tree by Turner Wright

Turner Wright UC Davis 101223

Another lunchtime, another part of campus, this was outside the Art Building, by the Turner Wright Hall, next to those Arneson Eggheads that look like they are in a one-way argument; a spot I have sketched before, not that that’s ever stopped me. I liked the colours. I’m drawing a lot at the moment, because (I think) it’s something I know how to do, and in moments when you feel like you can’t really do very much at all, that means a lot. Even if sometimes it feels like a waste of time/energy that could be spent better, it actually isn’t, and in the long term, well I have this huge body of art work to look back on, and people seem to like it. It’s never enough though is it. There always has to be another drawing. Like, do more, do better, try out another idea, another pen, another type of line. There’s no ‘finishing line’ though, not even the end of a sketchbook, because I tend to race towards the end of that sketchbook (I have about a third left in my current one) just so I can start a new one, that magnificent feeling of Page One. I’m drawing in these books, creating them and controlling the narrative, but I think I’m also reading them. Some sketchbooks, they are like novels you just can’t put down, you’ve drawn on one page and you can’t wait to see what happens next. The plot point might be “the Silo” or “the Arboretum” but it might somehow be the best sketch of the book, one of those ones that inspires you to draw a load of other sketches in a similar way – or not, maybe it will be a sketch that convinces me to give up on a certain palette or pen. All the sketchbooks just show the story of my life, the mundane, the world I’m in. I’m not that interesting, Davis might not be that interesting, but there it is, here I am, I’ll keep on drawing it (“everything is interesting if you take an interest in it” a younger man once said, hoping that would be his catchphrase, and it’s still true). This sketch shows I’m really into the trees on campus still, worried about them all after so many fell since last year. I decided not to colour in the trunk but let it stand out against the background colours. On to the next page.