Well this past week has been a big pile of pants, but we press on. Here are some more drawings of Davis from this long and wounding January; I am trying to post them all in themed batches where I can, the last one were all along one block of E Street in Old North Davis, and these ones are all along First Street (also known as 1st Street) in the downtown-to-campus corridor. First Street was named after William Randolph Hearst, a rich oligarch who had so much money he could do whatever he wanted, glad we don’t have those any more. I’m joking it wasn’t, and we definitely do. No, it was named after England’s World Cup Winning Hat-Trick Hero, and only surviving member of that famous team from ’66, Geoff Hurst. We don’t have those any more, English World Cup winners. I’m joking, it wasn’t, and we definitely don’t. I actually call this street ‘Last Street’, because I live in North Davis and coming from that direction, this is the last street in downtown. However we are so coming-off-the-freeway-centric aren’t we. What’s in a name? Don’t let’s get started on that. Ok, the sketch above, I was very pleased with how this turned out. I think this building is part of UC Davis called the Center for Child and Family Studies, they have a pre-school I think, my son went to another one in town. That was a long time ago now. I liked the light on the side of the building and the view down First Street, that is a very busy road. I used a bit of Buff Titanium for the side of the building; this is a new colour I got recently, Daniel Smith, I have seen it in other people’s palettes and wanted to give it a go. It’s a fantastic colour, very versatile and subtle, and handy for those warm washes on off-white buildings, mixed with a little orange or ochre. The sky was being very helpfully interesting to paint. It was cold, and I drew mostly at lunchtime (plus a little bit post-work) colouring in later for the most part.

This next one is a block or so up First Street towards downtown, a building I have not only sketched before (twice) but also held an exhibition at, one of those 2nd Friday Art About ones I used to do years ago, they were very nice in here. It’s a very sketchable shape, and I stood across the road in the shade, listening to an audiobook while I drew. It was ‘Guards! Guards!’ by Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite books when I was a teenager, and still a fantastic story. This month I have so far listened to four Terry Pratchett audiobooks, all recent productions excellently narrated (by Jon Culshaw, who does amazing character voices, with Peter Serafinowicz as Death and Bill Nighy as the Footnotes) in the ‘City Watch’ series. So far I’ve listened to ‘Guards! Guards!’, ‘Men At Arms’ (another which I fell in love with in the early 90s), ‘Feet Of Clay’ and ‘Jingo’. Next in that sequence is ‘The Fifth Elephant’ (which I remember being so-so about when I read it), then ‘Nights Watch’ (which I remember absolutely loving), then there’s ‘Thud!’ (which I was indifferent to, so we’ll see if a re-listen changes my mind) and ‘Snuff’ (which I never read; I’m still saving some Pratchett books for later in life). This year, 2025 (in case you need reminding), marks ten years since Terry Pratchett died. He was the author whose work I felt most closely connected with while growing up, and I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately.  I think about his illness, and about age, and how he handled it all and how he stood for people. He has missed a lot of how badly the world has gone. I will listen to those new audiobooks, which have many other narrators, in the run up to the anniversary, and read the old books too, although my own collection was left in England in my sister’s garage, and that garage was subsequently demolished when the neighbourhood was rebuilt, probably with my whole collection of Pratchett books inside it. Now is a good time to start rediscovering them all, but I will probably always leave one or two unread, because if I do that then he’s not really gone, is he.

And here are two buildings on First Street that I have not only drawn before, but in fact drew on the same day of the year eleven years previously. I drew both of these after work, finishing a little early to catch the fading light and the soft muted shadows. I coloured a lot of them in afterwards but I was keen to grab those shadows. The building above at 221 First Street was the ‘A.J. Plant Home’, according to the City of Davis historic pedestrian and bike tour which I have discussed in previous posts. Built in 1911 in the Dutch Colonial Style, it used to be a frat house but is now home of AGR Partners, some agricultural firm. Not ‘Alpha Gamma Rho’ which is a real fraternity somewhere else in Davis. I have drawn this building a number of times, the first was back in February 2010 though. What a time of my life that was. I didn’t expect that I would still be drawing that building in 2025. Below is the Delta Delta Delta (or ‘Tri-Delta’) sorority next door to the one above. Tri-Delta was the first sorority at UC Davis, with this chapter being founded in 1974. We didn’t have these types of things at university in London, so I never experienced that part of student life, but let’s be honest, I would never have been in a fraternity anyway. I’m just not that sort of personality, am I. There are people that are, and there are people that aren’t. It’s a nice looking little building this though, some of these places are big and a bit grotty looking (think beer-pong and robes for curtains), some of them a big and seem to be quite moneyed, and some look like this, quite nice and well-kept. It’s a different world to mine. I do occasionally get asked by people for prints when I’ve sketched these buildings, since they contain a lot of memories for people, though whenever I posted them on the old Society6 they would invariably be taken down at some point as some sort of violation of their terms, I assume because it has the frat house logo on it, and they don’t like that on a print you’re selling, even if the same frat house has asked me for it (and my own cut of the sale is very small compared to Society6). That particular print site ended up being useless anyway, screwing over its artists and taking more and more of a cut, so I took all my stuff off it. I did start a Redbubble site, though so far that’s proved worthless to me, so I’m not currently doing prints to order, certainly not of frat houses. But I’m still drawing them all, still documenting the whole of this city and this university in my sketchbook, and sharing them to look at here. More to come.