november’s gonna november

November 30, 2023December 2, 2023Leave a comment

Since today’s the last day of November, and tomorrow is December, here’s a bunch of sketches from around Davis this past month showing the colourful trees they have nowadays. You’ve seen them, the trees they have now, with all the colours. It can be very exciting, especially for the person with a paintbox who just has to record it somehow. Above is Oak Street, I cycle down here every day, and now the sun sets so early I cycle up it every evening in the dark, and there are no streetlights (but occasionally piles of leaves in the bike path). This was back on the 19th; today is the last day of November. I heard this morning that Shane MacGowan has died. He was 65. I am really pretty sad about it.

I stood on the corner of Russell and Miller to draw this. Russell and Miller sounds like one of those comedy duos you used to get, one of those ones that were extremely unfunny, but had absolutely no idea how unfunny they were. A bit like Hale and Pace, but even less so. I also sounds a bit like the sort of law firm you have to call if you get bitten by a dog, or if your foot gets run over by an e-scooter. In the foreground is one of those ‘Spin’ bikes, you’ve seen those, those e-bikes they have nowadays. You’ve seen them, you use an app, there’s a bike, it rides a bit faster and you can appear suddenly behind regular bikes on the bike path like “surprise!” before whizzing by saying “see ya later suckers!” and then when you want to stop using it, you can just get off an leave it in the middle of the sidewalk in the way, so someone else can come and have a go. There used to be ‘Jump’ bikes, now there are ‘Spin’ bikes. There are also these ‘Hump’ bikes, looking more like modernized mopeds but completely silent and people ride them on bike paths at twice the speed of a normal bike. They give me the ‘ump.

In the sketch above, I drew with the full intention of adding in the yellowing oranges and browning greens of all the foliage, but didn’t get back to it later, and so I left it up to your imagination. The great thing about this is I can re-use it in April or May, and colour the leaves in a more spring-like green. It’d be like going back to an old song and reworking the bass or adding better lyrics. This was on 4th Street, in the run up to Veterans Day.

So, Shane MacGowan has died. The first record I ever owned that was all mine was The Fairytale of New York, which if memory serves my mum got for me as a present a few weeks before Christmas in about 1987, and which became an instantly beloved classic in our home, and everywhere else too. I still have it. We had a lot of Irish music in our house, a lot of music in general, but we loved the Pogues, and Shane MacGowan sang in an Irish accent, though he was from London, and was absolutely one of a kind. Our world was Irish north-west London, this was us.

This one above was drawn on one of those Saturdays when I needed to get out and sketch, to look for those autumnal leaves, and grab a milkshake before cycling home on my regular acoustic bike. I listened to a podcast talking about George Harrison and the Travelling Wilburys. I loved George, but back when I was in my early teens, the Wilburys were a bit of a joke, a bunch of grandads (in their forties). Back then, I became obsessed with the Pogues. I was obsessed with the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols, but at the end of the 80s I loved the Pogues. I remember buying the Peace and Love album from a record seller at the Irish Music and Dance Festival in Southport (at Pontins, Ainsdale Beach). We would go to every year for a week of listening to Irish greats like Brendan Shine and Philomena Begley, and I’d get to hang out with other Irish immigrant kids from all over the UK, getting pals from Glasgow and Lancashire and Birmingham and all those Irish bits of London. I never got to see the Pogues live. I think my mum did, and I know my cousin had seen them playing in Archway many years ago. I listened to their greatest hits on my cheap portable tape player, travelling all over London on the tube or on the bus; walking down the south bank of the Thames listening to ‘Misty Morning Albert Bridge’; I remember sitting opposite Parliament, I must have been fifteen or sixteen, long before the London Eye ever came along, and drew Big Ben, and was chatting to this homeless guy from Liverpool, and he told me all about his situation, I remember giving him the drawing when I was done, and he was really nice, and I remember thinking a lot about that conversation on the way home. I think about those years when I hear the Pogues, I was an awkward skinny freckly lad with untamed red hair and creative energy fighting to get out, and I played my guitar a lot, badly I might add, and I played mostly Pogues songs because they were easy as fuck, three chords in a few different ways, and lyrics that were picked right off the littered streets where I was living. I used to get this book of Pogues lyrics out from the library. I actually used that book for a study in poetry for one of my English GCSE exams; I don’t think my teacher was impressed with it. But they were presented as poems, and they read like poems. They were illustrated by this guy who would mostly just scribble in biro and it would be brilliant, and I loved that complete looseness, matching the ‘tripping-over-the-kerb and getting up again’ of the lyrics, telling so many stories about the simplest things, a freedom of expression I found so hard to achieve. I could not sing, I still can’t, but Shane MacGowan, his voice, his looks, his whole presentation, it felt like you didn’t have to be ‘good’ at something to be great at it, he was great, the Pogues were great. I played songs with D and G and A a lot, to the point that the frets on my Westone Concord (which is still living at my mum’s house, hiding from view) are to this day completely worn down in the chord shape of D. Three chords is really all you need mate, boom there’s a song. Years later at the end of the 90s, while I was living in Belgium, I actually wrote a song called ‘Misty Morning Waterloo’, a tribute in the title (though actually about those foggy mornings leaving London on the Eurostar to go back to Brussels, I always hated leaving London behind), and that only had two chords in it. If I’d just tried a bit harder, I could have got away with one chord.

