In my last post I told you that I have just passed twenty years living in Davis, CA. Twenty years is a long time. It’s twice as long as ten years, but due to Einstein’s Theory of Looking At Your Watch, the first ten years were longer than the second. In terms of number of sketchbooks, the second decade was way longer (see the list here), but I have been drawing Davis since 2005 and often I end up sketching the same thing, over and over. Davis is not very big, there is only so much to draw, but it’s a tale of two cities, or rather a city and a campus, easily distinguished by the colour of the fire hydrants. So here is a chart (containing almost no fire hydrants), but containing twenty places that I have drawn at least ten times over the years. There were some places I drew multiple times that didn’t make the chart (the old Boiler Building / new Pitzer Center which I drew countless times, the Chemistry Building, the TLC, plus Bizarro World which I had drawn only nine times, but added a tenth just today to make up for it). A couple of the rows are not all of the same thing but are multiples of similar, such as ow 20, which are all the Eggheads drawn a couple of times, and row 15, bridges over the creek in the Arboretum, many of which are drawn multiple times. It looks a bit like rows of film, you can get lost looking at it. If this was just a random set of drawings, or if each row was year by year, it would not be that interesting, but this tells twenty stories. The images are not in chronological order, except the last Egghead is one of the earliest sketches I did in Davis.

Here are the twenty rows:

1. Bike Barn, UC Davis
2. Varsity Theatre, 2nd St
3. UC Davis Water Tower, seen from various locations
4. Amtrak Station, 2nd St
5. Silo tower, UC Davis
6. Historic City Hall, F St
7. Mrak Hall, UC Davis
8. Farmer’s Market, Central Park
9. Memorial Union, UC Davis
10. Davis Community Church, 4th / C St
11. Hart Hall, Shields Avenue, UC Davis
12. Newman Chapel, 5th / C St
13. Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Vanderhoef Quad, UC Davis
14. Orange Court, E St
15. Bridges over the Creek, UC Davis Arboretum
16. Dresbach-Hunt-Boyer Mansion, 2nd / E St
17. Walker Hall (Graduate Center), UC Davis
18. De Vere’s Irish Pub (now Bull’n’Mouth), E St
19. Mathematical Sciences Building, California Ave, UC Davis
20. Robert Arneson’s ‘Eggheads’, UC Davis (five locations)

Anyway that’s twenty years in Davis. I’m already in the third decade, time waits for nobody.