Month: November 2012

wrapped up in books

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Powell's, Portland

Powell’s City of Books in Portland is one of the most well known bookstores in America. It covers a whole block downtown, and I went in there on my first night in Portland and nearly never came out again. Books books books, everything you could think of, I was lost in a literary world (well, in my case more of the non-fiction world, and specifically the language section) as soon as I walked through the door. It’s the sort of place I would probably have spent every day of my teenage years (by the way, I spent almost every day of my teeneage years in bookshops, whenever at all possible). The map of the store is incredible, but in my case I still got hopelessly lost. I just kept seeing things I wanted to read. when I reached the section on languages and found the books on philology I nearly started crying. There were titles I have never seen in a bookshop, just sitting there on a shelf in front of me, saying “Go on, Pete, you know you want to spend the rest of the evening reading about Old English and its Closest Relatives”. I didn’t give into book-buying temptation (mostly because I didn’t want to carry loads of books to the pub with me), so I got a Powell’s pint glass and a couple of t-shirts instead. I did find myself getting sucked into their Star Wars section, got a little sidetracked looking through the maps and travel books, and I passed a good deal of time in their zine and small-press section too. I came back on my last day there to sketch the outside, but ended up getting sucked back in and wandering about its colour-coded sections like a mouse in a cheese shop.

http://www.powells.com/

let’s draw davis community park

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let's draw davis! community park, 11/11/12
Hey sketching folks, it is time for another Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl, this time back up at Community Park in north Davis, from the Davis Art Center to the Library. The Fall colours are very colourful at this time of year and if it gets too cold, the library is a great place to sketch.

DATE: Sunday November 11, 2012
START: 11:00 AM, outside Davis Art Center (F & Covell)
FINISH: 3:00 PM, inside Mary J Stephens Public Library (14th & B)

As always this sketchcrawl is free and open to anyone who likes to draw. I hope to see you there!

Facebook event

Pete

all around the world i’ve been looking for you

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International House, Davis
A small break from the Portland sketches (many more to come!), to bring you something I sketched on Saturday afternoon. This is International House, aka I-House, one of Davis’s great institutions (for foreigners such as me). I have been meaning to come by and sketch for a very long time, and finally on Saturday I did, and a nice building to sketch it was too. I haven’t personally been to many events here in the past but I really should. A few years ago when my son was a baby we came to a potluck party here for internationals, which was nice. I brought trifle (that didn’t sit there for very long! My trifle is lovely, I’m not kidding) and we chatted with a friendly German couple, but that was it really, I was shy and didn’t speak much. Still, I like being an international. It’s nice and you get to travel.

As I sketched this I listened to the latest History of English podcast, which was about the Greek word horde that has filtered its way down to English, and I was especially pleased because there was a mention of Wulfila (or Wulfilas; it means Little Wolf), the fourth century Gothic bishop whose translation of the Bible from Greek to old Gothic provides us with our earliest example of a Germanic language, and an East Germanic one at that – I loved studying that. Wulfila’s my hero – though his choice of Gothic vocabulary may have been heavily influenced by the Greek rather than what was in general use among the Goths, his work is a massive resource to Germanic philologists. It has been a few years since I read about it all though.

In other news…well done Barack Obama!!!! Re-elected President tonight! Knew you could do it!

join me by the riverbank

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pdx hawthorne bridge
When the rain comes, I don’t run and hide my head. I do however stroll about and look for a little bit of cover so I can do some drawing. I love sketching bridges – no trip to Portland is complete without at least one bridge sketch. I like drawing bridges more than fire hydrants. Partly it is because I like being beside the river (as opposed to crouched just off the kerb hoping cars don’t hit me), but also because bridges represent that great connectivity of humankind, our ability to create cities and urban landscapes in tandem with the forces of nature, those big powerful (and very much alive) rivers. London exists because of the Thames, and prospered because it had a bridge (which admittedly kept falling down but that is another story). So when it rains, as it did in Portland (and occasionally in London too, I’m told), surely bridge sketching is a perfect sport?

Not exactly. For one thing to get out of the rain you often have to go beneath the bridge, which makes drawing the thing a bit trickier. Thankfully decent covered vantagepoints do exist for the more intrepid urban sketcher. On Sunday lunchtime, with a modest hangover from the previous night’s PDX craft beer samplings, I made my way down the southeast waterfront to the Hawthorne Bridge (above). The rain was coming down in bouquets (Portland rain is sweeter, as I’ve said before) and there were lots of people milling about the water’s edge. Boating crews lined the river, and were one-by-one taking to the water, cheered on by colourful umbrellas dotted along the bank. The road that comes off the bridge is high and curving, and I found a spot far beneath where the driving rain could not touch me. Joggers and other happy, soggy people jogged and plodded about the path in front of me, so I stood slightly back on a slope of grass and sketched away as best as I could. I think my slightly swaying demeanour comes across in the sketch, and that’s why I like this one at the top so much. After about forty minutes or so it was time to move on, and walk through the rain.

I had another rainy bridge experience the day before, at the end of a Saturday afternoon. I had spent the morning sketchcrawling (well, sketching, not so much crawling) with the fabulous Portland Urban Sketchers in two indoor locations in Old Town (that post is yet to come), and afterwards went to the Saturday Market. I drew Steel Bridge on my previous visit, but it’s a lovely structure and deserves to be sketched many times. This one, below, took a lot less time than the 2010 one, partly because I was sketching in almost direct rain. It wasn’t heavy rain, just a light sprinkling really, but there really wasn’t a good location beneath Burnside Bridge to sketch the view I wanted, so I took my chances. Still, once the pen started to protest at this treatment, I wrapped it up, but I was happy with it.
pdx steel bridge

If I could spend my days drawing bridges by the river I would be one very happy fellow. Incidentally here is a set on my Flickr stream called “Bridges, Riverbanks…”

long and winding rogue

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Rogue Ales, Portland
Rogue Ales, in Portland’s Pearl District.

