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Aisha Rosli is a Singapore-based painter whose practice centers on the body, moving through themes of solitude, concealment, and desire. Her works unfold through layered gestures and recurring forms, where figures inhabit spaces that feel both intimate and unsettled.

In this edition, we turn to the process behind her practice. The notebook becomes a site of quiet negotiation, where forms surface, shift, and take hold, holding, in part, the movement of a creative consciousness.

Q1. What role does a notebook play in your practice?

AR:

I use my notebooks as a space for both the intuitive and for planning. Most of the time, when I get a random burst of ideas, I will roughly sketch it out with my coloured pencils. I also use my notebook to plan things out when I’m in the midst of a painting. Usually, I will use the notebook to plan different ideas or ways when I get stuck completing my artwork.

Q2. Is your notebook where ideas take shape, or do they only truly reveal themselves once you begin painting?

AR: I think it only truly reveals itself once I’m painting. I don’t usually do a complete sketch in my book and transfer it to my canvas exactly as I sketched it. My notebook is used to guide my paintings. Most of the time, my final work is slightly or mostly different from my sketches.

Q3. When you begin a painting, what is the first thing you listen for — the body, the feeling, or the image?

AR: The feeling. The image will come after as a reimagined “version”. Putting different images into one to create an uncanny visual.

Q4. Are there recurring images, patterns, or thoughts that seem to return again and again in your notebooks?

Domestic spaces and floral patterns seem to be a recurring thing in my works.

Q5. What does the notebook allow you to do that the canvas does not?

AR: I love how the notebook is small and intimate which allows me to be raw and free. It’s easier to create beautiful unintentional marks with a smaller surface area. With the canvas, not only is it a different medium, I tend to see it as I’m painting an image I’ve planned for, unlike the notebook, which I can just carelessly make out an image.

Q6. Is there something about the physical act of writing or sketching in a notebook that changes the way you think about an image?

AR:

Yes, with sketching, I usually do it in coloured pencils instead of graphite. The choice of colours and the spontaneity that a notebook allows me are different compared to a canvas. I have more room to create errors, which allows me to find new images and gestural marks that can be transferred onto a painting. Using coloured pencils also helps with finding the mood of the image that I want and can change the way I think about a certain image.

Q7. If someone were to read through your notebooks without context, what do you think they might understand — or misunderstand — about your practice?

AR:

I think they would misunderstand my practice. I’m an emotional being, so whatever I have in my notebook can come across as heavy, but in my practice, they are my mindscapes. So, I use different images and put them together to convey certain thoughts and feelings that are altered instead of the raw emotions from my notebook.

Q8. Do you think of a notebook as a private space of the mind, or as a kind of parallel studio where paintings begin to exist in another form?

AR: I think it’s both. It works hand in hand.

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In Their Notebook: Aisha Rosli

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