So yeah, I’m very sad about today’s news, and I’m going to spend the next few days thinking about Shane MacGowan, listening to the Pogues, thinking about London, listening to ‘London You’re A Lady’ (which is probably my favourite Pogues song, an absolute belter of a poem and always makes me sad thinking of my old home town). But it wasn’t the only news of one of my late 80s London heroes dying. Terry Venables, ‘El Tel’, one of my favourite Spurs managers, died last week too, and we all loved him. November 2023, you took a toll. The sketch above was drawn on campus, in the middle of the month, those colourful trees were just begging for someone to sketch them. It’s December tomorrow, and then this godforsaken year is nearly over, and then there’s another godforsaken year coming right up. I’ll keep on scribbling. Below, last one in the set of November’s trees, another escape downtown catching the colours at the corner of 3rd and D. November is done with now.

across covell

November 21, 2023November 22, 2023Leave a comment

I cross this street every single day, except those days when I don’t leave the house. That sometimes happens on the odd weekend, I just forget, or I say, there’s nothing much to see out there, I’ve seen it. I think I was like that as a kid sometimes; I dreamt of going far across the world, but didn’t really fancy leaving my bedroom, where my record player was, and my books, and my cat, and my felt tip pens. This is the corner of Covell and Catalina. Davis has a Covell Boulevard running along the north of the city, and a similarly named Cowell Boulevard running along the south; that’s where we used to live, when we first moved here, eighteen years and one day before I drew this. I do like to go for a run around here. I have been running less, due to a slight injury on my leg, but I did enough to run the annual Turkey Trot 5k last weekend, and did alright. As always, I get excited after the race and start planning the next races. The Davis Stampede is coming up in February, and the Lucky Run in March; I’m thinking I’ll do the 7k for that one, which is held in this neighbourhood. Mostly I bike across this street to the bike path across the road. You can see the autumn in the trees. Draw the world you live in.

the tallest building in davis

November 8, 2023November 7, 2023Leave a comment

Another campus sketch, drawn after work last Friday, the last workday of the year where there’s any daylight to draw anything, because the clocks went back on Sunday morning; enter the dark times, cycling up the streetlamp-free Oak Street hoping not to bump into a random pile of leaves and sticks left helpfully in the bike lane. The building in the foreground here is the School of Education, the Learning-Place of Learning. It’s a pretty nondescript typical campus building, nothing to see here, never featured highly on my sketching lists. Interestingly enough the building rising behind it has not been sketched much by me either, despite being I think the tallest building on campus. That’s Sproul Hall. all nine floors of it. It rhymes with ‘scowl’ not with ‘school’. I remember going to a meeting up on that top floor years ago back when I was a grad coordinator, and wondering if I could get back up there to draw the view some time, but I never did so. I don’t suppose the view will be that interesting, it’s a very flat landscape. They do languages and literature in here, you know. That was my area of study, once upon a time when I studied. I wonder sometimes if I miss being a student. It was so long ago now. I did do a Masters degree before moving out here, and while I loved spending my days in the library, I hated the constant feeling of having some sort of homework to do, that I’m behind on something, that some library book was due. I miss being younger, that’s not really the same thing. Being a student over there is not the same as being a student over here. Besides, I did drama for my undergrad, and we were all a bit different. It’s November now, and everywhere I look are trees I want to draw, it’s distracting me somewhat. I’m anxious for them all to go orange and yellow and red, and for me to catch them before it gets windy and blows them all bare. There are still a lot of nice greens around though. It was the blues reflected in that glass that I was interested in here though.

