Mont St Michel

January 16, 2023January 15, 20235 Comments

A couple of years ago at the beginning of 2021 I started another Virtual Tour sketchbook, this time around France, a much bigger prospect than my tour of Britain. I only got as far as Le Mans before I stalled, probably because I have now been to France in real life twice since I started it. Still, I’ll get back to it. I didn’t even get around to posting half the drawings on here yet. One of the ones I drew was Mont St. Michel, a place I’d never been to but always wanted to see, and now I have. We drove from Bayeux down to the very edge of Normandy, to the place where it meets Brittany, one of the most beautiful spots in France. Mont St. Michel is a rocky outcrop in the sands of the English Channel (the French don’t call it the English Channel, they just call it La Manche), and a shiver runs down the spine when you first see it out there in the sea, rising like a fantasy island. The tides rise and recede around it, and the long beaches are known for quicksand, but much of the area is made up of salt marsh meadows upon which sheep graze (and get very salty wool). We parked by the visitor’s center, and then there is a shuttle bus ride out there for about a kilometre or so, dropping us off on the long elevated causeway that leads to the Mont. Great place for the photos, and also where I sketched the above (though I actually stood slightly underneath the bridge on the sands, to stay in the shade). It was a pretty hot day, and there is a lot of climbing once you get into the Mont itself. We walked about the narrow winding streets with all the usual kitschy touristy souvenir shops, and made our way up to the Abbey, which was quite a hike. It’s pretty labyrinthine inside, but the views once you get to the windy top are amazing, out over the bay. We couldn’t see England, but I thought I could see the Channel Islands, though my eyesight is so bad it was probably a smudge on my glasses. I did attempt a sketch looking up to the abbey’s spire, with the golden Archangel Gabriel looking back towards France, but it was a difficult angle so that’s as much as I could do. There were many seagulls. Mont St. Michel appeared in the Bayeux Tapestry actually, in a scene where a bunch of people got stuck on the sands. There is an equivalent place in England, in Cornwall actually, called St. Michael’s Mount, which is smaller but still pretty impressive. This place reminded me of Minas Tirith from the Lord of the Rings, partly because I have no imagination, partly because the film-makers were inspired by the Mont when designing it. Picturesque place though, well worth the trip.

We had a nice day out at the Mont, and the drive through the Norman countryside was a big bonus. My phone’s navigator was having fun trying to say all the French names. “Street L-O-Circumflex” was an interesting one it kept repeating for St-Lô. We passed through little villages and down hedgerowed lanes, and near one farm we stopped as there was a little cat in the road that was not in any hurry to move along, so my son got out and gently led it it the side, where it sprawled out expecting a belly rub. We looked out for the cat on the way home, and sure enough there it was again, so this time we parked up and my son got out to say hello again. A little moment we’ll always remember from this trip.

Bonjour Bayeux

January 15, 20237 Comments

We spent a few nights staying in the little city of Bayeux, a good base to explore Normandy. There are a lot of places in Normandy we didn’t get to that we’d like to have seen – Rouen, Honfleur, Giverny, I mean it’s a big place – but for what we were going to see Bayeux was perfect, especially being so very close to the D-Day Beaches. For me though Bayeux was the place for the thing I’ve wanted to see forever, the Bayeux Tapestry. It did not disappoint! It has its own museum, and while we went when it was early and not yet too crowded, the line has to keep moving along it. It’s long – about 70 metres – and while I’ve learned about it for many years there’s nothing like the experience of seeing it all in one go, and constantly moving along, with the commentary in the headphones explaining it, made it feel like watching a long comic strip, a cartoon about the Norman Invasion of England. And it was funny, too. There were a lot of willies. The inventiveness and use of colours is incredible, and the sense of movement you get in the horses and the battle scenes is something a few modern movie directors could learn from. The Bayeux Tapestry was made sometime in the 1070s with the Conquest still fresh, is of course, neither a tapestry (it’s an embroidery) nor from Bayeux (Made In England, by Nuns in Barking and Canterbury, likely under the instruction of Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent) but so what, as Macca would say, it’s the bloody Bayeux Tapestry, it sold, shut up. It wasn’t about Peace and Love though. A brilliant piece of Norman propaganda, perhaps, but as I said to my wife, for me this is like going to see the US Declaration if Independence or something (but in reverse, I guess), 1066 being such a crucial moment in British history and in the history of the English language. If it wasn’t for William the Bastard getting all Conqueror on our medieval asses, we’d probably be speaking a language much closer to Dutch and German than the way it looks today. Either way, the gist of the story is that the Normans totally stitched up the Anglo-Saxons.

