Sketchbook Stacks by Chacho Puebla
By Alixandra Rutnik on Jul 09, 2020
One Club Member aims for 10,000 Insta posts
During lockdown, we asked our One Club Members to share their recent projects with us, and we received A LOT of great responses– We love to see what our members have been up to, so don't forget to send us your cool work post-quarantine too!
Chacho Puebla, renowned creative director and One Club Member, has an Instagram account dedicated to his sketchbooks and everything in them– ilchachoscratches is like taking a peek inside Chacho’s brain. He is constantly posting new content on his account for us to explore and admire. We asked Chacho about his Instagram sketchbook so we could learn more about what drives his Insta feed.
Your Instagram aesthetic is super cool– when it comes to sketching where does your mind go and where does your inspiration stem from?
Thanks! I guess my mind goes everywhere. I doodle when I’m doing something that does not need my visual attention, like calls, listening to documentaries, or online talks. I get loads of imputes from there.
I’ve been doing this for a long time – my inspiration is a constant stream. If I listen to something I like I keep it on my Evernote and then I write them down later. I do the same thing with visuals. Sometimes I draw what is right in front of me, other times my ideas come from a movie, a documentary, a talk, or whatever. I like drawing when I’m watching videos the most.
Tell me some background about your sketchbook and why you decided to showcase it the way you did.
I’ve been curating these notebooks for a while. I’ve been keeping journals and poem filled books since I was a kid. However, this kind of notebook started in 2002 in Chile. The agency I was working at was a huge meeting-kind-of-agency. They did meetings to decide what we will bring to the meeting where we will decide what we will bring to the big meeting. Usually, they were very long, crowded, and unproductive– like 20 people in a room for more than 4 hours. So instead of listening to things on a loop, I preferred to draw and take some notes from the crazy and useless verbatim that was going on during those meetings. At least I could take my own productivity from it. I kept drawing but in my free time. When I traveled, I would draw on planes. I used to spend 200 days a year traveling, so airports became my second home– drawing was a great escape. Thank God I don’t travel like that anymore. Now I doodle when I’m on a call or listening to audiobooks.
I started posting my drawings on Instagram in 2016, as a way to stack them somewhere. Plus, it forced me to keep doing it and not lose my creative freedom. Starting in 2016 I did not buy any new material for two years, so I had to use the free notebooks I got from meetings and steal pencils from where I could. That's why a lot of my notebooks are not made of the best paper. That forced me to use something to cover the side behind the drawing because the ink always bled through the paper. I used photos, memories, or collages to cover the left side of the book. Of course, the right side is for my phrases or my drawings.
Do your sketches tell a story?
Like I say in my Instagram bio, some sketches make sense, and others do not. There is almost no connection between photos and drawings, but sometimes the photo on the left is very strong and invites me to do so. The idea is to keep drawing whatever comes to my head. It’s part of a big project I’m doing. My goal is to reach 10,000 posts. That translates to about five years of drawing.
"It is a great memory for my son and daughters– they will have loads of things to read directly from the mind and soul of their dad."
The first drawing on the left is about how greed is killing us, but we are still promoting it. The second one is a random thought about my bad experience in Paris, and the third one is a drawing of a bad client who believes in Superman.
How many sketchbooks have you filled?
Probably around 80, but there are a lot of I don’t share. So for my Instagram feed, I guess around 50? Because all of the notebooks are stolen or gifted to me, they never have the same number of pages or are the same sizes– I focus more on the number of pages rather than the number of books.
How do you know that you have an idea that you want to sketch out?
When something sticks with me. A phrase, a word, a look, a pose, a light, a shape, whatever hits me goes into the book sooner or later.
Your Instagram bio says, “Stack of ideas to be developed someday–” what do you want to develop?
There are ideas on sketches, a series of paintings, ideas of installations, photos, books, etc. My Instagram notebook stack is where I will go to pick the ideas I want to develop whenever I have time. Also, it is a great memory for my son and daughters– they will have loads of things to read directly from the mind and soul of their dad.
Plus, it’s an experiment to see what people like the most and how I react to their preferences. If I give what people what they like or not– it’s a really good ego exercise.
Lockdown has been really long, how has your creativity been affected recently?
These crazy times have been really good (creatively speaking) for me. I love this total hold in the world. I hope this will help us realize how trivial some of the things we did before the lockdown were and how stupid we were by not giving importance to the relevant ones. The environment, our families, spending time at home– cooking, reading, thinking, training, eating healthy, asking yourself questions about you and so many things we never had the time to do before. I would continue to lock myself up once a month to stop the crazy speed I am used to flowing at every day. A lot of these lockdown thoughts will make it into my sketchbooks.
One Club for Creativity Members get featured here on the One Club website and across our social media channels. Have a new project you'd love to share? An upcoming exhibition and you'd like us to help spread the word? Drop us a line at membernews@oneclub.org.
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