Time for side two of the album of trees from September. It is October now, the weather is still very hot (over a hundred for several days now) and I haven’t stopped drawing trees, though I am tired of this heat and need some cooler weather now please. It was cool standing in the shade of the big tree above, on Mrak Lawn. You can see one of Arneson’s Eggheads there, “Eye on Mrak/Fatal Laff”, one of the most photographed of the Eggheads. This was on the Friday before the new academic year began, just before the rush, the last moment of calm. I like the new year starting, usually, but this year I was feeling a bit of apprehension. I have quite enjoyed the quiet, even though the Davis summer is long and hot. I know that once all the people are back and things are moving that I always feel differently – I’m a city person after all – but maybe I am just always seeking the quiet spaces now, away from the noise. The world feels so noisy these days, with the news and the adverts and the endless sewage of voices that are shoved in your faces every time you look at your electronic devices that supposedly connect us all. This leaves our heads feeling noisy, as thoughts bounce around in there like birds trapped in a glass room not really sure where to land. The trees absorb some of that noise, I think. They just stand silently, no plans to go anywhere. They are alive, I wonder sometimes if they are happy with where they have ended up or if they don’t like some of the other trees nearby because they are always dropping leaves or attracting squirrels, or if they don’t really think about it because they are, you know, trees.

It’s at this time of year the trees start changing and getting ready for winter. Not all of them do, some stay the same. I start thinking about when I might start wearing my warm sweaters again – not any time soon, if this heatwave continues. It’s getting busy at work as we get on with the general running of this big university, helping the branches of academia grow and develop, insert tree-based analogy here. On the other side of the world this week, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the 2024 Urban Sketching Symposium is about to start. Sketchers from around the world are descending upon that colourful capital and starting to post their experiences already, their sketches, their photos, their connections with each other. October is not a good time for me to go to a Symposium. Last year it was held in New Zealand, another far-flung place I have always wanted to visit, but at another time that was not really possible for me due to timing (April). The last one I went to was the huge one in Amsterdam, 2019, when about 800 or more sketchers descended on the Dutch capital in the middle of an unbearably hot summer, back in the pre-Covid world that feels like a different planet in so many ways (though it’s still unbearably hot). Sure, we are ‘back to normal’ now, but so many of us are still not really. I think I’ve reverted back to the solitary reclusive sketcher that shies from the big events, and the small ones too. This has been happening since before the pandemic, but the past few years have made me even more so. It’s hard for me to really explain it. I sketch, I post on my website, I also post on Instagram, and while I keep up with a load of sketchers online who still inspire me daily, I don’t interact so much with all the wider groups these days, your Facebooks and so on. The algorithms are a mess. Instagram’s ok but a bit limited, I’ve stopped posting on the old Twitter, and Threads is useless. I post to Flickr, but not in the old groups which all feel so 2006. This place right here is my main outlet, old fashioned though the blog is. At the launch of Urban Sketchers I was a correspondent for the main USk blog, but I have not posted there for years since it’s not really for that any more, and is more about the network of local chapters. I never did set up an official local chapter round here. Keeping up with all the global sketching community is overwhelming now, it’s massive. I’m in my little corner doing my thing. I am feeling more reclusive than ever with sketching (and in general, if I’m honest), going back to the default setting of hiding away. Maybe I just need a proper Symposium experience, like in the old days, to kick me out of this, and give me some new ideas and energy.

It was the very first Urban Sketching Symposium that effectively brought me out of my shell in the first place, so to speak. We’d only been a thing for barely a couple of years, but the idea of getting sketchers together for a few days of workshops, talks, sketching and mostly interacting in-person was always on the cards, so Gabi and co organized the first event in Portland, Oregon. Not too far from Davis, really. I nearly considered not going. I was part of Urban Sketchers from the start but that old feeling that my place is to hide away. I’d been going through a bit of a personal crisis at the end of 2009, feeling at my lowest ebb, and I think I took a decision in 2010 to figure out how to somehow grow more, take charge of myself a bit. I was encouraged by other urban sketchers to come to Portland, so I took the leap. It really was a lightbulb moment for me when I got there. The Correspondents had a dinner the night before the Symposium, and for so many of us, gathered from not just America but literally all over the world – Kumi from Tokyo, Gerard from Belgium, Tia from Singapore, Isabel from Mauritania, Simo from Italy, Liz from Australia, Lapin from Barcelona – who had not met in person before, but all knew each other and recognized all our different styles immediately. It was exciting to finally meet Gabi Campanario from Seattle, Matthew Brehm from Idaho, and Jason Das from New York, with whom I’d spoken a lot online already, plus several others whose work I loved and still do, Veronica Lawlor, Shiho Nakaza, Laura Frankstone. The Symposium itself started next day, and there were about 75-80 of us total, and it was far less rigorously structured than the Symposia now – we only realized on day two that name tags might be helpful – but as we all wandered about Portland in our groups, it felt like everyone there got to know each other, and I met a lot of people I’ve stayed sketching friends with (and huge fans of) since, such as Kalina Wilson, Rita Sabler, Don Colley, Mike Daikabura, Orling Dominguez, Elizabeth Alley, Vicky Porter, to name a few I discovered there for the first time. I had dinner with a group of the local Portland sketchers and have been back a few times since to sketch (and eat and drink!) with them on their monthly sketchcrawls. The talks were especially fun, the bit where I asked Frank Ching about curvilinear perspective and Gerard Michel got up and gave an animated explanation to the room in French was brilliant. One of my favourite moments was in Matthew Brehm’s talk, when he described it as the ‘Woodstock of Urban Sketching’, and he was absolutely spot on.

