Graham Sutherland's hands-on sketchbooks

Thanks to a grant from Heritage Lottery Fund, over 52,000 items from the archive collection will be digitised and made available online. The 52 artists that we chose were working in different areas of the UK. They were either born there or had lived there or spent their time painting or creating artworks. I particularly love Sutherland as an artist and I think to be able to show these sketchbooks online next to the actual artworks that he created is just a really wonderful opportunity. Graham Sutherland at the end of the 1930s was seen by many as the great hope for English painting. By the late 1940s after the Second World War, he was probably the most successful, the most famous, living English painter. He continued as a major figure in British art really until his death at the end of the 1970s. The collection of Sutherland’s sketchbooks is one of the important collections of artists’ working materials, if you like, in the archive. But also it's particularly interesting to see that Sutherland has such a strong connection to South Wales particularly to the coastal inlets of Pembrokeshire where his imagery originates. What's exciting for me about digitising Sutherland’s sketchbooks is I catalogued our Sutherland paintings when I was first at the Tate in the late 1990s and went through those sketchbooks. Now, on the website, you’ll be able to see now just the paintings, not just the catalogue entries that I wrote about them but also these related images from the sketchbooks. My job as conservator on this project is to enable the safe digitisation of the archives and make sure images are available for photography. These sketchbooks are quite fragile and that can make them very difficult to handle. Digitisation provides a surrogate for the object, so if someone’s interested in just the information in a letter they don’t necessarily need to handle that letter if there's a digital image available which helps preserve the object because handling is a big risk to collections. Treatments on the archive materials typically include tear repair, flattening of creases, flattening of folded documents or rolled documents. One of the striking things when you look at all of the Sutherland sketchbooks is that he clearly didn’t treat them with any respect. They're not objects that he's precious about, that he stores carefully. They're things that he lays down, like a dirty brush or a rag in a way. I think digitising an artist’s sketchbook, Sutherland’s or any artist in a way, is important because in a sense we get a full sense of what an artist does when we only see the framed and glazed finished works in the gallery. To really understand an artist and how they arrive at things like this, you need to see the things that go on in the background, the studio practices that lead to the final composition. So we've chosen Turning the Pages technology to allow access to the sketchbooks actually within the gallery space. In a way, I feel I can have a lot of fun with the book. What I really like about this technology is that you can twist, literally, the book around and artists don’t always follow a format. They're often sketching all over on their sketchbooks, upside down, left to right, right to left. In a way, you're moving around the sketchbook like the artist would have moved around the sketchbook. This particular sketchbook was created by the artist in 1940. It's aged and it's weathered and you can actually zoom in on those particular marks, whether they're paint marks or you're really not sure what kind of marks they are, but you can kind of do your own investigation. It makes you feel like you're taking the journey with the artist and, in some ways, you will get that with the original but this is a more enriched experience in many ways.