Month: July 2023

piccadilly to tower hill

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Piccadilly, London

I didn’t do a lot of London sketching on the first few days of our trip, just what I could get in quick moments. The one above was drawn while waiting for my wife, I was outside Waterstones in Piccadilly (in the building which used to be Simpson, Piccadilly, the old department store which was the inspiration for the TV show Are You Being Served). Looking towards Piccadilly Circus. It was the sky that interested me.

Beatles blue plaque savile row

We walked into Mayfair and up towards Savile Row. It’s incredible, I’ve never actually been up Savile Row. I explored London for years but for some reason Mayfair a lot less so, though I would give open-top bus tours round a lot of the fancy squares and high-end streets, twenty-odd years ago. I had it in my head that Savile Row was further up, on the other side of Oxford Street somewhere, but of course it’s just a block off Regent Street. I do love that even in London I can be surprised and find places I’d not really been to before. The only place on Savile Row I was interested in seeing of course was #3, now an Abercrombie and Fitch, but that was once the HQ of the Beatles’ Apple Corps, and where they played that concert on the roof in January 1969. Watch ‘Get Back’, it’s my favourite thing ever (right up there with Star Wars and The Dark Crystal). There’s a blue plaque to commemorate the historic event, and so I put that in my sketchbook.

St Vedast Alias Foster, London

We were on our way to take a London Walk, over by St.Paul’s. It was the walk called “Old London”, and was a two-hour-plus stroll through ancient streets in the City, ending up at Tower Hill. It was a hot day, but our guide was excellent and she took us along streets I hadn’t explored in years, or didn’t even know about (and I have given walking tours in this part of London myself years ago). See https://www.walks.com/ for details on all their walks, given by accredited blue-badge guides, they are great and know a lot more than me. I was remembering some of the old stuff I used to know, but was fascinated by the stories. I did one sketch of St. Vedast-Alias-Foster, one of the many Christopher Wren churches, while we waited.

Tower Hill London

When it was over my wife got the tube back home while I stayed out a bit longer to do some sketching before dinner. I decided to draw the Tower, with that big sundial thing in the foreground. I was pretty tired though, my heart wasn’t really in it, so I left it as it was and got on the District Line. We were off to Scotland next day.

watling centre

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Watling Centre, Burnt Oak

As with most of my trips back to the UK, there’s usually a sketch from Burnt Oak at the start of it. I wake up early and get out for morning walk with my sketchbook, eager to draw something that isn’t the UC Davis Bike Barn or something. I didn’t walk very far on this one morning, just up to the corner of Orange Hill and Deansbrook, a couple of minutes form my mum’s house. I’m getting very conscious that I won’t be doing this forever. There will be a day when I don’t come back to Burnt Oak much, like everyone else who left, and maybe I won’t even come back to London as much; I’m always torn with the idea of letting London go, but I just can’t, can I. It’s still my favourite city, annoy me though it does. It is definitely feeling too crowded, and while that may be just because I’m coming from less-crowded Davis in a state designed for bigger cars and wider roads (I don’t even drive, I ride a bike), there seems to be so many more cars parked along all these narrow roads, crammed three or four fold onto small driveways built for one or two. I’m not a fan of this new ‘ULEZ’ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) expansion that is happening – although London evidently needs to improve its air quality –  it forces a lot of people who do need their car to buy a newer car they can’t really afford. Mostly though I just think it’s a rubbish name, they really could have come up with something better, I mean if it didn’t sound like a 2nd-person-plural French verb ending it might catch on more with the crowd who don’t like the sound of that sort of thing. But as I see all the cars squeezing themselves around the streets in these old neighbourhoods, I think to myself something needs to be done to reduce or discourage the number of cars. This street in particular, Orange Hill Road, it seems there is usually traffic backed all the way up from Watling Avenue almost to Deansbrook, but when there isn’t, cars will sometimes bomb down here like it’s 200cc MarioKart. I was up early, but even at this hour there was a lot of traffic. This is the Watling Centre. I stood next to the bus stop across the street to draw; as this is Britain, people started queuing up behind me in a polite line, I had to gesture for them to go ahead of me. I’m still disappointed that TFL removed the very useful 305 bus route that came up here, joining our part of Burnt Oak with Edgware. So, the Watling Centre, this is where my mum and dad had their wedding party back in 1991. They obviously met a long time before that, otherwise I’d be a lot younger. I remember that party, we had a lot of family and friends there, friends we loved, family we liked, and also family we didn’t like, that’s how it goes, but it was a good party. There was a lot of dancing to Irish songs, small kids running around. My schoolfriend Terry came, I still have a photo of him in his blue cardigan. I remember eating an entire chocolate mousse cake, because when I was 15 I could eat everything in London and still be like a gangly skinny rake with unbrushable red hair. My uncle Eddie wheeled a shopping trolley with all the remaining booze in it back to our house, and then told me stories all night about my dad in the old days. Fun times. It’s funny, I know I have been to many other events here but I don’t remember them all now. I think this is where I briefly went to karate class, which despite being taught by a family friend, I only went to twice, with my neighbour across the street. There was another kid from my form class at school who showed up, and he was the sort of kid to take the piss the entire time and then continue at school next day, so I stopped going. In earlier years, I would go to the field next to this building with other local kids and look for conkers, because we all knew this was the best place in Burnt Oak to get good conkers. Anyway that’s enough “I ‘member when…” mawkish memories and city-planning moans. I have a few more London sketches to post, then it’s Scotland all the way. We had a great time up there, but I may have drunk too much Irn Bru.

