Journal Drawings

Journal Drawings gathers nine years of work by the artist Henri Jacobs, reproducing all 666 numbered drawings from his ongoing journal series in a single 492-page volume.

Jacobs began the numbered series in December 2003 and continued it through January 2013, and the book shows every drawing from 001 to 666 in sequence, including different stages of development for some of them so that a drawing's evolution, and the evolution of Jacobs' practice as a whole, can be traced across the pages. The book includes a text by Ludo van Halem. It was designed by Mevis & Van Deursen with Lu Liang and published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam, in 2013, with support from the Mondriaan Fund and the Flemish authorities.

Jacobs works across drawing, painting and installation, and treats the daily act of drawing as a form of private notation, a way of recording and processing observation over long stretches of time. Journal Drawings is the fullest publication of that practice, presenting the journal not as a sketchbook facsimile but as an edited, sequenced body of work in its own right.