The Bayeux Tapestry used to be kept in the cathedral but isn’t any more. The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Bayeux (above) is pretty massive and as in many French towns you can orient yourself by looking up and seeing where the spire is, and it’s visible for miles around. While we didn’t get a chance to go inside, I did sketch it on one of my morning walks, though it started to rain so I finished it off inside. It was consecrated in 1077 with William the Conqueror there, so it fits into the timeline of the Tapestry. It was supposed to be here that William got his promise from Harold that he would support him to be King after Edward the Confessor died, starting that whole thing. The little courtyard in front of the cathedral’s main entrance is very pretty, I stood at the rear a little way down the hill where the view was pretty magnificent. Even when looking at this, I keep thinking, I must go and get a pain aux amandes for breakfast.

The narrow street we stayed on, Rue Saint-Patrice, was full of little shops (many closed on both Sunday and Monday, when we were there) and many very old looking buildings. I don’t recall what this building was called, on the corner of Rue Franche, but I drew it on my evening walk after we had eaten dinner and had a busy day touristing somewhere else. There are flags lining the streets in Bayeux. I love a timber-frame building, it’s like a puzzle when drawing to make sure you get all the bits in the right place, but a little personality goes a long way and you don’t want too many straight lines. The weather was nice, the sky had dappled clouds and of course the sun set so much later, so after this I went further into town and drew another scene, below. This pretty postcard view is across the little river Aure, that trickles through Bayeux with the Cathedral in the background. Every evening we would take a walk down this way, and around the corner we ate some nice Norman food at a restaurant, though on one evening I walked up to a little store about a mile up the road (the supermarket in the centre-ville being already closed) to buy some dinner supplies, and was brought back to living in France years ago, standing in line in a small shop for about 20 minutes and then carrying heavy bags up and down streets and up a narrow staircase, it was like going back 20 years. I really liked Bayeux, and my family loved it, we had no ‘Bayeux remorse’. Bit quiet, but a good base to explore.

And of course, I drew a hydrant! More Normandy sketches to come…

Norman Style

January 14, 2023Leave a comment

In July 2022, we finally visited Normandy! My wife had actually been talking about visiting Normandy since we first met twenty years ago, to see Mont St Michel and the D-Day Beaches among other places, but France became so much further away after we moved to America. I’ve wanted to go to Normandy for many years, mostly to see the Bayeux Tapestry, but also those other places. I’ve always liked the idea of the Normandy cuisine as well, hearty and full of apples. We loved it there, a land of green rolling hills and white cliffs, not unlike the south of England but everything was in French, and the towns were more charming. We stayed in Bayeux itself, taking the train out there from Paris, and we rented a car and explored for a few days. Normandy is big, and we could have spent a lot longer there, trying all the cheeses, and we got our fair taste of history. I also did a good bit of sketching, especially around Bayeux. I would wake up early and leave our little apartment in the centre of Bayeux to wander about with my sketchbook before my family woke up, bringing back the pains au chocolat and other pastries for breakfast when I’d return.

