I took the U-Bahn out to Warschauer Straße, a wide busy road well out into the East, full of hostels and clubs and new buildings. I was headed to the East Side Gallery, a famous stretch of the remaining Berlin Wall that separates Mühlenstraße from the banks of the river Spree. Popular with tourists, I’ve been here before, but almost didn’t recognize the other side of the street, now all built up with tall steel and glass hotels and apartments and businesses, plus a big modern concert arena, not like the concrete DDR era blocks and empty spaces I saw on my last visit. The East Side Gallery starts close to the Oberbaumbrücke, a decorative bridge over the Spree, and is the longest bit of Berlin Wall left standing. It was covered in artwork by over a hundred artists in 1990 after the Wall fell, and has been left as a testament to the fall of the DDR. Some of the artwork has stayed in place over the years, much of it has been updated or renovated, or even had new artwork put in place. Some sections have even come down, as Berlin has started redeveloping, but this is considered to be the largest open-air gallery in the world and contains some now famous paintings such as the one of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing, My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love by Russian painter Dmitri Vrubel. I stood and sketched the section above, showing Alles Offen (‘Anything Open’) by Rosemary Schinzler. I drew in pencil and watercolour (on that horrible bobbly Moleskine paper) and I likely had in mind the looser style of Detlef Surrey having been so inspired by his work at his talk. Plus it was just faster; I get bogged down with my penwork sometimes, and it’s good to be free; where better to be free than at the broken Berlin Wall. There were a lot of tourists about but it wasn’t crowded. I tried to find the spot where a photo of me was taken in 1998, and it was besides Wir Sind Ein Folk (‘We Are One People’ aka ‘Worlds People’) by Schamil Gimajew. I got someone to take a photo of me, so I could put them side by side. It’s clear that the original painting looks fairly different to the updated version, but still in that very distinctive style that I was so drawn to. The side by side photos are below. I remember we used a highly stylized black and white version of that photo in a poster for our small university production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (performed in German; I was Azdak the judge, the best possible character to play ever; that was a chaotic student production for our German Play course, in which I co-directed the first half, and designed the set to be projected on stage by one of those overhead projectors you get in schools, with extra characters drawn in pen and moved about alongside the real actors by me, it was very strange but we were on a budget and had to be creative…). Wir Sind Ein Folk is a really long piece and you could spend hours looking at all the details; there is more information about the piece and the artist on the East Side Gallery Exhibition website. Anyway here are the two photos, almost three decades apart (note the odd socks in the older one); I still stand in the same way.

After exploring the East Side Gallery I walked along the Spree, the Sun was out and I like to find the shade, so I stood next to a big boat (which was also a hostel; seemed like a fun place to stay, or maybe not, maybe 1998 Pete would have enjoyed it). I wanted to draw the long Oberbaumbrücke. I had intended to colour it in but couldn’t be bothered in the end. It is a double-decker bridge, and connects two neighbourhoods (Friedrichshain and Kreuzburg) that were divided by the Wall. This bridge was built in 1896, replacing an older wooden crossing, and has those two distinctive brick towers inspired by those in the city of Prenzlau. Updates were made following reunification. While I sketched, an American man started to chat with me, he was another sketcher who had been at the Symposium and was part of Urban Sketchers LA, Kevin Riley, really good sketcher, so now I’m following him on Instagram. It’s this whole thing about urban sketching, we get to recognize our people out in public, make connections.

Here’s another picture of me in Berlin in 1998 standing on the Oberbaumbrücke, with the Fernsehturm in the background. I had thought about taking one of those riverboats down the Spree, that would have been interesting. Can’t do it all though. After I finished the sketch of the bridge, I walked back over to busy Warschauer Straße, had a fairly gross tasting vegetarian currywurst at the station, and headed back to the hotel for a rest before seeing some more remains of the Berlin Wall before it got dark.