Back to the TLC

November 7, 2023November 7, 2023Leave a comment

You may remember the Teaching Learning Complex (TLC) that was officially opened over a year ago now, and I had drawn all the construction of it for a couple of years during the pandemic, and the construction company even gave me a nice warm sweater with an embroidery of one of my sketches of the site in the sleeve. It’s now getting to the time of year when it’s cool enough for me to wear it again, by the way, it’s very comfortable. I always need a construction project to draw, don’t I. Right now it’s that new wing of the Chemistry building, it’s nearly finished. Then I don’t draw it again for ages. However the TLC is pretty sketchable, and so on one of my lunchtimes I had to draw it again, while stood in the shade of another new build right opposite (the new part of the Engineering building, which wasn’t as visually interesting to document unfortunately; I’ll draw the recently finished thing soon). I was going to do a full colour sketch with the nice blue sky contrasting the building and all the different foliage, but I stopped where I was because lunchtime was over and I just liked that tree standing out. I drew in a plane that was flying far overhead, and then spent the rest of the sketch (as well as every time I look at the page) trying to swat it away thinking it is a fly. Instinct, innit. This was ‘Now And Then’ day, and by this point I had not listened to it, I was saving it until the end of the work day. I could do a ‘Now And Then’ for this building by showing what it looked like when it was just a construction site, but just look at the tag /teaching-learning-complex/” and you’ll see all the old sketches, with some waffling text.

eighteen years later

November 6, 2023November 6, 2023Leave a comment

Yesterday, November 5th, marked eighteen years since we moved to Davis. I had never even heard of Davis until a few weeks before. I knew quite a few people with last name of Davis (actually mostly Davies), but when our plane landed from London in the fall of 2005 I was unaware of the college town in the central valley of California that would come to define this latter part of my life. I didn’t really have an idea in mind of what life over here would look like when we emigrated, find a place to live, find a place to work, turn thirty and get busy living in America until we got bored and moved somewhere else. I remember the first visit to Davis; my wife had a job interview here at the university, so I tagged along and waited downtown while she did that. I liked the downtown; there were several bookstores, including the Avid Reader (where I eventually got my first job in the US) and the now-gone Bogey’s Books, which was where Bizarro World Comics is now located (they used to be on 5th Street), and they had a good language section. There was also the Soccer and Lifestyle football shirt shop, which to me was a massive bonus, and the guy who still runs it was the first person in Davis I ever spoke to. I remember asking if they got the Spurs shirts in, but he said that Kappa are really bad at distributing in the States. (Spurs are made by Nike now and they always have our new shirts in stock). I wasn’t sure about the landscape around Davis, this huge hot, flat valley that reminded me of Tatooine, and it was a fair ride from Santa Rosa where we had been staying with my wife’s family, the idea of moving to America being that we’d be closer to them. When she accepted the job, we came back one more time to look around at apartments, using the DavisWiki site to look for apartment complexes, and we ate at Sudwerk back when they still had genuinely decent German style food (we ate there again a few weeks ago in the newly reopened restaurant part; their food is pretty bland now, though the beer is still nice). And then on November 5th, remember remember, we moved into our new apartment in south Davis. I just recall walking down to Nugget and getting a bottle of London Pride beer, which was a nice find, to celebrate our new home and also celebrate Guy Fawkes Night, which is (obviously) not a thing over here, but was always one of the big days/nights when I was growing up. Bonfire Night. It sounds strange explaining it to people over here. I remember hearing on the news here back in that first year that November 5th was ‘Britain’s Fourth of July’, which made me laugh. I would tell people, no it’s America’s May the 11th, which took some explaining. Those first few months were an adjustment, living in Davis. Those first few eighteen years have been an adjustment.

So on this day, eighteen years later, I cycled downtown just to get out of the house for a bit (being stuck in the ‘I am bored but don’t want to actually go anywhere’ rut, and the ‘there’s nothing to do in Davis’ rut), and stopped in Central Park to draw that caterpillar sculpture I think I’ve never sketched. It’s very autumnal right now, and we had a little bit of light rain, Fall is here. I was listening to something about the Beatles. ‘Now and Then’ has been stuck in my head since Thursday, growing on me more and more. I can’t stop playing it on my guitar.