Our SNCF train ride to Normandy was pretty pleasant. We had taken the Eurostar down from London, easy enough from St.Pancras. We had to take the Metro to connect to a different station for the train to Normandy, and there was a bit of a wait, so we went out and had a nice lunch outside, got a bit of the busy Parisian urban ambience before our quieter time in Normandy. I did have a run-in with a weirdo in Paris Nord station while my son and I were waiting for my wife who was in the bathroom, just one of those odd people who come up and start acting weird that you get in stations. Initially ignoring him, I asked him in French to please leave us be. I don’t think he was French because he said something in Dutch, maybe he thought we were Dutch. Then he started growling aggressive swear words in English at me and getting in a bit close, so I stepped forward and in my best Burnt Oak told him to F off out of it, and F off out of it he did. “Welcome to Paris,” I said to my son. “Not my first time here.” We didn’t meet any other train station characters, though we kept awake for them, and there were a lot of police around prowling for pickpockets and occasionally grabbing people in the act. I remember my first trip to Paris as a kid with my school, and we first saw a Paris policeman outside a Metro station, carrying a gun. We kids from London had of course never seen such a thing before, except on the A-Team (where of course nobody actually got shot). I remember a few years in the 90s later seeing some French armed soldiers with machine guns on the Metro, just patrolling in case of terror threats, and being a bit gobsmacked having never seen a machine gun in my life, let alone one being carried by soldiers on the underground, except at the start of the A-Team, when the only thing that gets shot is the title card. Of course now I live in America. anyway, I knew that Paris stations might have their train station troublemakers, but were pretty well defended. That first school day trip to Paris though back in 1989 or 1990 was pretty brief, but the other thing I remember that stood out to me the most was the very particular smell of the Metro itself. Not a bad smell, more a particular flavour of industrial that you don’t get on the London Underground, and was specifically Paris. Every time I’ve been back and been on the Metro that smell has always brought me back. It’s funny, I don’t remember smelling it as much on this trip. Many of the trains are so modern now, and the stations pretty well kept, and the occasional whiff of it here and there was maybe all in my head.

Speaking of the A-Team, did you know that in the French dub of the show, they added words to the theme tune? No word of a lie, they gave the A-Team tune lyrics. They call it “L’Agence Tous Risques” and you can see it here. Magnifique.

So after our late lunch we caught our train from Gare St Lazare, a beautiful historic station that I may draw one day if I’m back, and was basically a luxury shopping mall inside. The train zipped through the city centre, the suburbs, and the green French countryside with occasional glimpses of the Seine as it accompanied us on our way. Our neighbour across the table on the train was carrying a very very small rabbit in a plastic case, which was sat on the table and we just adored. I sketched the scene on the train, while my wife and son watched France whizz by, and my son listened out at all the French language, absorbing it all since he is learning it at school, before we reached the small station in Bayeux. I’ll add my sketches from Normandy over the next few posts. Bon Voyage!

the lamb and flag and the brown bear

January 13, 2023January 11, 2023Leave a comment

Here are a couple more drawings I did last summer, not on location but from photos I took while in London. I always want to draw as many old London pubs as I can, so I drew these two on big pieces of paper, and in fact the top one sold at the Pence Gallery’s Art Auction in September. It’s the Lamb and Flag, a popular old pub near Covent Garden off Garrick Street. I’ve been there a few times myself, though more often I pass it by when slipping through that alleyway on the right (Lazenby Court) to get up to Long Acre (via Floral St and another alley) when I’m on my way to Stanford’s map shop (which has now moved around the corner). There’s been a pub on this site since at least the 1770s, and it took the name Lamb and Flag in 1833, although the brickwork is from the 1950s, replacing an older building from 1638. This is what their website says, although the sign outside says ‘Circa 1628’ so who knows. Actually to confuse things further the sign actually says ‘Circa 1623’ but my eyesight is circa 1976 and therefore prone to get things wrong from time to time. The 3 looks like an 8. See also, whatever the hell is going on with those window panes. Whichever date is correct, doesn’t really matter, it’s a nice pub to stop into for a quick pint while out walking about London. The one below, the Brown Bear in the East End of the City, on Leman Street. It is one I’ve never actually been to, but I passed by it while walking from Aldwych to St. Katharine’s Dock back in the summertime, and I thought, I’d like to draw this, but I’m on my way somewhere else right now, and it looks like it might rain. So I filed it under ‘draw larger when I get home’. I definitely prefer drawing on site though, for some reason my eyesight works better outside in normal (preferably overcast) light than it does sat at my desk with the artificial desk-lamp light. This east-end drinker dates back to Victorian times and even from across the street it kind of looks like what my dad would call a ‘villain’s pub’. It’s probably nothing of the sort, but it does have a bit of local villainy in its history, allegedly being where George Cornell had a punch-up with Ronnie Kray. This is also Jack the Ripper land, and those murders were investigated by the cops at the nearby police station on Leman St. There was another pub a little further down the street I would like to draw sometime, the Sir Sydney Smith. London has been losing so many of its great historic pubs in recent years, especially lately, for one reason or other, mostly because property is so expensive in London that many old places can’t afford to stay in existence, and with beer being so expensive these days and the cost of living being so high, people can’t afford the pubs like they used to. I always try to make sure I spend some good time in old pubs whenever I’m back home; use them or lose them. Many are historically so important to the local area. I heard recently that The Tipperary on Fleet Street was closed for good; that was the first place in London to sell Guinness (first place outside Ireland I think) and the pub dates from 1700. History rapidly vanishing, being replaced with vapid gourmet burger joints and chain coffee shops and expensive apartments.

