When I draw I always add it to the chart I make to track all my sketches for the year, and looking at this summer it feels like I’ve drawn a lot less than usual, but it’s not really the case. The format is a bit different because of the sketchbook I am using, with the portrait pages rather than the long landscape pages, so in the way I arrange it, it looks like less. I should have done it differently, but never mind. I still have a bunch of drawings from this summer wandering about Davis over long lunchtimes on slow days, and rather than post them all individually I’ll bunch them up like I usually do with my summer sketches at this time of year. What story is there to tell other than it was summer in Davis, it was hot, I was a bit bored. So like they do in montage sequences of films, here are a few more from downtown that I drew in August. At the top, well it’s on A Street which is where downtown meets the university, and I’ve drawn this building a few times before, Guilbert House.

This one is on 3rd Street, and drawn a little differently. I have drawn this house in the background of a sketch before I think, they often have fun stuff dotted around it, I think it’s one of those student houses. Anyway I was drawn to the pedal machine thing they have on the driveway, I must have seen this at Picnic Day or around town, it says “Vibey” on it so that must be its name. I decided to do the background with only paint and no lines, for some reason, but I don’t really like that much.

This one isn’t downtown at all but very much in the heart of campus, Haring Hall, as drawn from the Silo. The ghostly phantom walking past there is to remind us that I do draw people as long as they look like the people in the road-signs at crossings. I’ve only been inside Haring Hall a few times, and that was only to visit a now-retired professor who I knew and would have to get an occasional signature from, and I always liked his office full of books and things, as a proper professor’s office should feel like. I still occasionally see him at arts events and new building openings on campus, but I do think of his old office when I look at Haring. Anyway I drew Haring in the middle of August, before you know it it’s the middle of September.

And finally, late August. I actually didn’t do much sketching in August this year, as it turns out. I’m making up for it in September by drawing loads of trees, more on that later. I have also done lots of shoe drawings (they are long and take up more space in the chart). The drawing above is of an optometrist, “Eye Sea” (eye don’t get it), I have drawn this building before but not so big. It’s an interesting shape. It’s not my optometrist, this one, I go around the corner but I did come here once many years ago, it was a different optometrist back then, because I wanted some different frames and they had a good selection. I remember I picked up a pair of ridiculously small glasses, comically small lenses. They had no rim on the bottom half, and a very thin rim on the top; I would call them my ‘Half-Svens’, because former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson used to wear little rimless glasses, and he was pretty cool. Poor Sven; he died just two days before I drew this sketch. I must have thought about that subconsciously when I chose to draw it. I liked Sven a lot, ever since first seeing him on the pages of World Soccer in about 1991 when he was Benfica manager, I think. He didn’t look like football managers looked, certainly not English ones, and nothing like the old grizzled ones you’d see coaching the big clubs of Italy or Spain. He got around a bit, did Sven, and was much loved, the football world lost a real individual when he died. He left the world a farewell message before the cancer took him: “Never give up. Do not give up, is my message for life. And please don’t forget this: life is always, always to be celebrated.” Thank you Sven, rest in peace.