“cause I just wanna fly”

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SEA to LHR

Ok, I’ll start posting the sketches from my recent trip to England and Scotland (“Britain” as we call it, for the time being anyway). Let’s start with the bookend airplane sketches. You would think that I would be incredibly bored of drawing these views by now, and you’d be right, I am bored of drawing these views. Yet I still draw them, because when I fly I need something to relax me, and that is drawing my surroundings. I could watch some stupid film on the seat-back monitor, and get interrupted by the captain who wants to tell us very slowly that we can buy some useless duty-free rubbish from the flight attendants if we want, or maybe to not tell us about a pocket of upcoming turbulence that will make the plane suddenly plummet god-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-feet downwards towards Greenland (that happened on our flight back, and I’m still feeling it). I mostly just watch the map, to see where we are. I always download some things on my iPad to watch, mostly Get Back, but I don’t like to dive into watching something early on knowing that the flight crew will be serving us some marginally edible food an hour or so into the flight and I might miss out if I engrossed in watching my screen with headphones on. So I draw, it helps me calm my nerves a little. I do listen to a lot of podcasts while on the plane, and audiobooks. I don’t actually mind flying, I just hate the airport experience, and if we are all cramped into a plane with no space, I hate that too. The sketch above was done on the way over on my iPad, we flew via Seattle for some reason, late at night, and I think I only managed an hour of sleep at best, total, we were so cramped. On these flights, I only recline my seat a little, as to go back the whole way is not very considerate to those seated behind you, who then cannot move much. Still when we landed we were excited about getting to London, seeing family again.