the eggleston home on third street

January 12, 2023January 11, 20232 Comments

The next stage of our summer trip was a vacation in northern France, taking in Normandy and Paris. I’ll put posting those on hold for a bit though and come back to the present day. Or at least last week. This circus of dangerous storms is still sweeping through California on the back of this Atmospheric River, bringing heavy rain and flooding in many areas, as well as evacuations, and strong winds that are still knocking down some really old trees. Every couple of days though we get an off-day when it doesn’t rain as much and maybe even some sun peaks through. On one of those off-days I walked downtown for lunch, and came back via 3rd Street, where I stopped outside the old building now occupied by Davis Copy Max, historically known as the Eggleston Home and one of the oldest buildings in Davis. It was built in 1870 at 232 3rd St, and was the home of Lucy Eggleston, who was an important member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the Davis. Back in the early years of the twentieth century they campaigned to have alcohol banned in Davis (or Davisville as it was), finally succeeding and getting a one-mile ban from campus put in place, which eventually became a three-mile ban, a rule that lasted until 1979 (it’s from this that Three Mile Brewing took inspiration when choosing a name). I’ve drawn this building before. I’ve also drawn Davis Copy Max when it was located in the building directly opposite, which was behind me as I sketched and is now home to ‘Guads’, a restaurant. I wonder how Lucy would feel about people drinking beer right opposite her old house, maybe some swooning and some stern letters to the Mayor.

Thames Time

January 11, 2023January 10, 2023Leave a comment

Now this is an atmospheric river. Back in July, the day before we left for France, the family and I took a walk down the Thames. A few days before we had been dealing with unbelievable record temperatures in London, making it nigh on impossible to do much other than hide inside listening to the news of how this was the Hottest Day Of All Time. My wife flew into London on that Hottest Day Ever (having stayed behind in California a few more days to look after our sick cat), transport was down all over the place as the English train tracks could not handle the heat. They famously can’t handle any slight change in weather, for those of us who remember leaves on the line, etc. Now the average temperature back in Davis is much higher at this time of year as a matter of course, but it feels a lot worse in London where the humidity is much higher, nobody has air conditioning, and well we just love a moan about the weather. A few days later, it had cooled off considerably, and was now a nice, humid, overcast London summers day. There was even a touch of rain to freshen us up. Still slightly sensitive from the previous night out in Camden, I braved the nice weather and took the tube down to the river, and we walked down past Tower Bridge towards Bermondsey along Shad Thames. I’d never actually walked very far down that way before, it was pretty interesting. A week before my son and I had taken a boat trip down the river all the way to Greenwich and listened to the stories of the riverman, that was a fun little history trip. Although our guide insisted telling us that the word ‘wharf’ is an acronym for ‘warehouse at river front’, which sounds nice but isn’t true. It comes from the Old English hwearf, which stands for ‘house where even alligators read French’. Shad London is an interesting street flanked by old warehouses at the river front and criss-crossed several storeys above by old metal walkways from the Victorian era, definitely a street I would go back and sketch another time. Instead, we turned back towards Tower Bridge and walked down the South Bank. I did stop to draw the panorama above, the view from the Tower of London on the right westwards toward the City with its expanding bouquet of steel and glass towers, all different shapes and funny names. This is where London has changed the most for me since I left, seventeen years ago. Seventeen years! Back in those days the small group of towers in the Square Mile were dominated by the Nat West Tower (I mean, ‘Tower 42’) and the Gherkin (I mean the Swiss Re) (sorry no it’s called 30 St Mary Axe) (look it’s the bloody Erotic Gherkin, that’s what we called it when it was being built in the 2000s). Neither of those can even be made out in the cluster above now. I don’t even know all the names of the funny looking skyscrapers now. There’s the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie, the Heron, maybe the Dark Crystal, the Skeksis Finger, the Great Conjunction and the Gelfling’s Flute. Those cranes tell me that they are not done building just yet. I drew them again from a different angle when we had sat down to eat. The shapes are fascinating to draw.

