playing with pure pink

February 6, 2024Leave a comment

After the downtown sketchcrawl, I wandered about the shops, and then popped into the Bull’n’Mouth (formerly De Vere’s) for a beer before heading home. I’d really wanted to get another sketch in, and I haven’t really used that ‘pure pink’ pen that much, so I sat by the beer taps and drew those in dark brown, using the pink for the background. It’s one of my uni-ball signo um-151 pens, I have loads of different colours, most of which I only use for the occasional few lines of another sketch. I really liked how the pink and dark brown worked together for the depth. This is always a good sketching subject, the shapes and different areas of light and shade. It didn’t take too long, and I cycled home before it was dark. I had done that big detailed panorama on 1str Street, and this, and a few people sketches, so that was a good day of drawing.

i turned my face away, and dreamed about you

December 16, 2023Leave a comment

After a busy week, and after we’d just had our annual Holiday Party at work (my belly filled up with hot chocolate), I popped downtown to have a festive pint in honour of the dearly departed Shane MacGowan, as it was his funeral that day in Dublin. I never drink Guinness, but I felt I should have some Guinness to mark his memory (MacGowan being famously fussy about what he drank), and I don’t like whisky. I went to the Bull’n’Mouth, the bar that was formerly De Vere’s Irish Pub. It’s not Irish any more, but the bar itself is, having been brought over from Ireland in 2011. I found that spot I like in the corner and wrote out some Christmas cards to friends in England before sketching the bar. There were quite a few people out that night; one of my work colleagues who’d been at the party was performing a brief gig with his band and his red Rickenbacker in the plaza across the street, I had just missed it. One of the professors from work, who’d also just been at the party, was having dinner in Bull’n’Mouth with his family and a group of students from his summer course in Cork, it was nice to bump into them. My wife and son were out at an orchestra concert at the High School, so I had a couple of slow beers and got on with the sketch. I overheard a man nearby at the bar ask a woman how to spell “fascist” which was an interesting chat-up line, I probably heard out of context. I was thinking of Shane MacGowan’s funeral, and caught some of it on YouTube. Singing and dancing and music and a priest holding up a box of Barry’s Tea, that’s a great funeral. I loved Shane MacGowan. When a famous person dies and they’ve meant a lot to you, even if only at certain times in your life, it can definitely touch you, and with MacGowan it was that whole thing of being London Irish in the late 80s, all the music and people and that was like our voice right there. And not just London Irish of course, the Pogues weren’t just from London, but all over Britain where Irish people had come and settled. It wasn’t always that great in the 80s for Irish communities in England, but voices like Shane MacGowan’s definitely made it ok to be who we were, at least that’s how I felt when I was a 13 year old listening to this hundred-mile-an-hour band with folk instruments and a drunken frontman from London with missing teeth and a Tipperary-twisted singing voice singing songs about my London, Soho and White City and being down by the Thames. So I have definitely been feeling sad about his death, and he was unapologetic about who he was, and his huge flaws, and I always admired that. His funeral showed how much he was really loved, and the impact he had. Would that any of us get a send-off like that. Slainte, Shane!