It really was where I lost my shyness as a sketcher too. I remember being in Frank Ching’s architecture workshop down in Portland’s Saturday market, and I didn’t know where to sit and sketch, normally looking for the out of sight place where I would not be bothered. I was sketching with Shiho (who introduced me to the pen that day that I still use daily) and we decided, why hide? Why not just sit in the middle of the market, and let people go around us? I think we were back to back. And it was fine, and people came up and watched, and I didn’t mind, for the first time ever I didn’t mind being watched. It was as if suddenly I realized, it’s ok to go out sketching, it’s normal, and not only are other people doing it, but by doing it ourselves we are giving other people permission to do it. And I drew pirates. I remember sitting outside a little bar one afternoon with a group of us and just seeing each of our minds racing with ideas, none of us able to sleep much, and I realized we need more of this to get sketchers together. On the plane ride home, I couldn’t sit still for ideas, and filled several pages of a notebook with thoughts and phrases and plans, and wrote down “Let’s Draw Davis!”, deciding to start a monthly sketchcrawl in Davis, making fliers that I would post about town and start an email list and make it open to anyone, and promise myself that I would get out of my shell and actually start trying to meet other artists and sketchers in this little city, and encourage others to become urban sketchers. I even brought extra pencils and little sketchbooks with me in case people wondered what we might be doing, and would like to get sketching themselves. And it worked! I’ve met a lot of the local art community over the years, and continued meeting sketchers from over the world, and organizing big events in London, all the fun art stuff. Yet now I find myself shying away again. Maybe I need to, if you will not excuse the pun, branch out a bit.

Let’s get back to the trees. The previous trees were from the Northstar Park, not too far from my house. The big old oak above though is outside the Chemistry building, right opposite the Bike Barn, and has seen a lot of construction right next door while that new Chemistry wing has been built. A number of smaller, younger trees had to be sacrificed for that building to happen, but thankfully this big old mighty tree remains. Its trunk is such an interesting shape, and I pass under its shade most days on my way to work, I am very grateful for its shelter from the sun. I try to find the path with the most shade, the sun does not fit well with my skin. I drew this in pencil as you can see, it made the drawing go a bit faster. It looks like a traditional map of languages, starting out with the big trunk of Indo-European, branching off early into Indo-Iranian and European, then getting all Indo-Aryan, Italo-Romance, Germanic and so on. Like Minna Sundberg’s illustration of it from about ten years ago. I love a language family tree. Languages were my obsession for many years; I’ve kind of let that go a bit, but I still get very excited when I read about it. It’s nearly twenty years since I wrote my Masters thesis, which was based around medieval English and its relationship with French. As far as family tree models go, they are very useful but of course don’t tell the whole story – certain languages having strong influences/cross-pollination on others not in the same branch (or even tree), mixed-language societies where code-switching leads to blurring of the boundaries and pidginization, enforced standardization, but on the whole they can be very helpful in showing how languages at their core developed from each other. Besides, as we have established, I just really love a drawing of a tree.

This is the second tree in this set which has a lot of yellow blooming on the sunny side. This one is next to the Bike Barn, drawn on the first day of Fall quarter. I did another type of tree drawing this summer – I finally updated our Faculty Family Tree. It’s something I have wanted to do for many years. Back in 2008, for the UC Davis Centenary, one of our Emeriti in Statistics, Professor Mack, created a massive genealogy, with lines carefully hand-drawn in pencil, small black and white photos, and names of all sorts of historical mathematicians and statisticians (that bit was typed by me), all collected into one huge board that we displayed for the Chancellor, and have had on our wall ever since. A lot of new faculty have joined us in the intervening years, some have left, and I thought that it would be nice to update it somehow (especially as we can now add Newton and Galileo to the map). And yes, you’ll notice I said ‘map’ there and not ‘tree’ because it was while I was in London this summer, on the Underground, that I had the idea of finally doing this project, and drawing it in the style of the tube map. I had kept a spreadsheet of the lineage of all new faculty who had joined us in the past sixteen years, and got to work in Illustrator, taking about a month to draw the whole thing up. I had it printed as a poster, and it made its debut at a special event in (funnily enough) Portland, at an event for our alumni held at the Joint Statistical Meeting and hosted by our Dean. It’s now on display in our main office on campus, and the great thing is I can update it every year as I find out more information, or as people come or go. It was even featured in the L&S Magazine back in August. Perhaps the biggest tree I have drawn this year.

And finally, two big old oak trees on the north-west corner of the Quad – above, the first day of the quarter, below, the last day of September. Everyone is back now, behind me groups of sororities and fraternities and clubs and other campus groups, as well as the Jehovahs who have been there patiently every day this summer, were gathered outside the MU grabbing the attentions of all the newcomers on campus. Bikes are whizzing by, and e-scooters which go faster and more silently, and e-bikes which go faster still, and now those e-bikes that look more like mopeds, but people ride them on sidewalks and bike lanes much faster than any regular bike; one nearly knocked me over behind Hart Hall the other day. I’ve not been out during the busiest parts of the day yet when classes interchange, but late September/early October is when most of the crashes happen. Yeah it’s great having the people back. I’m still drawing trees, and probably won’t stop any time soon. The Symposium is starting now. Maybe I should think about finally submitting a workshop, trying to teach something. I never feel confident enough to feel like I have anything to pass on; maybe I could teach about drawing trees. Yes, maybe I could. I will try to come out of the shell a bit more, be less of a recluse, I will, but for now, you’ll probably find me under a tree.