You’ll notice that there is a red Urban Sketchers stamp on that last sketch. While we were walking down the Thames, we started seeing other sketchers dotted around the riverbank. Then I remembered that Urban Sketchers London were having a three-day celebration to mark ten years of USk London, and that there would be some sketching going on down the Thames. Due to our trip to France I wasn’t able to take part in this so I never signed up for the workshops and talks, and had forgotten that there would be loads of fellow sketchers around. Just as my wife said “maybe you’ll bump into someone you know!” I spotted someone I definitely knew – Gabi Campanario! Urban Sketchers founder and my sketching friend since about 2007/8. I think he was as surprised to see me as I was him. My wife had never met him though she knew who he was from all those years back. I first met Gabi in person back at the first symposium in Portland, and several others since, and his daughter was there in London with him. On top of this nice surprise, I bumped into another of the original London urban sketchers, James Hobbs, who I’ve known since USk London started in 2012. I have a nice photo of the three of us from Amsterdam in 2019, and now a nice one of us in London 2022. As one of the leaders of USk London James was very busy and showed me the new book that came out to mark the tenth anniversary of USk London, “London By Urban Sketchers” (an excellent book by the way and I recommend you get it, if you love London, follow that link to buy it). I have two drawings in there, plus a shout-out in the intro to that first sketchcrawl in 2012 that kicked off USk London, called it “Let’s Draw London“. Urban Sketchers London is a really strong chapter of USk and have some great sketchcrawls all over the city each month. So, excited by all the sketch chat and activity all around, I had to do some more drawing. My wife and son took a rest on a bench while I went and drew the view of the city which includes St. Paul’s, as well as a mudlarker down on the sands. I bumped into another old sketching friend Joe Bean, who I’ve met at a few of the symposia since Manchester, as well as some in London, and who has been doing some great sketching up in Leeds. The sky was grey and that’s the way I liked it.

I always want to be down by the Thames. Even looking at these sketches I just want to jump on a plane and get back there, explore and draw, see it as it keeps on changing. Some day I’ll put together a post of all my Thames-side sketches. Actually a lot of them are here: https://petescully.com/tag/thames/

Here’s one for you. An old one, from around fifteen years before the one above, from almost the same spot. 2007…

at the black heart

January 10, 2023January 9, 2023Leave a comment

One evening in London, after a busy day helping my brother move my dad into a new place, I met up with a couple of my old London mates down in our old haunt of Camden Town. We met at the excellent rock pub The Black Heart; I got there a little early so I could attempt a sketch, though I didn’t get very far, but I enjoyed adding the paint in like that. I do miss these types of pubs, good music and good vibes, and great company. We went for dinner at the Italian place on Parkway, and on to spend the rest of the night at the Dublin Castle, where else. That place has not changed since I first started going there in the 90s. Camden has changed, quite a lot, but in some ways not at all. The streets are still in the same place, which helps, even if some of the places aren’t. Beer costs more nowadays though (didn’t let that stop us though).