LHR-LAX

This second sketch is on the flight back (we were flying through LAX this time), when we were similarly squeezed in, and I was feeling pretty sick. About ten minutes into the flight, the young fellow in the seat in front decided that he needed to recline his seat the entire way. Not only did this give me zero room to be able to lean forward and get things from under my seat – physically impossible, and I’m of average height – but also made it impossible to see the seat-back screen which does not adjust any more, and impossible to put anything on my tray taller than a small plastic cup (not my bottle, certainly not my iPad), and if I wanted to read my magazine I would have to hold it close to my face (which let’s face it I have to do anyway these days, my eyesight is so bad). His girlfriend in the seta next to him only reclined half the way and my son (who is now almost as tall as me) had no problem. So I politely asked the guy if he would mind not reclining the whole way, but may just 50%? Nope, he didn’t want to do that. This was ten minutes out of Heathrow, we hadn’t eaten yet and the lights were definitely not turned off for sleepy-time mode. “It’s just I have no room if you put your seat back the whole way.” “You can put your seat back too,” he said. “But I don’t need to; it disrupts the person sat behind me, and it still doesn’t give me any more room to lean forward to get things from under the seat.” “It’s the same for everyone,” he said, refusing to budge or acknowledge my point, adding “the person in front of me has their seat back,” which I could see was not in fact true. “Mate this ain’t a game of dominoes,” I said. “It’s not ‘the same for everyone’ because people generally respect the other people around them. I’m not saying don’t recline at all, but just halfway.” It was like the guy was on my lap. I’m not actually sure why they make the seats in these economy areas recline as much as they do, using seats from a time when there was much more legroom. Airlines have tried to squeeze passengers more and more in recent years, no wonder there is so much air-rage. On other economy flights they either don’t recline at all or just a little. Either way, be respectful innit. I feel like flight attendants should announce at the start of the flight that passengers should be considerate of their fellow cattle, their fellow battery hens. As I tried to move to get my bag, I’m sure my legs must have knocked the seat in front a few times, which I try not to do but dude, really. Eventually though, he relented, and moved his seat forward a bit more, with some quiet grumbling, and in a way that was very much like he was deciding that he was more comfortable further forward, nothing to do with me. So I had a bit more room to breathe, which was good because I was still sick, and very much losing my voice. I started a sketch early on this flight, and you can see that we were still only over Scotland by the time his seat went forward again, and I could put my lukewarm Pepsi Max on the seat (British airports – it might be nice if you occasionally refrigerated your cold drinks, thanks very much). I might have had eleven hours of that. I drew this in my little Fabriano Venezia sketchbook. We eventually got to LAX after what felt like a series of Andor (slow and painful and full of boring characters, and still not actually at our destination when the whole thing was over), and flew on to Sacramento after a long walk along not that busy road with the very narrow sidewalk that runs a ring through the middle of the airport. I will say though the immigration guy when I landed in LA was very friendly. We landed at Sacramento and got one of the worst Ubers ever, a smelly car driven by this stoner dude drinking a Big Gulp who played awful music and kept telling me about his trip to London in like 1999 and how he never saw any green space at all, “London has like no parks” (even after this journey I’m like, mate you clearly weren’t in London if you saw no parks or trees). I could still barely hear after the planes had messed up my ears, and I just wanted to see the cats, get to my bedroom, fall asleep. But even as we went up our pathway dragging our suitcases and sweating in the shock of the Davis heat, I could barely hear the Uber driver calling me from his car, and I was nearly in the house when I noticed him. What did he want, had we left something? No, apparently we hadn’t closed the door the whole way getting out of the car, in my exhaustion from that horribly long journey I hadn’t noticed. Rather than just get out and close it himself and drive on, he just sat there drinking his Big Gulp and waiting for me to come back, and open and close the door again more firmly, which I did. Honestly, I really just wanted to not be around people for a good while.

Well we got our wish because next day we all got progressively sick, and so we tested and sure enough, Covid had finally got us. So we stayed home all week, not seeing anyone, ordering food in, and tried to recover from our vacation. July 4th fireworks came and went, I nearly joined the cats hiding under the sofa. But even if the air travel itself was stressful (and that includes flying from Inverness into Luton, my least favourite airport, and the post-midnight Uber ride from there back to London), our trip overall was fun, and we saw some amazing places, many of which I sketched. So I’ll post all those next. Despite all of this travel fun, I actually can’t wait to go and visit somewhere else. But as I’ve said before, it’s always nice to finally get back home, even if it’s to 100+ degree weather.

everything’s “A” ok

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A St DavisAnother post-trip sketch before I dive into the latest British vacation adventure. This was drawn on A Street in Davis – not “a street”, I mean obviously it was drawn on a street, but “A” Street, which is because the street was named after the letter A, and there’s a B, a C, a D, an E, an F, a G, the list goes on. There’s no Z Street though. Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead. A Street is kind of like the A Team of streets – it backs onto the university, where students receive a “B.A.” yeah, stay with me. It’s the point where the university and the town “Face” each other, yes. Plus the other two. Since this is also the boundary where the smoke-free university ends, you’ll sometimes find a few relegated smokers sitting on the naughty step here, including occasionally a man in a bad crocodile suit with a cigar and a big grin saying something about loving it when plans come together (I made that last one up). A Street. Anyway now that’s out of the way, this is a view I have sketched before on probably more than one occasion, the building is called Guilbert House, and makes a nice sketch. Finishing a sketch like this, all in one lunchtime, is satisfying, there are different colours in play, different shapes, dark areas, interesting shadows, textures, a motorbike parked at an angle where I won’t make the wheels look all lop-sided (much), some bins conveniently in the way of the wheels of the parked car so I won’t mess those up either, and it just says old downtown Davis to me. I’m happy with how it turned out. Looking over my sketchbook sometimes I’m often a little hard on myself, sketches where I know I didn’t have enough time, or if I had to finish them later and they look a bit forced, or if I just didn’t get perspective or linework or the colours quite right, or if a subject matter clearly started to bore me mid-sketch (oh boy, does that happen sometimes). But I love it when a sketch comes together.

bull’n’mouth

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Bull'n'Mouth 070923

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.

