Why I Sketch: Mafalda from Switzerland

Moment Sketchers, you are in for a treat today! In May, I had the chance to chat with Mafalda Tenente, who’s originally from Portugal but has now been based for many years in Switzerland.

But there was a third country at the forefront of our conversation — Japan, and its centuries-old artistic tradition of sumi-e brush painting. Three years ago, Mafalda began exploring the world of Japanese painting for herself, and her sketchbooks are a testament not only to the style, but to the values and principles it represents: Paying attention to every detail, keeping hold of a beginner’s mindset, and honoring the beauty of the present moment.

Mafalda was also very generous in sharing so many glimpses into her sketchbooks here, so I hope you’ll enjoy both our inspiring conversation and the visual feast of her sketches and paintings:

What was your background with art growing up in Portugal?

I started learning classical ballet when I was four years old, so the only art that I’ve really ever practiced regularly has been dance — and classical ballet at that.

I’m a person who gets lost in art museums very easily, but art was never an option for me. I come from a middle-class family, so for me there was always this need to pick a career that offered real stability. So for thirty or more years of my life, the artistic side was rarely in the foreground. I actually thought I’d end up pursuing that affinity by putting my business skills to the service of institutions whose mission is in that space, but for a number of reasons the right opportunity never really presented itself and my career just ended up going in a completely different direction.

When I was working in Lisbon before my MBA, I took an art history course at night after work. Because those were the types of books that I bought when I wasn’t working — art history books. So there was always this affinity, but there wasn’t actually any practice.

Other than the drawing class all high schoolers in Portugal then had for a year, I had never actually drawn or painted until I came across Japanese painting.

I love that you’ve always had an interest or an affinity for art. When as an adult did you start practicing art yourself? When did you pick up a paintbrush for the first time?

I started picking up the brush really about three years ago now — and it links directly to my connection with Japan.

I had wanted to learn the language, and when I was googling Japanese language courses, I came across this course on Japanese painting. I love Japanese art, and here was this open class where you could join and all the materials were there and they said just try, anyone, no prior experience needed. The description was all about meditation and disconnecting, and so I thought, “Well I’ve never painted really, so this is probably going to be terrible, but let me give that a try.”

So I just went for this class, and I kept going back, because it’s a bit like a meditation exercise. You start by preparing your ink, there’s no cell phone, you shut out all the noise, quiet down, and then you just start your painting practice. This is meditation in the fact that you’re re-centering yourself and just focusing on creating on a piece of paper, with as few strokes as possible, the essence of a topic — I find that fascinating.

And then at one point, I felt that I needed more books, and that I wanted to keep learning on my own because the classes were only once a week. So for Christmas that year my partner gave me a couple of books on sumi-e painting from a Japanese master, and it turns out that one was a book on how to do the practice with brush pens. He says it’s an easy way to start, and if you don’t have all the materials and you’re always on the go, it’s a good option to actually keep practicing.

So I went to an art supply shop and I found the exact brush pens that he had depicted and that’s how I started — I thought, “Well this is really cool. This I can just take in my pencil case and then I can practice every day, without any hassle.”

And so for about two years now, I’ve been doing it every day, and then once a week I do a big painting with the scroll-sized paper and the ink. But daily, it’s usually the brush pen practice. The strokes and the technique are the same, but the outcome can be very different, because you can experiment a lot more with the brush pen — because you don’t feel like it’s such a loaded experience, like “Oh my god, the big scroll.”

You can allow yourself to experiment a bit more with a journal or sketchbook.

I’d love to hear more about how your love for art and your love for Japan intersected.

Japan was like a snowball effect. I had already taken the art history course, and at some point, I was in a London museum shop, and I was thinking that I needed to find another art history book on another period or movement to continue my education.

And then I saw this Japanese art history book, and I have to tell you, I was at the Tate Britain, and I remember that moment because at the Tate Britain, you don’t have Japanese art — but there it was in their bookshop. I just looked at the book, and then I was looking at a bunch of other stuff, but I kept looking at that book and I eventually bought it and brought it back home to Switzerland.

And of course the question was, why did I buy a book about Japanese art? I didn’t know, it just called to me and I had to read it. And when I finished reading the book, I said out loud, “You know what? Next year, we should go to Japan on vacation.”

So we went to Japan for the first time in 2008. I didn’t speak a word, but I felt like I was home. It took us quite a while to get back to Japan, but it was 2014 when I went there for the second time. It was after this second time that I decided to learn the language. When I got to Japan last year for the third time, I was actually having classes with a painting master in Tokyo. And so at some point, those two things just ended up meeting a bit in the middle.

So you’ve had this long interest in Japan and a long interest in art, and I just love how they made their way towards each other — and it sounds like your gateway into this connection with Japan was through Japanese art.

It is how it started. It was the love of art that led me to pick up that book, and once I read about the basic history, I was so fascinated that I just started diving deeper and deeper into the country and the culture — and most of it has all been done remotely, because those are the opportunities that have presented themselves.

As we move into talking about why you sketch in general, what does the style of Japanese sumi-e painting specifically bring to your artistic practice?

I’m not sure if I can actually disconnect the two too much — because I do only paint in this style, and I haven’t actually chosen to learn other techniques, because I’m so fascinated with this particular field and I could spend a lifetime and still have more to learn.

But the reason that I do it goes back to something I said earlier — it’s the chance to disconnect. For me, it gives me energy; whenever I sit in front of that blank page and shut out everything else around me, it’s really like a meditation. It really is a moment where I can get my energy back at the end of the day.

I also used to keep journals before as well, and I would always doodle stuff around them. And so with sketching, why I’ve carried on and why it makes me so happy and why it gives me this energy is because the way I’ve created these “zen-like” journals, and this habit of journaling, has been to connect.