I did draw a quick and shaky sketch on the tube down to Camden from Burnt Oak, the Northern Line (I didn’t sketch on the way home, I was too busy eating my greasy bag of chips I always get from the chip shop next to Camden tube, on the last train back). I do miss London…

the other side of Denmark Street

January 9, 20232 Comments

Back to London last July. After a day’s touristing with the family – we went to the Churchill War Rooms, then wandered about central London until my feet hurt – I stopped off at one of my favourite old streets, the centre of guitar shops and music people, Denmark Street. Just off Charing Cross Road, round the back of the recently redeveloped Tottenham Court Road station, this was the center of the British music industry for a long time. Tin Pan Alley. As London has been pricing anything good out of existence for a long while now, but of it have been falling away and I was worried to finally come back and find it all gone down the pan. There’s a few old places no longer there, but I was pleased to still find a lot of places to mooch about looking at instruments, the character still exists. So I drew the street looking southwards, across from Wunjo and Regent sounds, and stood drawing until my feet hurt. This was intended as a sister piece to a panorama I drew of Denmark Street back in 2014 (see below) looking northwards, before major redevelopment started in the area. The 12 Bar club was still there, and Macari’s; I was saddened to see Macari’s on Charing Cross Road had closed recently, that’s where I got my beloved acoustic guitar that I still have. After drawing that picture years ago I learned about “Save Tin Pan Alley” – http://savetpa.tk/– which is devoted to preserving this historic and culturally significant London lane. As a guitar-obsessed teen I was often too shy to go into these stores, fearing that I would suddenly be found out and laughed at. They soon became my favourite places, though I still won’t get down an electric guitar and plug it in unless I know nobody is there to listen. They have different guitars than you see in a lot of guitar shops in the States as well. This past year I have finally rekindled my love of the guitar, having abandoned it for well over a decade, and got myself a new guitar, the Lake Placid Blue Squier Telecaster, as well as a Fender electro-acoustic for my son who is learning. Just last month I finally got myself a bass, for the first time in my life, and I of course got the Hofner violin. I should have been playing bass all these years, I love it, and the Hofner is nice and light, especially with the Flatwound strings. I need to fix the fret buzz though. Apparently I should adjust the truss rod, but I’m a bit nervous about that. I also need to fix up my old electric guitar in London and bring it back out here, the one my brother got me when I was 14, the Westone Concord II. I re-strung it and cleaned it up, but the third fret is pretty worn down where the B string hits it, making it hard to play an open D. Teenage Pete played that chord so much it filed away the fret. Maybe on my next visit I’ll take it down to Denmark Street and see if someone there can fix it. I’m still pretty basic with my guitar playing, and I don’t mind that, but it is nice to be back messing about with guitars again.

atmospheric river / bomb cyclone

January 8, 20234 Comments

Before we return to the sketches of summer 2022, here’s 2023 so far. Here in California we are going through some of the worst wave of storms I’ve seen since coming here, knocking down more trees than I’ve experienced before (in my life that would be since the Great Storm of 1987 in the south of England, the Michael Fish Not-a-Hurricane). We knew the ‘Atmospheric River / Bomb Cyclone’ was incoming, but weren’t expecting it to cause so much damage. Atmospheric River and Bomb Cyclone sound like two flavours of anti-perspirant spray, or maybe a double A-side twelve inch from a 1980s dance group. With all these trees down I wasn’t not sure whether to call it ‘Arbor-gedden’ or ‘Arbor-calypse’. The situation has been pretty serious though.. The first biggie was on New Year’s Eve. It was pouring with rain and the wind was picking up, but we weren’t going anywhere, just played some board games and ate a nice roast dinner, and then noticed that the internet had gone down. We watched a movie saved on the iPad (the new Pinocchio, funnily enough) We could hear some big crashes not far away, but couldn’t tell what that was, maybe a big tree limb had snapped off. Just before midnight, the rain and wind had stopped revealing a bright starry sky. My son and I took a little walk around the neighbourhood and saw some trees had come down, but turning back towards our road the lights were out, but we could just about make out that a big tree had fallen and totally crushed the carport opposite. That’s it above, as seen first thing next morning. The car was just missed. Then walking away from that we nearly walked right into a huge tree that blocked the entire street, twice as big as the other fallen tree, and that had taken out the street lamp too. We found a way around and went back home. Power was out through much of Davis, but we were ok. The next morning I saw that the huge tree that came down had also totally flattened a car and pulled up the pipes from beneath the street, right outside our neighbour’s house. The sound of chainsaws had started at about 2am, before crews even made it out, there were neighbours just cutting away branches so that people could get past. Another enormous tree came down on top of all our mailboxes (that stopped the junk mail for a few days). I walked around, and saw that trees were down everywhere, a huge one already cleared from the main road, plus one house which had two trees fall on it, one damaging the roof and another crushing a car (I know the owner actually; he told me that they heard the first tree come down and went out to see, and only narrowly missed getting hit by the second tree which took out the car – so very, very lucky). This was just in our few blocks, trees were down everywhere. I’ve seen a lot of trees fall in Davis, but never this many all at once.