bull’n’mouth

October 16, 2023October 16, 2023Leave a comment

I went downtown on Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago; I had a big drawing to do on short notice, and had to scout out a few locations to preliminary sketch for it. Of course this was the day we finally decided to have some rain, after another seemingly endless hot spell, finally some cooling down. So while it was raining, I decided to pop into the Bull & Mouth, the pub which is formerly the location of De Vere’s Irish pub on E street. I had not been into Bull & Mouth (it might be ‘Bull’n’Mouth’, I’m not sure) since it’s opening; De Vere’s originally closed at the start of the pandemic, as so many places did, before a fresh paint job outside in the summer of 2021 followed by a slow reopening later that year; I went back in once then for dinner with my wife, and that turned out to be the last time because it closed down again shortly thereafter, this time for good. The spot has been closed ever since, until this summer when the new Bull & Mouth took over the space. I had not been in yet, so I took this opportunity to finally check it out. I was pleased to see that it still looked a lot like De Vere’s, but with a few added TV screens (thankfully not overbearing), a lot of different wall decorations, long displays of beer cans above our heads, and the wording on the long black strip above the bar now referencing something about bulls rather than what it said before. The fantastic old wooden bar was brought over from Ireland when De Vere’s first opened in 2011, I remember going in there that first week and drawing a panorama while in the middle of the busy place. On this rainy Saturday afternoon, it was not too busy but there were a few people at the bar and I took a seat and ordered a beer. The guy behind the bar recognized me, “it’s been a while!”, it certainly had, about four years since I’d been in there for a beer and a sketch (dinner with my wife in 2021 not included). It didn’t feel that different from De Vere’s. I don’t know what it’s like in the evenings (I don’t go out much in the evenings any more). I had to do a sketch of course; first I worked on my prep sketches a little for the other big drawing, I was still working out the composition of that one as it was of three Davis locations all in one (I’ll post that soon), and then decided to play with the Lamy Safari fountain pen, I had not used it for a bar interior like this. It worked well, moving quickly across the page, and I added a bit of a wash too, though it took the ink a little longer to dry I think in the slightly damper air of that rainy day. I had a couple of very nice beers, and then once the rain had stopped I went across the street for a milkshake (diet be damned) and walked home (there’s my exercise). The last day of September.

bull’n’mouth

July 28, 2023July 27, 2023Leave a comment

My first time out of the house after we got back from the UK, spending a week indoors sick, I felt pretty good on the Sunday afternoon so I cycled downtown to do a sketch. I drew on E Street, the view of the former De Vere’s Irish pub, the best place to sketch and have a pint, which closed shortly after reopening in 2021 after the pandemic-enforced closure. They had just repainted all the outside into a nice new red – I sketched it in June 2021 – but it didn’t last too long, and they decided not to renew their lease, and focus on other things. Big shame for Davis, but time moves along. We heard there was going to be another bar opening in its place called Bull’n’Mouth, but this was being said for so long with no sign of any new pub that I was starting to think it was a load of, well. Then as I passed by I saw that doors had finally opened on this new place, though on this Sunday afternoon it was closed. It seemed that the opening hours were still pretty limited, starting at 4pm, and not every day. I think they are starting to open for lunch now, I heard this week; I’ve not actually been in there yet. So I decided to draw it, with the new sign up. Didn’t colour it in, but it did me good to get out with my sketchbook, document more change in this town.

and i’ll sing in your ear again

June 5, 2021Leave a comment

Last Year when the pandemic hit, De Vere’s Irish Pub in Davis took the difficult decision to shutter up, focusing on its Sacramento site, temporarily until the pandemic eased. Well, in California at least we are at that point now where more and more people are getting vaccinated, and we are preparing to All Go Back To Normal*. Last weekend we were in Yosemite (sketches to come) where they are allowing people in with reservations only to stem the crowds, and after waiting nearly two hours in line to get in after a two hour plus drive from nearby Sonora, we parked several miles away from where our first hiking trail began due to lack of spaces, and waded through throngs of people on a steep narrow trail to look at a bit of a waterfall among large groups of people all trying to take photos of each other (and it’s fine for strangers to touch each others’ devices now). The Mist Trail is so-called because of the mists of sweat from the hundreds of other hikers, not from the waterfalls. It was a hot, hot day, we were tired, and we gave up and hiked back to the car. But more on that story next time. This was the first day of June, I was working on campus in the morning for a bit, the weather was ridiculously hot. I had to cycle downtown to pick up a drawing from the Pence (the Covent Garden drawing I had done for their ‘garden-themed’ show, it hadn’t sold). Anyway, as I pulled into D Street I noticed my bike tyre was getting low. When I came back out, it was completely flat, so I wheeled it over to Freewheeler on 2nd Street, and grabbed some lunch on E Street. I then noticed that De Vere’s across the street looked a little bit different. They were busy finishing off the shiny new paint job, going from black to red, a new look for the reopening which I was told would be happening this week. If you have followed my sketchblog over the past decade you will know how much I like this pub, I’ve drawn it many times. I really like their pub chips, served in gravy. So I did a drawing of it. I stood in the heat waiting for my bike to be fixed up, and when that was done I cycled home to work the rest of the day, finishing off the pen and colours later on. I’m well pleased for them to be reopening, I hope business is good, and can’t wait until I get back for some pub chips, a paint or two, and an actual interior sketch of a pub for the first time since before This Whole Thing. Last weekend in Sonora we did eat inside for the first time, at a pasta restaurant that was not busy (and going by the food wasn’t much of a pasta restaurant either), and yeah I’m still a bit anxious to go inside a pub, it’s been so long, but something about seeing these guys repainting and reopening made me feel pretty optimistic. It’s been, well not an easy week, news of other people I know losing family members in other countries to Covid, plus just being so far away from my family in England, my dad’s birthday was this week, it would have been nice to be over there but it’s still very hard travelling (on top of the restrictions and the quarantines and the expensive required non-NHS tests, I’m still not comfortable about being stuck in a plane with lots of people for eleven hours and then stuck in line at Heathrow for more hours). I’ve been generally feeling exhausted. But signs of optimism make me feel good, and when I’m up for it, knowing I can get some pub chips and a pint or two is pretty nice, maybe with a comic from Bizarro World next door, like I used to. I hope the reopening goes well.