One of the principles of sumi-e painting is this connection with the transient, which means — connect to the world around you, what is happening in the world around you, look at the seasons. And I think the offshoot of that is that it forces you to look at your day and think about what was the one really beautiful thing that you saw in nature or in your day?

No matter how draining or bad a work day that you might’ve had — where things didn’t really go the way you expected them to go — it’s kind of like cheating your brain into happiness. It’s like, “Well wait a second, that bird — the redstart — just came back for the first time this year, and the couple’s nesting again up on the roof. Oh, and our peonies just started blooming this week, they’re so pretty and there’s so many more buds than last year.”

There’s always something in your day that you’re grateful for and there’s always something beautiful in your day — and so it brings about a feeling of happiness in our otherwise busy, stressful lives. That’s one of the reasons that I do it, because it does make me super happy, and it does link directly to the principles of sumi-e painting: connecting to the seasons, paying attention to the details, but also appreciating everything — the positive and the negative.

It’s not that the flower is just pretty, it’s that the flower will fade away the next day, and that change in state itself is also a beautiful thing. So you record not just the beautiful, colorful bud, but maybe the bud that fell to the ground.

One of the other principles of sumi-e painting is this feeling that nothing is perfect — and that perfection doesn’t exist. Everything is ever-evolving. And if you take that principle, what that actually means is that you can always be happy with what you’ve done today, because you look at it and instead of focusing on the negative, you focus on the things that you’re able to do — there’s always something that’s going to accidentally happen and make it different and interesting the next day.

It’s this kind of forward-looking attitude: You can always grow and you can always improve, and that the practice of today is the practice of the day and it will always bring you forward — so that’s another reason I keep doing the Japanese painting.

In Japanese painting, you always try to keep the feeling of a beginner, which is very difficult. But if you’re a beginner, everything is always new and everything is always exciting, and it’s like, “Oh my god! I couldn’t paint at all before today.”

I’d love to return to something you mentioned earlier. You said that with Japanese painting, one of the goals is to look at a subject and try to convey its essence in as few brushstrokes as possible. I thought that was really interesting — let’s say a beautiful red bird has just landed on your balcony.

What’s your approach or mentality when you’re bringing your brush pen to the page? How do you try to put as few brushstrokes down as possible?

It’s very funny, because the idea goes back to one of the principles of that type of painting — which is that you don’t correct, or you cannot correct strokes, and so you should only bring about the few characteristics of the subject that allow people to still recognize it, but without filling in the details.

One of the reasons for that is that your brain will automatically make up the rest. It’s like when people say it doesn’t matter if you only have the first letter and the last letter of a word and you scramble everything else in the middle, your brain can still read it. It’s almost that type of effect, where if you put as few strokes as possible, but they’re the right strokes, people can still recognize the bird.

But then, because not everything is connected, maybe people can imagine a bit more on their own, based on their own experience — and that also connects to leaving enough white space on the page, which is another principle of this type of painting.

So for example, I’ve practiced small birds a lot because they’re my favorite topic. At the beginning, you practice from examples of masters. You have the strokes that they use for a particular type of bird — small birds, large birds. Then, when you see a new bird, you try to see its outline, and you try to see what are the things that make it really distinct. Does it have a colorful beak? Is it a long body or a short body?

So if you focus on those things and get them right, people will still recognize its type.

The interesting part is this white space, or the unfinished, and what is not on the page. It’s a very Japanese kind of concept, even though this type of painting came from China — but the idea to leave a lot of empty white space is something that the Japanese have taken to an extreme. And they use it in a lot of arts, not just painting — it’s the in-between, the pause, and the silence. It’s actually part of the expression.

To end this great conversation, I’d love for you to tell us about your book, One Moment, One Drawing. Where did the inspiration come from?

The book really came from a request from friends. When they were flipping through my journals, I could see the smiles on their faces and then they would inquire, could they have some of these? Seeing people happy almost felt like an extension of the happiness I feel myself when I’m painting. So the idea for the book was to share some of my work with people in a more permanent form.

Then the question was — how many drawings? And what’s the concept for the book going to be? So I went back to the principles of Japanese painting. I wanted to have images that followed the seasons of the year. Originally, in ancient Japan, you had 24 seasons, which followed the astronomical calendar — and so roughly every two weeks, the season would change.

These seasons also have very poetic titles — for example, the current season this week is “The bamboo shoots appear.” They’re very poetic and they always refer to some element of nature which is changing around you.

And so I wanted to give that same feeling, but 24 would have been a bit too much, and most people in the Western world are more familiar with the 12-month time period of a year — so that’s where the idea of 12 postcards featuring 12 paintings came about. They all follow these seasons. And so on the back of the postcards, I picked the Japanese season that matched that image and then I created a variation of that title.

The idea for the book’s title itself came at the very end — and it came when I had the idea of making the postcards perforated and detachable. There’s this one principle in the Japanese tea ceremony, ichi-go ichi-e, which translates as “one moment, one meeting.” But phonetically, Japan has this kind of limited phonetic range, so there’s a lot of things that sound exactly the same. So with ichi-go ichi-e, if you switch the kanji at the end, it can also say “one moment, one painting,” because the word for painting is also e.

So the idea in the tea ceremony is that every moment is unique — you have the circumstances, the season, you’re unsure of whether you will meet the exact same person again, so you need to treasure this moment. So the idea of having the postcards be detachable is that you could create your own moments and your own meetings, by sharing the beauty of the postcards with people you like — by sending them to someone, you create new moments and new meetings every time.

If it’s a gift of happiness and a gift of beauty, you would want it to be passed forward and you would want people to have as many moments — and as many drawings or meetings of their own — as possible.