It took a while for the internet to come back on at home but I went into work a few days later, to find that the massive tree in front of our building had fallen too. Other trees have gone down outside the Math Sciences Building over the years but this was the biggest, a huge pine I think it was, and the roots had pulled up the sidewalk too. Crews have been out there ever since with chainsaws and shredding machines pulling it all apart, the the huge stump is still on its side and roped off. Several other trees around the building have had large parts come off. In front of Mrak Hall, two historic trees, oaks I think, fell on the main path. I walked through part of the Arboretum, mindful about loose branches, and saw one of the big Redwoods in the old Redwood Grove had fallen too. A lot of old trees fell on New Years Eve, a lot of history (and some much-needed shade) went with it; it made me feel sad. However, we were told that this was only a taster, that the really big storm was coming on Wednesday evening, with the worst hitting on Thursday afternoon. I got a little bit drenched cycling in on Thursday morning, but by about lunchtime it was another calm lull. In the early afternoon however I could see from my fourth floor office window a long black line against the sky, ominously stretching from north to south, moving fast in our direction. By the time it reached Davis, it was like we were suddenly engulfed in a giant grey wave, with the view from my window being a wall of water across the city. I had to quickly sketch while watching this deluge.

Thankfully the storm didn’t bring quite as much damage to our area as on New Year’s Eve, but still caused chaos around the state, and there have been big floods already with the region on high alert for more. There was another lull on Friday, and then on Saturday night (last night) the next wave hit, and boy was there some wind. It reached around 65 mph here, and I was pretty nervous watching as best I could from my bedroom window, as the silhouettes of large trees dancing around like jelly against a sky illuminated by flashes of lightning, to the constant pounding drone of the winds. The one tree that is right outside my window was giving it all that, mouthing off and getting lary, but by sunrise the tree had sobered up and acting as if nothing had happened. I took another walk this morning to survey the damage around our part of Davis, and while there were some big branches down and at least one tree it didn’t seem quite as bad, but I can’t speak for the rest of town and the news showed that midtown Sacramento got pretty badly hit. Our electricity was on, unlike for much of town after some power lines went down, but the internet was out. I cycled down to campus during today’s lull to check that power was on in our building, thankfully all ok (first day of the quarter starts tomorrow!), but didn’t sketch anything. All along each street there are piles of branches, and chopped up tree trunks, or the scars of where they crashed. Last night was pretty scary, but the news is telling us the next wave of this Atmospheric River will hit tonight, the winds of the Pacific stretching out its long arm to give us another clobbering, and this one will be even worse than last night? It’s nature’s way, sure. Fingers crossed that tomorrow will be ok. I’d say ‘touch wood’ but frankly I want to keep as far away from any wood as possible…