the answer’s in the looking glass

January 22, 20204 Comments

Continuing in nonlinear fashion (until I pluck up the courage to write properly about my summer trip to the Low Countries), let’s stop in at De Vere’s for a pint or two. De Vere’s is my go-to pub for sketching – lots of places to sit, lots of perspective, nice atmosphere, friendly staff. I also really like Sophia’s but it’s smaller, and a bit less light to draw by (but it’s my favourite place for food in Davis). Little Prague used to be my sketchpub years ago when it was there (it closed six years ago), it had a long bar perfect for panoramas, lots of stuff all over the walls, and awesome tall Czech beers. De Vere’s however has Pub Chips, and that is a big win for me. Their Pub Chips have some thick gravy on them, and some melted cheese. Not quite as nice as proper northern Chips in Gravy, and possibly more similar to Canadian Poutine, either way they taste pretty nice. On this one Saturday night in September I found my favourite spot in the corner at the end of the bar and sketched away. I got into a nice conversation with a bloke from Ireland and his American partner. I lay the paint on very thick, and scribbled away with the pen very hard; I had fun with this sketch. This was one to attack the paper. I’ve drawn this place before, and I’ll draw it again, no need to be precious. I was celebrating; that evening I had sold another drawing at the Pence Gallery in the annual Art Auction, which is always a nice feeling. I really like drawing. Sometimes I get down on myself, start questioning if I’m good at anything, and then I remember I can draw fire hydrants pretty well, and while it’s not a useful skill, it’s a starting place. I can draw a bar too, in my own way, and it’s often fun as well.

Anyway, I drew De Vere’s again a couple of months later, when I wanted to try out sketching with the iPad. It was a quicker sketch (one beer, late afternoon, on the Nov 11 Veterans Day holiday), while I played with the new Apple Pencil. A good learning experience, also enjoyed alongside those lovely Pub Chips. Now one of the nice things about Procreate is that you can create nice videos showing every stroke you made, very helpful in showing how you put the sketch together. Here it is…

Previously, I had to show this by just taking photos of my sketchbook when I remember to. For that first sketch, I actually did, and even tweeted out the progress. Here are the photos, which helpfully show the beers too, which I’m sure you will agree is helpful to know. No sign of the Pub Chips though. Everything stops for those. Prost!

de veres sept 2019 in progress

Déanaimis Tarraingt Dáibhís

March 20, 20191 Comment

Last Sunday – St.Patrick’s Day – was the day of our most recent “Let’s Draw Davis” sketchcrawl. It was a shortish sketchcrawl, three hours downtown, ending up with a get-together to look at each other’s sketches. This time I included a ‘scavenger hunt’, which was optional, but I gave it a go. It was Ireland-themed, nine things, specific (“an animal sculpture”) or vague (“snakes!”). The weather was lovely, warm and sunny, and lots of people were out. I drew a group of cyclists (a couple of whom I chatted with), focusing on the one of course wearing green.

