I’m a little obsessed with these pipes I see outside buildings. I think they’re for water, or perhaps gas, or perhaps both. I’m not a plumber, nor a gas-man. They could be filled with Dr.Pepper for all I know. I like how they look, so I sat in the shade outside Ace Houseware and drew them.

It reminds me a little bit of the game ‘Mouse-Trap’. There’s probably a little cage and a tiny man diving into a bathtub right above this. I wonder if the people that put these together chuckled to themselves with the same thought.

It seems like there’s no staying away from Oregon this summer. We drove the long, long drive north, my third trip to the state in a little over six weeks.

We were in Roseburg this time. It’s quite mountainous there, and we were visiting a house at the top of a mountain. Beautiful countryside for sure, probably got bears and porcupines and mountain lions and all sorts of wild animals, oh my.

I took advantage of the incredible views to do some very un-urban sketching. Living in Davis, I don’t normally see inclines, let alone sketch from mountainsides.

This is historical logging country. We saw so many big trucks packed up with huge tree trunks. And there are a lot of trees.  Douglas County where we were was named after Scottish botanist David Douglas, after whom the Douglas fir is named. He brought back a load of North American tree species to Britain. Look at me learnin’ ’bout trees.

I forgot to post this when I drew it. Back in July, I went to see MLS outfit San Jose Earthquakes play my team from London, Tottenham Hotspur. It was fun, though a long way. Anyway, I got a phonecall from San Jose Earthquakes this week, which was a surprise. They were just following up on my recent visit to Buck Shaw stadium and wanted to see how my experience could have been improved. Welcome to America folks, seriously, can you imagine English clubs calling up everyone who went to their matches – including away fans – and asking about customer service? (Maybe they do these days?) Incredible, I was really impressed. I had actually enjoyed the day immensely and told the guy so (even mentioned that I cycled which helped me beat the post-game traffic). As for suggestions, I told him to ban Arsenal shirts (that got a laugh). I was going to say they should have gotten rid of their cheerleaders and had Ossie Ardiles sing a few half-time numbers (Ossie had been meeting fans in San Francisco the night before – how I wish I’d been there! As you know he was my childhood hero). Football football football.

I like symmetrical pages in my sketchbooks, and this one is opposite the G Street pub (not geographically, don’t go looking it up on Street View, it’s in the moleskine). Appropriately, it’s the UC Davis Shields Library, possibly the opposite of the aforementioned pub. Here you borrow books; there you buy beer. There you can listen to, well, not very good experimental bands, here you can read Ibsen. But, you can’t drink your beer in the library (not that I’ve ever wanted to), while you can read library books in the pub (now that I have done), but only if you sit near a neon lamp.  

I love libraries, especially academic ones. When we first moved to Davis I spent a lot of time in here, browsing the medieval language section. It’s very peaceful.

“A great library contains the diary of the human race.” - George Mercer Dawson

“A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.”  – Jo Godwin

While I certainly prefer the beers over here on the American West Coast, the pubs just don’t quite match up to the ones we have back home. Sure there are some interesting bars here and there, but give me a London pub any day (but with Anchor Steam and Fat Tire on tap). This is the imaginitively named G Street pub in Davis. I can’t say I’m particularly a fan of this place (where the guy at the door comes and stamps your hand after scrutinising your ID, though you may be halfway through your first pint), I much prefer Little Prague further up the road. It does attempt to bring a little piece of north London verite to the mean streets of Davis however: the toilets are as bad if not worse than any you’d find in Camden or King’s Cross. Nonetheless, it’s a good place to come and do some drawing, bar staff are friendly and pour a good pint, and there is a lot to sketch.  Plus they have pool tables.

I wanted to practise drawing people, sure, but also bottles – I always have a bit of an issue with them, I rush the shape and scotch the symmetry. In fact, I have the same issue with people. Guitars too, funny enough, hence my hesitation at drawing musicians. I remember years ago studying art at school how often (especially in cubist painting) I’d come across still-lives of bottles, guitars and female figures, as though they were all aesthetically connected, which I think in a way they are. Practise is the only way. I’m pleased with how I represented the bottles in the image below though, it says exactly what I wanted it to. Not that I’d drink any of the contents; the shots here a big and potent. I’m a beer man myself. That tap on the right there is Anchor Steam, the San Francisco beer, very nice too. Mine’s a pint, if you’re asking.

There is usually music too, and so I sat and tried to sketch the musicians, very quickly.

Then I sketched the market itself, and look at me drawing loads of people! I am inspired by the symposium, you see. It’s hard to believe it was a month ago already! That means it’s only eleven months until the next one (in Lisbon).

