A B C, easy as 1 2 3

September 12, 2009September 12, 20091 Comment

Drew this one a couple of weeks ago and forgot to post. This is a typical scene in Davis. Guilbert House on A Street. And that is ‘A’ Street, not ‘a street’. These imaginitively titled streets so many American towns have; seriously, all those A, B, C, D, etc, and 1st, 2nd, 3rd…come on, they could be anywhere, let’s have some soul, something with spirit of place. They are just points on a grid, and look bad on street signs. A, B, C, they feel like placeholders rather than names, as though the town planners when dreaming up their grids thought, we’ll come back to those. Well, A follows B, etc so surely that makes it easier to find yourself if lost? Except in Davis, between A and B is ‘University St’, so that doesn’t work. Ok, so keep the alphabet, well how about we rename (as some cities do, such as San Francisco) those streets so they run alphabetically? And we could have them themed with things relevant to Davis, a college town, they could be named after subjects taught there, so we’d have Applied Math St, Biophysics St, Chemistry St, Drama St, Electrical Engineering St… If you’d rather see the letters remain, and I don’t doubt people are very attached to their lettered streets, then we could make it more academic, so you’d have A+ St, A St, A- St, B+ St, until you get F St, which is just before U St. You don’t want to live on U St.

Then we have the First, Second, Third Streets, well they sound remarkably like grades you get at British universities, so we could Americanize them a little and have them on a US scale of four, so First St would be 4.0 St, then 3.9 St, etc etc. Alternatively, name them after Amendments to the US Constitiution, so First St becomes ‘Free Speech St’, then ‘Bear Arms St’, then ‘Don’t Quarter Soldiers in Peacetime St’, and so on. Let’s face it, a lot of people would be lost after streets one and two. Imagine telling someone you live on the corner of Film Studies and Revision of Presidential Election Procedures. They’d never come visit.

newspaper taxis appear on the shore

September 11, 2009September 11, 20091 Comment

It was 9-9-9 a couple of days ago, and passed without much notice (a good thing). I remember when it was 6-6-6 a few years ago. Next year we’ll have 10-10-10 and then 11-11-11 and 12-12-12 and then we can go back to having a normal life and not caring about unusual dates. Today of course is 9-11, and is called so even in the UK (where 9-11 would otherwise be the 9th of November). Here are some newspaper boxes I drew on 9-9-9, on a lunchtime in downtown Davis. No stool, I sat on the sidewalk (oops, I mean the pavement), as people passed by. These things are so American, these newspaper boxes, the make me think of old films, yellow taxis, steam coming out of the street, hot dog stands (that’ll be New York then). This however is just Davis, but it’s still America, small-town America. Small-ish.

Also posted at Urban Sketchers.

dog bless

September 9, 20091 Comment

#26 in a series of 30. Dogs. Not my thing. I’m just not that into them. People – and not smart people – love to think the world is divided into ‘dog people’ and ‘cat people’, elvis people and beatles people, lib’rals and cons’rvatives, celtic and rangers, tea and coffee. And it’s not. I don’t even like the whole pigeonholing thing. I happen to like cats a lot though. And tea, and lib’rals, and the beatles and celtic, but you know what I mean. And then people act as though liking both cats and dogs (as many do) is a novel and radical buck of the trend. It isn’t. They’re both animals, they both poo on the carpet. Personally I love tortoises. They don’t leave hair on your best black clothes.

So in this drawing there is a toy dog. It’s not mine, and no I’m not scared of it. There is also a lead, to continue the dog theme. Ok it’s a power cable type of lead but you know what I mean.

For me however, Dog People has another meaning. When I lived in Aix-en-Provence, the centre-ville had a small but prominent population of ‘dog people’, scruffy ‘swampy’ types who would hang about the fountainsides beating drums and smoking and letting their many dogs, possibly their daemons, chase each other around the town squares. The Dog People. Everyone knew them.

I like that phrase though, ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. It’s true, too. We had a dog when i was younger (‘Soppydog’) and it used to tell some whoppers in its sleep.

its sculptor well those passions read

September 8, 2009Leave a comment

#25 of 30. Nearly there folks! Yes this is lego. Baby-lego. Since my son got them, I have regained my incredible lego building skills. I’m not an architect, but I am certainly a legotect, and can build any manner of planes, trains and space-rockets with the stuff.

The British Museum…Yes, I did a bit of Interactive Theatre years ago, I was really into it, running some performance-and-games-based workshops, using the methods of Ali Campbell, the brilliant guy who taught me, and Augusto Boal, the brilliant guy who taught him (and father of the art). It’s something I was good at, but never did get back into. Anyhow, the Hidden Histories project was a major eye-opener; a series of workshops with inspirational performers from Shape Arts, a disability arts organisation in London, culminating in an abstract promenade performance among the statues, ruins and spectators of the Greek rooms in the British Museum. We were told (and it might even be true) that it was one of the first (if not the first) time the British Museum had been used to host performance art. It was themed around the histories that are hidden not only in the statues and stones, but also in the people you pass every day, able-bodied and disabled. One thing I learnt was that a lot of the people we were calling disabled were a great deal more able in so many ways than most able-bodied people. I was involved with a few other projects with the Shape performers but this one was the most educational, and most fun.