The animal sculpture was easy, as right there on First Street are two enormous animals, a giant dog made of records and a cat gateway thing, outside the Natsoulas Gallery. It’s not a specifically Irish thing, sculpting animals, but not all the list had to be. The dog is called “Roy” and is a tribute to the artist Roy De Forest, by John Natsoulas and others. Becuase I wanted to show some of the detail, the various coloured vinyl records that make it up, I sketched up close, covering the ‘something musical’ point. I used to have some coloured vinyl records, when I was a kid I would sometimes buy them because I liked the colour, not because the music was any good, and I’m guessing those who donated these probably felt the same. Speaking of not-good music, that awful violin player was downtown again, his screeching echoing down E street. I wasn’t drawing him, no way. Sketching the records was a little bit of a challenge as I don’t like drawing circles (it’s why I hate drawing bikes), but also the sun was beating down, so I added the colour once I got into some shade.

Below is fellow Davis sketcher Alison, who has been sketching Davis much longer than me and who I knew from the very earliest sketchcrawls. She found a great display of Irish books in the window of Logos Books on 2nd Street, so I sketched her sketching those (the bookshop was my ‘something to do with literature or poetry’), and then I drew one of the books myself, a children’s Irish legend book about St. Brigid’s Cloak. I don’t know enough of the Irish legends myself, despite my Irish family I never learned any of that stuff as a kid (my mum just played Wolfe Tones, Brendan Shine and Daniel O’Donnell a lot), in fact it was my son who told me the story of the Red Hand of Ulster back when he was a preschooler (gory storytime!), though I did like reading about the Fomorians and the Tuatha De Danann, Balor and the Evil Eye, that stuff. And I loved hearing the story of the Rock of Cashel and Devil’s Bit Mountain when I went there as a kid (Cashel is full of Scully gravestones actually, that always excited me). And I know about St. Patrick of course. There’s a whole wealth of story and mythology I need to read about.

“A green object in the street” for me was a street sign. It could have been anything, a tree, a bin, a bike, a bush. I also asked for something more than a hundred years old, and that required a bit of Davis knowledge. I said not to draw my jokes which are all about a hundred years old (including that one). I drew part of the Dresbach-Hunt-Boyer mansion, which dates from the 1870s.

Now ‘snakes’ was always going to be interpretative, as I don’t expect to see a lot of snakes slithering around. We do of course have snakes in Davis but they like to hide, and don’t often go downtown, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, for obvious reasons. I knew there was a green metal snake sculpture behind the Pence, however it is no longer there, so I ended up drawing some metal pipes, and calling it “snakes”, and there you go.

And the last one “DRINK!” is a reference to Father Jack’s favourite word. I had about twenty minutes before the end, so I popped into De Vere’s Irish pub (which was packed), remarkably found a seat at the bar with a great view of the Guinness toucan that had been perched up above the taps. I drew that and had a (quite marked-up) pint of Smithwicks in a plastic glass. I don’t really like drinking Guinness much myself, it’s alright but not really my tipple. And then it was time for the final meet-up with the rest of the group. we had a very good crowd this time around, and I can’t wait for the next one in April! We’ll announce when exactly that is very soon. I have some soccer game rearrangements that are still being figured out, but I’m really in sketching mode this year – I’m already months ahead of my 2018 sketch-count.

I never learned much Irish, except a few choice phrases, so the blog title today is a little bit of Google Translate finagling. I quite like bad translation though, there’s a certain comedic innocence to it. We used to play on that in our multi-lingual theatrical performances back at university. I did have a book when I was a teenager, ‘Teach Yourself Irish’, but it was a ridiculously dry edition and put the language out of reach. I could see how it connected to other European languages, but the orthography-to-pronunciation difference was too great for me to hear it in my head, so I just learned a few words and phrases, mostly ones other people had taught me (so I could say them). None of my family ever knew any Irish phrases other than Erin Go Bragh, Cead Mile Failte and Pogue Mahone, the last one being spelled the way the band did, not the spelling I was taught later by Irish people. None of the Irish people I knew as a kid (who were pretty much my nan’s generation) spoke any Irish words, so even as the historic language of my ancestors I never felt much of a connection to it. If they learned it, it was something they might have had to do at school decades before and forgot instantly, same as I remember very little about Chemistry class except a dislike of Bunsen Burners. I do remember when I was about 12 though being somewhere in rural Kerry, and suddenly everything was in Gaelic, the radio stations, the street signs, actually that was it, the only other things around were sheep and fog. It wasn’t until I was much older that I met someone who spoke it natively, as in at home, and whenever she used it to with us it was usually in song and not to be translated (she was clear about that). So, with the Irish language, it’s another thing that I might get around to learning a bit of now we live in the YouTube era, but might not be that high on the priority list living out in California. Anyway I hope all my Irish friends had a fun St. Patrick’s Day! I certainly did.