sketching shadows

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view from the couch

Before posting the sketches from the recent vacation (I am still scanning them all), I’ll probably post some more recent ones. This was sketched from the living room couch, as I was up early to watch the Formula 1, the British Grand Prix. I got sick at the end of our trip, enduring a painful couple of flights home, and then when we all got sick next day it turned out to be the Covid, the first time any of us have had it. It finally got us (thanks Britain!). We’re all vaccinated, so it wasn’t a very strong case (apart form that couple of nights when it was painful to swallow), but with the travel exhaustion I was feeling pretty knocked about. On top of that, my ears from the flight took almost a week to get back to something like normal, my hearing was totally off, the longest that’s ever taken. We just sat at home, getting hot, our ancient air-conditioning system from the 1970s starting to leak (but not actually fail – it’s kept us cool for years, never broken down). We had to just run it for very short periods so it would not leak, and the weather outside, well summer in Davis in the time of Global Boiling. So we eventually bit the bullet and got the local air-conditioning experts in last weekend to replace it with a brand new system, cost a bit of dosh, but well worth it. The new system is great, much quieter, more energy efficient (we hope), and was installed on a day when it was 107 degrees Fahrenheit outside so came just in time. On the morning I sketched this though, it wasn’t so bad, it was 7am, I had the window open, and that morning light that pours over the houses we back onto looked perfect for just drawing the shadows, so I just painted this quickly. Max Verstappen won the Grand Prix, as he always does now. We had doughnuts, and despite not feeling well, it was nice to be back on our couch, watching the racing.

do something pretty while you can

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bikebarn side UCD

To finish off the batch of sketching that I did in Davis between my UK visits, here are a bunch of lunchtime drawings from UC Davis of places that all kind of look the same. Some of them are the same place, just different sides of the building. The one above is the Bike Barn; the one below is the other side of it. I’ve drawn all these before, nothing to add really.

bikebarn rear UCD

Why do I sketch? I ask myself this all the time. Well not all the time, but every now and then. And I might have a different answer each time if anyone asks. The answer itself may evolve over the years, but the actual reason never does. Do I question myself, question my need to sketch all the time? Yep, absolutely. It’s why I like urban sketching symposia and sketchcrawls and those things, because it’s helpful to meet other people who sketch, learn why they do it, not feel so bad for needing to sketch all the time myself. Sketching does relax me, helps me stop and focus. It can frustrate me too, when I hit those walls of “all my sketches look the same” or “why can’t I make it feel a bit more effortless?” but sometimes when it hits exactly what you want it to and doesn’t take very long, I feel amazing afterwards and feel like I can accomplish anything. I do love drawing; I sometimes feel like I am too obsessed with it, when I get irritable because I’ve not been able to sketch, or if I have three pages left in my sketchbook but really want to fill them with something interesting, and not just of the same buildings near work or stuff around my house, or the living room. One of the reasons I draw is to capture a moment in time. “To remember, in case someday I forget” is how I have put it in the past. So with this in mind, all of these drawings from campus maybe reflect a bit of that. The ones above, look they look like several other sketches I have done of those buildings before. But what if next year they put new signs up, or replace all those flowers with bike racks? This sort of thing’s happened, and my old sketches show the area how it used to look. The one below has part of the under-construction new wing of the Chemistry building in it, already looking slightly different to how I drew it in the sketch in the previous post. It will look different again in six months. The are to the left looked different just a couple of years ago. This was also sketched on the first day of Commencement, the graduation ceremony days, and walking by in the left is a professor in their black professorial robes, you can tell what time of year it is because of that.

UCD view

I do question myself though, what if I just stopped and told myself I didn’t need to sketch any more? Or not sketch as much, just sketch occasionally and not worry about filling up all these books? Spend more time thinking about other things. I do use the time during sketching to think though. I also listen to podcasts, audiobooks, music. When sketching the building below – K. Esau Science Hall, which I don’t think I’d sketched before – I was listening to the audiobook of Lockwood and Co (just finished that series, it was very good), and I finished this whole sketch in my lunchtime, and that felt pretty good. Besides, I sketch in my spare time so that I can keep my skills up, so whenever I do a drawing for money those skills just roll right back out. My style looks like me, I always try to make improvements or rather move towards how I want the drawings to look, while balancing the fact that this is how my eyes see, my hands draw, and often a drawing is reflection of how I physically and mentally am at any given moment. If I’m uncomfortable when I draw, it comes out. This world is a crazy and overwhelming place, so many issues and terrifying things vying for my attention, politically things seems to be dragging towards horrible again (or the horrible lot would have us believe), and I know there is good in the world, it’s just that I need to go into my sketchbook sometimes to focus my mind on what’s right in front of me.