As did the others, I kept a journal to document the process – not full of the sort of drawings I do now, but cartoony diagrammy stuff, notes, quotes, scribbles, quibbles. The journals were in fact displayed at the British Museum on the days of the performances, down in the education centre. I even made little plasticine figures to represent one segment of the performance. I recall, in the wine reception after the main show (and the press were there), a woman was browsing the journals and was spending a lot of time looking at my one, and she asked me (not knowing it was mine) how old the children were that made these. “Well that child was twenty-five,” I said. I was elated.

look into my eyes, look into my eyes

September 7, 20093 Comments

“Ah come on Ted, you never know, there might be something in it. Sure it’s no more peculiar than that stuff we learned at the seminary, heaven and hell and everlasting life and all that; you’re not meant to take it seriously!” – Father Dougal Maguire

I’ve wanted to draw this building for quite some time. I don’t know who the Davis Psychic is, or what they do, but if they have half the prognostic track record of Mystic Pete then they can’t be half bad. Mystic Pete, for those who don’t recall, is the famed predictor of football seasons (that year when he said that Newcastle would win the league! And they came 14th), and I am his representative on Earth, etc etc. He’s taking a sabbatical this year (and coincidentally Spurs start playing well). Anyway back to the Davis Psychic. That’s a bold statement, a yellow house with purple trimmings. Who is the Davis Psychic? Perhaps we’ll never know. Here is the page on the Davis Wiki: http://daviswiki.org/Davis_Psychic. The wiki writers seem to think the Davis Psychic is a mystery figure with a Hummer who elusively hangs up the phone whenever they call (or whenever they crank call, by the sound of it). I wonder if they have an assistant called the Davis Sidekick? Maybe a Dougal type of person, in a tank-top? “Well, I’m very cynical as you know…”

losing my trainer thought

September 7, 2009Leave a comment

#24 of 30. Trainers, or sneakers, or tennis shoes, or whatever they’re called. I’ll never say ‘a-dee-das’ though. It is ironic however that I absolutely hate shoe stores, I cannot stand the places. I hatebuying shoes, it fills me with dread. I also hate sports stores (except those devoted to football shirts, like the one in Davis, which is really cool). And yet I love shopping for adidas trainers. Not that I do it very often of course. But for me, once every couple of years or so is often.

the only way is up

September 7, 20094 Comments

#23 of 30. Occasionally I lie on the floor, just to look up. It’s comfy down there. The only way is up. But I’ll tell you what, drawing while lying on the floor and looking up is bloody hard. An unusual one this.

sacramentalists

September 6, 20092 Comments

I went sketching in Sacramento yesterday; it’s been a while. The bus is 50 cents more expensive now. Not much else has changed though. I decided I finally wanted to draw that tall brick building downtown, I think it’s an elk’s lodge or something, and was excited when sketching out the perspective lines. However, this being downtown Sacramento, there are a larger than average concentration of street mentals per square yard, so I was distracted. As I was sat on my stool, one slightly agitated gentleman started screaming into an empty doorway at the brickwork, some nonsense about his “enemies in the drywall” and how they’re coming and what not. I carried on. But then he took residence in the middle of a large structure of metal poles and began yelling abuse at the universe in a variety of voices. I’m not really into that, and I felt a bit like, you know, I didn’t want to hang around such nonsense for too long, so I abandoned the interesting perspective sketch and traipsed up to Midtown to draw a wooden building, on the corner of 23rd and J, with a tree to the right and some blue sky. A typical Pete; it’s my equivalent of a three-chord song (but it takes considerably longer, when drawing every tile and slat).
Shame; you would have liked the brick building. Maybe next time.

flits from shop to shop just like a butterfly

September 3, 2009September 3, 2009Leave a comment

It was so warm and sunny on Saturday in the City. We went up to Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill (and like a nob I forgot the camera) to see the Labyrinth, before heading over to Fillmore Street to have lunch and look around the really cool shops they have there. My wife like ‘Seconds to Go’, a cool second hand store that is in the drawing above, and I loved ‘Paper Source’, a great store stuffed wit many different types of paper for all purposes; I bought some cardstock to make some cards of my drawings. They were very friendly in there.

I sat on the pavement outside Crepevine (where we had eaten lunch) and sketched the colourful street ahead of me. It’s a cool part of a very cool town. There are so mnay different neighbourhoods here. I could draw San Francisco for ever.

Also blogged over at Urban Sketchers.

camera obscura

September 2, 20096 Comments

Well, not really obscura. This is my entry for Illustration Friday, theme of ‘Magnify‘. The camera on the table looking at the living room. Not really magnified, but you could if you want to.