Travel Artist: Sketchbook Drawings and True Stories from the Road
Author: James Richards
Publisher: ORO Editions
Publication date: October 7, 2025
Language: English
Print length: 176 pages
Dimensions: 8.5 x 1.18 x 8.5 inches
Fans of books by urban sketchers have a special place in their heart for the artist’s list of materials. The colors the sketcher relies on; the pencils, pens, paint or markers used; the brand of sketchbook: all allow you to peek into that private space where the work actually gets done. Which makes the last item on James Richards’ list all the more interesting: a corkscrew. It’s a choice in keeping with the humor that enlivens this account of eight travel journeys.
Travel sketching, for Richards, is a gratifying and adventurous activity that is perfectly compatible with an excellent glass of Chianti. It’s a way of reaching out into the world and making contact in ways that are sensory, but also deeply social. Those two qualities weave together in stories that make it hard to know where his pictures of the world begin and where the real people who inhabit those pictures end.
In one scene, the artist’s caravan breaks down in the African savannah. While drivers and guides grapple with the situation, Richards is beguiled by the majesty of the landscape he can now drink in. Like a dream-vision, a goatherd emerges from the distance. Under the spell of the moment, the artist asks if he can make an image; magically, the goatherd agrees — and then asks to be paid. Picture meets reality, and from the way Richards tells the story, both are better for it.
Through countless anecdotes like this, Richards brings a reader/viewer directly into the enchanting, amusing and sometimes bumpy ride that travel sketching has been for him. A former urban designer who teaches drawing workshops worldwide, his pictures are not renditions of things he has seen; they are points of entry into experiences he has had, and catalysts for a spirit of conviviality he is committed to conjuring with his readers.
That conviviality means sharing and exchange, more than straight reporting. It is openly human, eccentric and candid. A series of pull-out sections called “The Sketchers Code” offer advice to fellow artists in a voice that is both instructional and blunt: “Don’t worry about style. … Get over yourself.”
Being frank like that will likely flag some boundaries, and much of the delight in Richards’ book lies in the range that those boundary-encounters can take. Sometimes they are political, like a run-in with suspicious customs agents in Cuba. Sometimes they engage the body, like what parts of it other cultures find appropriate to touch. In an account of sketching on a National Geographic expedition, the boundaries cross from the human to the animal kingdoms.
In all cases though, it seems that for Richards, boundaries are not meant to keep things apart, but are where differences make contact. For him, it is that contact — and the dialogue that can happen there — that matters. He prizes sketching for the way it lubricates that dialogue. As a writer, that gives him lots of breadth. As much as he discusses travel sketching, his writing also deals with rock music, cooking, celebrity chefs, literature and movies. Like the whole idea of travel, his attitude is based on generosity of spirit and ever-widening circles of interest, influence and cross-pollination.
In that spirit of exchange, Richards’ drawings leap off the page like urgent, energetic dispatches, with much about them that is happy to remain notational. Colors are jaunty, playful and fill everything they describe with clear light, open space and an optimistic frame of mind. In this book, drawing is dedicated to the pursuit of happiness — which is not as simple as it sounds. Happiness isn’t trivial. On the contrary, Richards’ experience as a travel artist demonstrates how complex, variegated and often startling that condition can be.