I must confess, when I was a kid I hated markets. I hated being dragged around them, that slow walking, looking at stuff I was just never that interested in. Car boot sales were one thing, regular markets another, but I didn’t like any of them. The Saturday Market in my native Burnt Oak I hated, accessible via an old alley and piss-slippery steps. I remember going to Chapel Street or Church Street or one of them as a kid, pretty young I was, and stopping at a Pie and Mash shop afterwards and throwing up (I hate pie and mash too; some cockney I am). Then there was Wembley market, a gargantuan affair clustered in the shadow of the stadium, my enduring memory of it being so packed all I could see were people’s behinds, all those people at Wembley without the excitement of seeing an actual football match. I got tall, and still avoided markets (and Camden Town station on a Sunday), but I did learn to appreciate them when I lived on the continent: the one in Charleroi which covered the entire town on Sundays, the near-daily ones in Aix which were always better places to buy food than the stores, that amazing one in central Munich with beer and wurst and music everywhere. These helped me enjoy the markets back in London more: Borough, Portobello, Spitalfields. Next time I’m back, I’ll probably sketch them. I still don’t like crowds, but (since sketching the market in Portland) I’m getting more excited about sketching markets as important places of human existence. (Well, I say that now…) 

I sketched at the Davis Farmer’s Market today (I’ll post that later; all my sketches are being posted in nonlinear fashion these days while I catch up with my backlog). I missed my bus home by mere seconds, so had to wait an hour for the next one. The bus stop is by the railroad, and I noticed a cool looking engine parked about a block away, near 6th Street. I sat by the lumber yard and sketched away. It’s from the California Northern Co; if I’d had more time I would have sketched the whole thing, from side view. If it’s there again I will do so. I was pretty pleased with this drawing, so I couldn’t wait to post it.

Back in Davis… Actually these were drawn straight after Portland, but just before Monterey, but I’m getting round to scanning my drawings. Quite the backlog built up…

You may have noticed, I have a thing for fire hydrants. I may even put together a special compendium (now don’t be silly). Most people ignore them. But as a Brit kid who read Richard Scarry and other such American picture-books, fire hydrants have always seemed exciting and exotic. Well, ‘exciting’ makes me sound like a trainspotter (I prefer drainspotting), but I still love seeing them dotted about towns and cities. Did you know (and I’m not talking to Americans, who obviously do know) that you can’t park your car in front of one? The fire department could have it removed. I like their shape too – some appear to be wearing hard-hats, some (like the one below, at UC Davis) look like those stocks they used to put crooks in back in ‘the old days’ to have tomatoes and abuse hurled at them. Now they just get parts on celebrity reality shows.

The other sketch above is of gas pipes, sticking out the back of a building on 2nd Street. It was in Portland where we (the European sketchers) were talking about how cool they looked, and Gerard Michel drew an excellent picture of some. I was eager to sketch them in Davis (having done so before, a good while ago). I think this all falls into ‘everyday objects we take for granted’, but if you’re illustrating your city, you can’t miss them out.

I feel like I did this ages ago. There have been so many drawings this month, so much scanning still to get on with. I’m sure I’m not the only Portland-Symposium-participant that feels that. Anyway…this is my son’s toy tractor, a metal green Tonka. Living in the agricultural world of Davis, tractors are inevitable.

Tractor Boys… that’s what they call Ipswich Town supporters, isn’t it. I have family in Norwich, so I should be all anti-Ipswich Town, but I have always quite liked them. They were great back in the days of Bobby Robson, John Wark, and, er, the other guys who were in Escape to Victory. I remember I was in Watford once when they were playing Ipswich, and all these Watford fans were giving Ipswich supporters some stick around town, calling them Tractor Boys and saying oo-arrr, and I wanted to say, Watford? Seriously?

Apologies to American readers, you won’t get any of that. I suppose it’s like people from Nebraska calling people from Oklahoma ‘farm-boys’. Or maybe it’s not. I grew up in London; everyone’s a tractor boy from my point of view. Even me, now.  

This little brown sketchbook is in fact finished now. You can see the whole collection of brown sketches, minus a few I didn’t bother scanning, on my flickr site.

It gets pretty foggy down at the Pacific Ocean’s edge. On our last morning in Monterey we took advantage of the cry of the sea one last time before we’d head inland to the hot Valley again. I painted the above pretty quickly; I was out of clean water for my paints so I used water from the Pacific Ocean itself to paint with. Seemed appropriate. This was still Pacific Grove, but further out, on the way to 17-Mile Drive.

My two-year-old son decided he’d like to help me with a bit of painting, so I gave him my paints and my brush, and even my nearly-complete brown sketchbook, and he painted the above. I think it’s just brilliant! He has a much better eye for colour than me. I can see us doing joint sketchbook projects in the future!

This last one is from the day before, when we had lunch at an interesting little place called Hula’s, where there was a lot to draw. And that was our short trip to Monterey. At some point soon I might start posting all the drawings I’ve done in Davis since the Symposium…