And I go back to thinking myself about Now and Then. 2005 was a different world, the last year of my twenties, the last year of my life in London, in Europe, with my ever-expanding family back home. When I think about how that was eighteen years ago I can’t help but think about where I was eighteen years before that. The answer was the first year at Edgware Secondary School, I was a lot smaller, everyone else was a lot taller. I had left my primary school Goldbeaters a few months before, and Edgware was a big new world, school uniforms, bigger playgrounds, getting the tube from Burnt Oak and walking up Green Lane, all those different teachers, some nice, some scary, some bored. It was not long after Tottenham had lost to Coventry in the FA Cup Final, the only one I ever went to, I’m still not really over that. Most of my friends from Goldbeaters went to Mill Hill County High, but I made friends at Edgware, including one who I knew from Goldbeaters but we didn’t hang out together until Edgware, that’s my friend Terry who I’m still friends with but haven’t seen in years, because he moved to Asia at the end of 2006 (he’s now in Japan). We both moved out thousands of miles from Burnt Oak, never to return. So eighteen years before my move to America I was 11; you can’t compare the difference between 11 and 29 with the difference between 29 and 47, but there’s a lot of life in between. I was obsessed with drawing and Tottenham when I was 11, and I still am now. Next year it will be nineteen years, and so I’ll be comparing nineteen years before that, when I was 10; in 2025 it will be twenty years, and so on. Eventually it will be fully half my life. You might say in reality it already has been. Well I’m still here now, and now and then I think of the old world.

the arboretum in october

November 4, 2023November 3, 2023Leave a comment

More brown De Atramentis ink sketches, this time from different lunchtimes in the UC Davis Arboretum, at the end of October 2023. This October has been long, and I’ve been feeling super exhausted a lot of the time, mentally, physically, metaphysically, geographically, mathematically, you name it. I also got my Covid and Flu shots for the season, one in each arm, so it was hard to sleep on my side for a couple of nights. I’ve not been exercising enough, and the stress of the world at large is creeping in. It’s good that we have the Arboretum here at UC Davis, a place to go and relax for a while among the trees and greenery. I sat on a bench out overlooking Lake Spafford, where that tree used to be, and sketched. It was sunny, and the foliage was colourful.

On the next day I also sketched in the Arboretum, on the little path near our building, in sight of the water tower. It’s a nice view this. A very nice view, once you commit it to paper. Draw where you live. This is a nice part of campus. A lot of people on their lunchtime walks, getting their 10,000 steps in, while I let that brown ink jump all over the page. In the lunchtime sketch below, I think it may have been working a little less well for me in places, but I did discover that if you draw directly onto watercolour paint (dry, not still wet), you can’t get a thin exact line as it will expand to create thicker lines, though it does come out that bit darker too. I’m still getting used to fountain pen sketching, and this ink in particular, but it’s fun to experiment. The Arboretum has many bridges like this.

raining champions

November 4, 2023November 3, 2023Leave a comment

Fall came at last. We had one Sunday where it really rained, an absolutely deluge. I was staying indoors that day because knackered, so I didn’t mind. This was the day I was trying out that new brown De Atramentis ink that had arrived the day before (thanks JetPens for quick delivery!). I’d just watched the USA Grand Prix, which was an exciting race in which Lewis Hamilton came second and could have won if there were another couple of laps, only to later be disqualified entirely from the race (along with LeClerc) due to his car’s floor being a millimetre too high or low due to wear, honestly I forget which technical rule had been unwittingly broken, but it meant that whole entertaining race we’d just meant zero. I hate it when stuff like that happens. The reigning champion Max Verstappen won anyway, that didn’t change. I looked out of the window instead, at the driving rain. This was a big storm, creating big puddles. Thankfully no big trees went down, unlike the calamitous storms of last January. By the way, I love Now and Then. It’s not necessarily a classic, but I love the sentiment, because I love the Beatles.

two parks in north davis

November 3, 2023November 2, 2023Leave a comment

I have been really enjoying sketching with the Lamy Safari and the De Atramentis Document Brown ink. I especially like drawing foliage with that stuff. Above, I was off sick that day, I woke up feeling achy and exhausted, but by about 10am I really needed to move about a bit so I took a walk down the local park, Community Park. Not a long walk, but I did stop to do a sketch of the path. There’s something very gentle about that brown ink with the park colours. This park has been the scene of many soccer practices over the years, and a lot of games also at the younger age groups, and is one of the main locations of the Davis World Cup tournament. It’s also the park next to my son’s high school, and his old elementary school as well, so we’ve walked across this park so many times over the years. Sketch the places you live your life, that’s what I always tell people (imaginary people, in my head, I don’t get out much). But it’s important. these are the places you fill your memories with. In years to come, these places become part of the dreamscape you go back to when you’re asleep, if you have left them behind. There are places in my dreams, patchworks of places from my teens and twenties, mostly in parts of London that I don’t really go to now, or maybe don’t really exist except in the imagined world. So I draw the real places now, so they always stay real.

