Sketchbook Studies is literally a series of contour-line sketches from my sketchbook, begun shortly after arriving in China. They were primarily intended as an exercise for keeping my hand in drawing, while adapting and acclimating to a new culture and surroundings.

Done very quickly, in a gestural approach of just a few minutes, they are often "riffing" off the Circadian Loops series in terms of their circular, overlapping, positive-negative spaces.

Although I have a certain system for the initial angles of lines, they are meant to be freely improvised, and are done in several stages of drawing and erasure. In the later drawings, the first stage of lightly sketched lines are done blindly.

I am especially intrigued by the interplay between positive and negative space, and how simple lines can suggest sculptural forms merely through the use of negative space.

Overall, when viewing the sequence of these sketchbook drawings -- especially in a scrolling format, I am fascinated by their time-lapse quality: not only in terms of how they reveal themselves as studies of movement, but also, as metaphors for adaptability in how they flex, twist, and rotate on the page from one sketch to another.

Ultimately, they represent, for me, the organic energy of movement that animates all living forms.

                                                          —Robert M. Hopkins