The last time I was in Portland, I made a very short trip to Rogue for a very little amount of sketching, but this time I wanted to come and really take it in a bit more. After spending most of the evening sketching, eating lovely food cart food, mooching around Powell’s and calling home, I plodded along to Rogue, found a spot at the bar, ordered a ‘Good Chit’ blonde ale, and started sketching. I spoke to several friendly people while I was there, all artists, all beer experts. This was a theme I would find pretty common in Portlanders. I like the Rogue beers, I have sketched at the Rogue in San Francisco before. I counted the beertaps individually before sketching them, and measured in my head how it would all squeeze on. Sure it’s a little wonky but I enjoyed drawing this. One guy said to me, on observing me get off my chair and rearrange my jacket and bags all orderly and neatly, “you do everything the same way you draw!” I mention this because people have said this sort of thing before, I must be very neat, very organized. Well, I can’t say I’m completely disorganized, but neat… well, you should see my desk. My mind is usually less a drawer full of folded socks and more a tumble-dryer full of ping-pong balls, ideas and thoughts zipping all over the place. In Portland however I was there to relax, and relax I did. When the sketch was done, I walked down to the MAX light rail and went back to the hotel. Nice and neat.

pyrohydrantophilia in portland

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PDX hydrant

Let’s get these out of the way now, shall we? There are lots of different hydrant designs in Portland, most of which are orange, many of which are weather-beaten and full of personality, if you see personality in such things as I do. They don’t tell good jokes or anything, but personality goes a long way, and they do help put out fires.

 PDX hydrant

The top one was drawn after meeting with the Portland Urban Sketchers in Old Town, while the second one was drawn on my first evening in PDX, downtown. Someone in Portland did ask me if I really was obsessed with fire hydrants as my sketchbooks suggest, to which I was like, hello, like. As i’ve said before, we don’t get them in Britain so they’re still fascinatingly ‘foreign’ to me and remind me of Richard Scarry books I used to read when I was a kid. More than that, they are ever-present civic symbols, and really are different from place to place. When people ask me, oh what do you draw, I say “I draw fire hydrants”, it gives me something  more to say than “oh, you know, this and that, stuff”. It’s only really a small percentage of what I draw (most of what I really draw you don’t see, it’s scribbled cartoons of Magneto on any piece of paper on my desk) but I like them. In 2010 I did ‘NaNoDrawMo‘ and drew “fifty fire hydrants and other metal pipes that come out of the ground“, and promised myself after that crazy experience I’d never draw another. Yeah, that didn’t last long…
PDX hydrant
I think I might make a comic filled with fire hydrants who tell bad jokes. They stand there all day like a doorman or security guard thinking of jokes, and all of them are really bad. As you know I won’t be short of material on bad jokes or fire hydrants so it’s the perfect combination for me, should take me about five minutes to write. Perhaps I could invent a superhero who can see and hear through all the fire hydrants in the city, and when he/she sees crime can travel through the hydrant system and transform into Hydranto and beat the bad guys, put out fires, rescue kitties etc. Speaking of comics, I went to Floating World Comics on Monday, at the corner of 4th and Couch (pronounced cooch, by the way, it was named by Officer Crabtree from ‘Allo ‘Allo). This comic shop came highly recommended by my comics-making urban-sketching friend (cheers Kalina!) and I was not disappointed – more zines than I have ever seen anywhere outside of ZineFest, lovely little independent hand-made comics, some of which I’d bought before in SF, but many many local PDX titles. Plus so many regualr comics, graphic novels of every kind; it was beautiful. I ended up getting a couple of small comics, “Jetpack Shark” and another called something like “Everyone in the world can fart except me”, which is a sad, sad tale. Also picked up one of the DC relaunched titles, the ‘new 52’, Superman #0. I have been getting a ‘comics-udaction’ these past few years by my comics-appreciating friend Roshan so hopefully one day he can go there too. I got there just before it opened, so I drew the fire hydrant outside, as the street dried out from the previous day’s rain.

PDX hydrant

So anyway, if you are a pyrohydrantophile (new word of the year award, please, cheers?) and want to see some more of these guardians of the galaxy, go to my Flickr set “Hydrants and Pipes“. But I’m not really that much of a pyrohydrantophile. I don’t even know how they really work.

you gotta go away, so you can come back

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portland ship
Everybody needs a weekend away every now and then. This past weekend, I flew up to Portland, Oregon, a city I had first visited two years ago for the first Urban Sketching Symposium. I wanted to come back and see some places I had previously missed, catch up with some local urban sketchers I know, eat from food carts, sample local beer, and spend time by the river. I like it down by the river. This was the first sketch I did after arriving at the hotel and light-railing it downtown, a big boat on the Willamette. The bridge in the background is the Burnside Bridge; those spiky towers belong to the Convention Center. As I sketched, cyclists cycled by, joggers jogged on, and gaggles of geese giggled at my goggles.

You can expect the next week or so of posts to be about my trip to Portland, either in a linear or nonlinear or scrawled comic or urban dance form. I got rained on rather a lot, but that was ok, it’s Portland rain which is sweeter than other rain, and contains beer and voodoo donuts.

sketching by the willamette, portland