought: chaotic, poetic, and profoundly human.
04David Hockney and the digital brush revolution
One morning in 2010, David Hockney, then 73 years old, discovers the iPad. What begins as a gadget quickly becomes an obsession. "It’s as if I’ve rediscovered the spontaneity of my early days," he admits. Within months, he produces hundreds of digital drawings, which he sends daily to friends via email. Landscapes of his native Yorkshire, portraits of loved ones, still lifes—endless variations on a single theme: light.
What changes with the iPad is the transparency of the process. Using apps like Procreate, Hockney can record every stroke, every hesitation, every correction. His drawings become time-lapse films, where the work takes shape before our eyes. "Before, we only saw the final result. Now, we can follow the artist’s journey," he explains. In 2012, the Royal Academy of London dedicates an entire exhibition to him, A Bigger Picture, where his digital drawings sit alongside his oil paintings. The public discovers with wonder that the tool doesn’t matter: only the gaze counts.
Yet some purists frown. "This isn’t art, it’s computer-assisted drawing," one hears in gallery corridors. Hockney merely laughs. "When I started using Polaroids in the 1980s, people said the same thing. But today, no one disputes that they’re works of art." His digital visual journal, A Chronology, is an ode to modernity. But above all, it is proof that creativity has no age—and no medium.
05The visual journal as self-archaeology
What if the true treasure of a visual journal lay in its imperfections? In those crossed-out pages, those unfinished drawings, those ideas abandoned midway? Delacroix’s notebooks, for instance, reveal an artist in perpetual self-questioning. Between sketches of horses and historical scenes, one finds grocery lists, hastily scribbled addresses, expense calculations. As if daily life and creation were one and the same.
Among contemporary artists, this porosity between the intimate and the artistic is even more pronounced. The American Julie Mehretu, for example, uses her notebooks as laboratories of form. Her drawings, inspired by architecture and cartography, resemble cities in motion, where layers of lines and colors overlap. "Each page is an attempt to capture the energy of a place," she explains. Her notebooks, exhibited in 2021 at the Whitney Museum in New York, show a nearly organic creative process: ideas germinate, flourish, then die only to be reborn in another form.
The same goes for the British artist Tracey Emin, whose personal journals have been exhibited as works in their own right. Her famous installation My Bed (1998), featuring an unmade bed surrounded by personal objects, originated in her notebooks. "I drew my life before staging it," she says. Her pages, covered in furious texts and erotic drawings, are a raw mirror of her emotions. "A visual journal is like therapy. Except instead of talking to a therapist, you talk to the page."
06Drawing to remember: the visual journal in the digital age
In an era where our lives are increasingly digitized, the visual journal is experiencing a resurgence. Apps like Day One or Notion allow users to blend text, images, and sketches, while artists like Iceland’s Loish (Lois van Baarle) share their daily drawings on Instagram. "Digital has democratized the practice," she says. "Before, a notebook was a sacred object. Now, you can draw anywhere, anytime."
Yet some purists lament the disappearance of paper. "There’s something magical about the texture of a page, the smell of ink," admits French illustrator Pénélope Bagieu. "A digital drawing doesn’t have the same soul." Others, like artist Refik Anadol, explore new frontiers by using artificial intelligence to generate "dynamic visual journals," where images evolve in real time.
But in the end, the medium doesn’t matter. What counts is this need to capture the moment. As Anaïs Nin wrote in her own journal: "We write to taste life twice." Drawing may be the same thing: a way to live more intensely, to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Whether on vellum paper or a touchscreen, a visual journal remains a map of the inner world—a boundless territory where every stroke is a frontier to cross.