Once an opera singer, alumna gains following for impromptu artwork

For months, Sarah Nisbett ’09 rode the subways of New York with a secret.

Working as a temp while searching for full-time work in advertising, she was traveling for the first time in years to and from a job that was not securely centered in the arts. The new job followed her successful pursuit of a career in opera, which began with a graduate degree in voice pedagogy and performance from Westminster Choir College and crescendoed with performances across the country, including at Carnegie Hall.

Despite the success, Nisbett realized that, for her, the lifestyle of an opera singer was not conducive to her happiness. “The more successful I became, the more unhappy I became,” she says. “The more I was booking, the less I was able to be home and see my friends.”

One day, alone on the subway, she pulled out a pen she had taken from her office supply closet and opened a sketchpad she was carrying. An inveterate doodler who majored in art history at the University of Michigan, Nisbett had no formal training in drawing and little confidence in her ability to draw from real life. Still, a fellow passenger had caught her eye, and she started sketching.

“I think I was looking for a connection,” she says. “I was an anonymous person in an anonymous city working an anonymous job. In seeing someone else and re-creating them on paper — by making them exist — I made myself exist in a way.”

Nisbett kept sketching, silently keeping the project to herself for about seven months. After her drawings had improved, she finally decided to hand one of them to her subject — a stranger on the train. Her once-secret drawings found a bigger audience when she launched an Instagram account she called Drawn on the Way.

Today, Drawn on the Way has more than 28,000 followers, and Nisbett published her first book, which is also called Drawn on the Way, last December. The book bills itself as a guide to capturing the moment through live sketching, but it doubles as a guide to living in the moment and connecting with your surroundings. 

“We’re all tuned out a lot, we’re disconnected in so many ways,” Nisbett says. “This book is an invitation to look around and imagine stories. It gives you an opportunity to be curious and empathetic and feel connected. I think of these drawings as notes on the world around me.”

Nisbett emphatically believes anyone can learn to live sketch, not just those with refined understanding of perspective, line and color. “Time, repetition and mistakes are your best teachers, and they were certainly mine,” she says. “I’m very much a perfectionist, which was great when I was an opera singer. Drawing allowed me to be very imperfect.”

In the mode of live sketching, point of view can trump technique, and Nisbett has been refining her perspective for a long time. She chose art history as a major in college because of a consistent interest in words and pictures. She brings a penetrating gaze to mundane details surrounding her, such as the particular way a man tucks his foot underneath him on the subway or the elegance of a woman’s hand draped over her purse. When she’s sketching, Nisbett can’t always see a person’s face or whole body, but these details give clues to who they are or might be. 

Nisbett wasn’t ever sure how she would use an art history degree, and even as an undergraduate, she was already gravitating toward music and performance. After a summer program with Westminster, she enrolled as a graduate student. “My Westminster experience was very affirming,” she says. “I was given opportunities for lead roles, and I felt like I was in the right place.” 

Although she is no longer singing professionally, Nisbett continues to partake in musical improv in New York City. She gets to make music on stage with friends but without the stress and 110% commitment to auditions, rehearsals and performances. “It’s candy all the time — no vegetables,” she says. 

Advertising is also in the rearview mirror. Drawn on the Way is Nisbett’s full-time job. In addition to writing the book and promoting it through related events, she live sketches weddings — an offshoot she calls Drawn on Your Day that came about because of a request from a “very camera shy” groom, she says. Nisbett’s live sketching began as a way to capture life’s seemingly meaningless moments, but it now has her preserving the moments that many people call among the most memorable of their lives. 

“None of this has been a direct path by any means, but it keeps growing,” Nisbett says. “At first I thought I could only do this on the subway. Now I feel like I have a larger sense of purpose: to remind people to connect to their sense of wonder.”