“My family tells me it’s dark, but I don’t really think it’s dark … I just added in the surroundings of where I was,” Ellie Manos ’18 reflected on this page of her notebook, drawn during a flight from Los Angeles to New York over spring break. “First, I put in the door and the exit sign, and then it became sort of plane-crashy.”

Manos is an art major and plans on pursuing art after college. “I don’t know what I will do if I’m not an artist,” she said. “I’m just now being more proactive about figuring out my career path.”

A performing artist, Olivia Lindsay ’19 is new to the visual arts, but turned to sketching to help her deal with the challenges college brings. “I got to college, and everything felt a little mindless compared with what I experienced in high school,” she said. “Last year, I was quite sad at Kenyon, and I wasn’t doing my homework. I was doing a lot of doodles because I was frustrated by the culture of Kenyon. I wrote Post-Its that were a little sarcastic sometimes and tr[ied] to make people think about why they do the things they do at college.”

“When you look at your own stuff long, you can’t really tell if it’s good or not,” Emma Brown ’17 said while thumbing through her notebooks. We arrived at this page, and “don’t panic” caught my eye.

“I started asking friends what they say to themselves when they’re having a hard time and they need reassurance,” Brown explained. She used this notebook page as a starting point for a larger art project in which she painted an umbrella with quotes. “The umbrella is like a metaphor, because it’s like all these words of reassurance are sheltering you from the world. I say ‘don’t panic’ — that’s why it’s in the middle.”

“Leonardo DaVinci used to write backwards,” Armaan Maharaj ’19 said of this page in his notebook, “Mostly to confuse and throw off people that were trying to steal his ideas. I thought it was novel, so I gave it a try.”

Maharaj has been perfecting his speed and fluidity in backwards writing for a while. Recently, he has taken to creating and labeling small worlds in his notebooks, combining individual constructions in an interesting and extraordinary way. “I was wondering what it would be like if you had a series of flat earths, or an infinite series of flat earths even,” Maharaj said. “I’m interested in cartography and old cartography and the imaginative ways people envision their world.”