’twas twenty-twenty-two

January 7, 20232 Comments

2022 sketches sm

2022 is over, and 2023 is already chugging along. It’s been a while since I posted, and even then I was posting stuff from about five months ago because, well that’s just the way it is. I’ve been pretty busy, but also my home computer was just not working properly for the longest time, and I don’t like working on the small laptop, so I just didn’t scan or edit drawings, or find time to sit and write. I really enjoy sitting and writing though, so my new year resolution is to get back to that. There’s always that thing, when I’m so far behind posting all my sketches on here, it’s a headache catching up. This place is just for me after all, and I do look back over the years to find my stuff with their context, and my often-incomprehensible thoughts to go with it. I track my work, to see how I’m doing. One of the things I have done every year for the past decade now is list all of my sketches in a set-width column, and then compare them to the previous year. It’s not an exact science – some sketches are in portrait format and so don’t take up as much space, some are a little smaller and take up more, and any large drawings also count for less space. But on the whole, the immense majority of my sketching is done in a similar landscape format size, either single page or double-spread panorama, so on average it works as a guide. It also doesn’t include my digistal Illustrator drawings, or my advent calendar art or stuff like that, this is my regular drawing or sketchbook stuff (and even now, I have spotted one drawing that’s missing, because it was a commission and a bit too big to scan). I usually place them against the previous year so I know if I’m up or down on a particular month. I’m competitive by nature – so many all-night MarioKart sessions with my big brother to prove it – but not in a bad way, more in a spur-me-on-to-do-better way, and I compete exclusively with myself. If I’m running, I always have to try to beat the previous week. So I will this it to push myself to sketch more, to catch up with my past self. Sketching more means more improvement, but also it’s still one of the best ways to spend solo time, it both relaxes me and energizes me. That said, the last couple of months of the year it tailed off a bit, probably because I knew I had at least beaten 2021, my foot was off the gas. I’ve not had time (or energy) to organize any sketchcrawls, I’ve been a little bored of sketching Davis (I get that from time to time, the ‘I’ve sketched everything’ feeling), and some of the drawing I want to do is so detailed that I sometimes don’t start a sketch because I don’t have enough lunchtime time to get much meaningful out of it, especially if I’ve spent a bit too long eating, and I’ve been enjoying the big lunches a bit too much lately (I need to start getting back to the gym and competing with myself again there). But excuses, excuses, January is here again and I am committed to getting that sketchbook out a lot more. I also finally bought a new computer on New Year’s Day, so am at last getting back to scanning and editing and filing my drawings. Right now I am up early to do some pre-dawn writing (also Spurs were playing in the FA Cup at stupid-o’clock, but it turned out it was on ESPN+ and I cancelled that subscription a while back). So, finally, here are all the sketches I did in 2022, above. The last third of them are still to be posted on my sketchblog and that will be a fun early-morning routine for me for a while. Writing and exercising, and eating smaller lunches to give myself more sketching time. Let’s hope that works. 2022 saw a fair bit of travel – finally back to England after the pandemic, not once but twice; finally back to France, not once but twice, to Lille, Paris and Normandy; finally back to Belgium, not twice but once, though I packed in a lot, and yet had a relaxing time; our trip to Arizona, where we visited two national parks, Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon, as well as many other interesting places; my brother got married and I gave a speech as best man; I got interviewed by the UC Davis Chancellor about my sketching for his video series; I coached a lot of soccer before giving up coaching to be a spectator; we had a World Cup at Christmas which was a more fun time than expected, and Messi finally won it after probably the best final I’ve ever seen; I bought more musical instruments than ever in my life, both for me and my son (who now loves the ukulele most of all), including my first ever bass guitar; in the Fall I had an operation on my face to remove a skin cancer, that left a big scar across my forehead (fun times); we had one of the hottest summers ever here, and we also experienced the hottest day ever in London; and of course, football finally came home, the Lionesses won England’s first international football trophy (we still aren’t counting Le Tournoi in 1997, then?) in the Women’s Euros, which was pretty bloody brilliant. Oh, and The Queen died, gawd rest ‘er, not long after having her 70th Jubilee (which I was also in London for, though I’m glad I wasn’t there for the Mourning After, otherwise I’d have had to join The Queue, just for the sketching opportunities). And the king Pele died, the Picasso of Football. I’ll probably write about all these eventually. I’m still in shock after hearing yesterday that Gianluca Vialli died.

Here also then is the annual comparison chart to all the other years going back to 2013 (I was prolific before then, but didn’t have the idea to start making these lists, and am not going back to do that now, it’s kind of a do it as you go along thing). Here’s to 2023, whatever that will end up looking like for the world. I hope it looks more like 2012 (but with 2019’s sketching).