esau science hall UCD

I dunno. There may come a time when my hands go, or my eyesight packs in (on our way there, lads!), or the supreme court makes it illegal to draw pictures of fire hydrants, or whatever. I have not been active in the social media sketching groups, the Facebook groups and what not, though I post on the Instagram and still occasionally on that Twitter (and I still post all my stuff on Flickr like it’s 2007), I’m not all in with the groups any more. I just write and focus here mostly, like when I started, before Urban Sketchers. I’m less visible these days I guess, and I’m ok with that, I’m just getting on with the act of being a mostly-daily but always obsessed urban sketcher, telling my little stories, written to myself.

Next up, sketches and stories from the June trip back to England, as well as eight days in Scotland. I have more stories to tell. Then there’s a load of drawings from my day out in San Francisco last weekend, avoiding the heat, searching for the last few pints of Anchor Steam in the world. I’ll probably need a rest after wall this, but as it stands I’m still a couple of pages from finishing Sketchbook #47, and I like to finish a sketchbook in good time, so I can’t rest until it’s done. I need to catch up with the scanning though…

Chemistry Building latest news

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chemistry UCD

I have this compulsion to draw the construction projects on campus – it gives me something sort-of new to draw, and I can pretend I have some sort of special purpose or something, like I’m some sort of official documenter of change on this campus, when really I’m just obsessed with filling my sketchbook and find drawing relaxing. When I get a good lunchtime sketch done I feel satisfied and it propels me to be productive for the rest of the day. That’s what I tell myself anyway, but I remember noticing that in times when I was super busy at work, I also got more sketching done in my spare time than at other times of the year. Like in some Januarys, always one of the busiest times of the year, I would be drawing these big panoramas almost daily. Anyway, this is yet another update of the Chemistry Building’s new wing. As I write, the whole thing is now covered in orange. They covered it in green, then in orange, and the end result will be white, so the Irish flag is fully involved in this one. Incidentally, when I was in Scotland I witnessed some of the Orange marches for the first time ever, both in Edinburgh and in Glasgow, that was interesting (but nothing to do with the Chemistry building). I’m not sure when this building’s construction will be fully done, but rest assured there will be a sketch of it posted on this site, because I can’t help myself can I.

You can see the rest of the in-construction sketches of the Chemistry building, and all previous ones pre-reonovation, at: https://petescully.com/tag/chemistry/.

temperature’s rising

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varsity davis

This is a big motorcycle in front of the Varsity Theatre in Davis, drawn in the period between trips to the UK. I was pretty busy in those interstitial weeks, work-wise, but I got some sketching done. Got to fill those sketchbooks. This was early June. Now it is mid-July and the temperatures are all up in the 107s, which is really oppressive. We are having our air-conditioning system replaced tomorrow, on one of the hottest days of the year, because our current one has been leaking. Not a lot, but enough to be a worry. It’s really old (it’s from the 1970s apparently, one of the oldest left in the units in our neighbourhood) but has worked well for so long, previous occupants never needed to replace it. It’s overdue though, and the new one will hopefully be a lot more energy efficient. Very expensive to replace though; the fun of homeownership. You cannot live without air-conditioning in Davis, or anywhere in the California central valley. This place gets super hot. I remember my first summer here, 2006, it was the hottest I had ever been. I was working in the evenings at the Avid Reader bookshop on 2nd Street, very close to where this was drawn, and there were power outages in parts of town so people were going out in the evenings to wherever had cool air-conditioning. So our little bookshop was packed. It was a community event, almost. I don’t remember if we sold a lot of books on those evenings but I spoke to a lot of locals. Now the building across the way, the historic Varsity Theatre, that has the distinction of being the first building in Davis open to the public that had air-conditioning. We have been freezing our butts off in cinemas ever since. Speaking of cinemas, or movie theaters as they prefer to say here, one of the other two in Davis closed recently. Those other two are Regal cinemas, often showed the same films, and were just a couple of blocks away from each other. It was the one I liked to go to that closed, unfortunately, the one with better stadium seating, and hardly ever anyone there. I’ve definitely been to see films there where I have been the only person, which is great for me, but not really solid business. No wonder their sodas are so expensive, it’s the only way they can stay afloat.