austinkleon:

The diaries of Janice Lowry

From childhood on, Lowry filled small notebooks with daily musings and drawings. Then, in the mid-1970s, she moved to a larger format, 7 1/2- by 9 1/2-inch notebooks. For almost 40 years, Lowry—an artist best known for her intricate, three-foot-tall assemblages—filled the roomier notebooks with jottings and sketches. The pages contain everything from original drawings, collages and rubber-stamp images to observations about herself and the world, including the commonplace “to-do” lists many of us make: “pay bills/make plane res/get asthma med/Judi birthday gift.”

Lowry said she originally started the notebooks “as books for my sons, so they could see my progress through life. Now they’re 126 chapters of a memoir.”

Lowry died of cancer in 2009.