This took an existential turn, didn’t it. This next sketch is of another nearby park, Northstar Park, where there’s that big pond. I often run this way when out doing my three mile jog. It’s another park with some youth soccer history, having coached many U8-U10 games here, and held a few practices at U12 as well, it’s always the field with the most random dog poo on it.

tiki stuff on the shelf

November 2, 2023November 2, 2023Leave a comment

I recently got a couple of new Lamy Safari fountain pens, one Extra Fine and one Medium, to go with the Fine one that I’ve had for a while. I filled the Fine one with black carbon platinum ink, and put that in the Extra Fine one too. While on recent sketchcrawls I saw my fellow Davis sketcher Alison Kent using this nice chocolate brown ink, De Atramentis Document Brown, and I thought right, I’m going to use that too. So I got some (not cheap) and have been using it for a bit, and I love it. It’s much lighter than my regular brown-black, and draws very smoothly. Still getting used to it, and it might not be as fine as my Uni-ball Signo, and it does often depend on the side of paper I draw on, but it’s nice. So to test it out I did a sketch of some of my wife’s tiki-themed ornaments on the shelf. It’s a good colour to be drawing this with. It was a stay-indoors day. We’ve not been to Trader Sam’s yet, by the way. We have been to Three Dots and a Dash, a very cool tiki bar in Chicago, their cocktails were amazing. And of course we’ve been to the Enchanted Tiki Rooms at Disneyland, my wife loves that place. We still haven’t been to the new tiki (and pirate) themed bar in Davis though, Shipwrecked, we need to check that out. Might be a while before I sketch that one though. We did recently visit an amazing (and expensive) exhibition on Napa about all the tiki bars of northern California, there is a very interesting history with all these old themed places. Personally I loved the Tonga Rooms in San Francisco, when we visited there while staying at the Fairmont.

it was fifteen years ago today…

November 1, 2023November 1, 2023Leave a comment

Did you know that it is 15 years to the day since Urban Sketchers first launched? November 1, 2008, and now it’s huge all over the world. I was thinking about that the other day when passing through old North Davis and realized I needed to draw that house on the corner again, the one I had drawn in late October 2008 and was my first post on day 1 of the Urban Sketchers blog. Not however my first drawing on the site, because a photo of my sketchbook was used as the first blog header. Still I remember drawing that little house, which was pink in those days, on a crisp Fall afternoon, with golden orange leaves above it ready to fall. I think I’d left work a little early that day; I lived in south Davis then, but was riding around the old North neighbourhood exploring with my sketchbook before heading home. Some things have changed. That tree is long gone, as is the taller tree behind the house. It’s also no longer pink, and has a solar panel on the roof. Fifteen years ago, George W Bush was still president, right before Obama’s first election. Lewis Hamilton was about to become Formula 1 world champion for the first time. Spurs were not as great as now, but we had just won a trophy earlier that year, and we’ve not won one since. My baby son is almost as tall as me now. My hair is a fair bit less red than it was then. I certainly feel older, but I’ve been to a few interesting places since then. I’ve drawn thousands of sketches since then.

I did draw the house again five years ago, at the end of October 2018. My drawing style had changed (the pen for sure was different) and that big tree out front was gone, but the tree behind was still there. The house was still pink then. It’s a cute little house.

And here is that very first shot of the Urban Sketchers site (not of the post with this house in it) on the day it was launched by Gabi Campanario with that small group of global correspondents, a photo of my screen and sketchbook from Nov 1, 2008, my little computer screen in our old flat. I was thinking about how in another five years it will be 20 years ago today, and we should rewrite Sergeant Pepper in honor. “It was 20 years ago today, Sergeant Gabi taught the band to draw, we been sketching in and out for miles, but we’re guaranteed to save a file” ok look, I have five years to write something significantly better. Maybe I will use AI. Speaking of which, tomorrow (November 2) is the launch of the new, final Beatles song, “Now and Then”, and I’m pretty excited. I’m likely to shed a tear.

P1010070