Hey, if you want to see other people’s sketches from the day (or post your own from the sketchcrawl, if you came along) you can go to the Let’s Draw Davis group page on the dreaded Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/383785982124525/

To find out when future sketchcrawls will be, our main FB page will show those: https://www.facebook.com/LetsDrawDavis/

a festive friday

December 24, 20181 Comment

It’s almost Christmas! I haven’t had much energy for sketching lately, but I really needed to get some drawing in. I went to see Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (by the way, an awesome film, incredibly creative animation) and then popped into De Vere’s (not Into the Spi-De Vere’s), our local Irish Pub, for some Smithwicks and sketching. It was pretty busy with festive end-of-year partygoers. I sketched in dark green pen. It was really nice to get this sketch done, to get anything done. I’ve been finding it hard to be productive lately, everything seems to take me forever. Actually I have made a lot of things out of Perler Beads. This year I made my son’s advent calendar out of 14,000 of those beads; that was a lot of work. Anyway Christmas is almost here, so I wish you all the very best for the festive season, and hope you go and watch Spider-Verse, because it was pretty great.

back from outer space

August 25, 2018August 29, 20185 Comments

After I got back from Portugal, I had a hectic week (few weeks really) trying to settle back in. Busy work, busy life, jet lag, waking up at 3am every day, and the insatiable urge to just KEEP ON SKETCHING. It’s hard to explain the urge to draw stuff all the time. It’s probably less hard to explain coming back from a place like Porto where everything is a sketch waiting to happen, to Davis, which as we have seen over the past decade or so is worthy of a few sketches itself, but Porto it ain’t. You can only beat the team you’re playing, as they say, and since coming back I have ramped up my sketching of Davis once more after a relatively uninspired and fallow period. I’ve sketched almost everything I’ve wanted to sketch, so it comes down to sketching some of the old favourites just to keep the pen working, so one evening I popped once more to my local pub De Vere’s, always a nice place to hang out, and flexed the old ink muscles. This sort of drawing is about observing lots of detail, tackling interior perspective, and having a nice cold beer while you’re at it (the weather was so hot this summer). What’s more, I drew the pub from the outside a few days before: see below.

And as you can see, I also drew a Davis fire hydrant. These finished off my Seawhite sketchbook so that it was completed in July.

Now, I have a few more London sketches (and accompanying stories) to post, and then a bunch of new Davis panoramas I’ve been doing, but in the meantime I think I’m going to go out on this fine Saturday and do some more. I also need to get on setting the dates for the next few Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawls so stay tuned for those. My recent sketching travels has filled me with a new sketching-energy I want to share.

lazy monday afternoon

January 23, 2017Leave a comment

I needed to draw something in black and white for submission to an upcoming group show, and so I decided to draw something familiarly Davis. And then I abandoned my sketch of the Hunt-Boyer-Dresbach Mansion (always struggle with that one) and popped into De Vere’s Irish Pub on a President’s Day afternoon (back when we had a president I really liked) and sketched that familiar view instead. I finished off all the hatching and shading at home (just the one quick pint for me). there was Africa Cup of Nations football on the TV. Outside it was sunny, a break from the series of big winter storms we’ve been getting. I haven’t sketched in just black and white for a while (even the ones I draw in pen only are usually, well, very very very dark brown) and it was tempting to add just a tiny little bit of colour, maybe just a little bit of red on the Exit sign or a couple of green bottles, but I stuck to the straight monochrome. The show it’ll be in, “Black and White”, is at the Pence Gallery on D Street, Davis, for the whole of next month with a reception for the ArtAbout on Friday February 10th. This pub is a good place to hang out. I think I’ll go back again sometime.