crème de la crème

July 17, 2025Leave a comment

I like the little alleys that connect E Street to D Street, between 3rd and 2nd, there are little shops and cafes and narrow passages to explore. It’s a charming and shaded quarter and behind the Mustard Seed restaurant is this little store called Crème de la Crème. The lady who runs the store came out and was talking to me, she liked the sketch and I think she had heard of me and seen my other work, and she lent me a chair to sit on while I sketched. I sat for a while but ended up having to stand again, as I was losing some of my shade, and sitting changes my perspective very slightly. I appreciated the gesture though. Sometimes when I am sketching on the street I do wish someone would come along with a chair. That happened once in the Castro in San Francisco, someone just brought one out from their house for me, which was nice. I remember once in Whitechapel in London these teenage lads saw me sketching, it was a really hot day, and they decided to get me a drink from the shop, a cold bottle of Coke. I was very touched by the gesture and even drank some of it, but I don’t like Coke (I prefer Pepsi Max). I never forgot that though, it’s funny how little acts of kindness do stick with you. Anyway, I have sketched this store before, but it was a very long time ago, back in 2011 in fact. I think it was on the day of a Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl where I was focusing on the interstitial spaces of downtown, those areas between the streets, which are always fun to explore. That sketch is below. There is a lot more foliage around it now, the little plant pot with ‘Bonjour’ on it is still there, as are the little table and chairs. I don’t see the sign that says “Live a Good Life” any more, but I like to think that in between 2011 and 2025 I have lived a good life, so I guess I have done what it said. 2011 feels like such a long time ago. I was thinking about the early years in Davis, well before 2011, the other night and about how much I have changed and also how much I have not, because we all grow as years go by but we also shrink, in ways we might not notice. I’ve become shyer in recent years, more likely to hide away than I used to, even from people I know. I haven’t organized a sketchcrawl since last Fall, though I am planning to start organizing sketching events again this Fall. Areas like this are good places to sketch and explore. I might go back and draw from a different angle.

seven/four

July 11, 2025July 11, 2025Leave a comment

I may be up to about May with my late posting of sketches now but here’s another one from April, back on good old April the 7th, which as you all know is Independence Day in the America. The 7th of April, when everyone gets out their fireworks to scare the cats and dogs, they have hot dogs and crisps on the barbecue, and watch the foot ball, Tom Cruise’s birthday. I like celebrating Independence Day over here in the US because as you know, we don’t have one in Britain. We are kinda responsible for everyone else having one. When people here ask if we have anything like April the 7th I say, well our Independence Day was the day the Romans left. (I say ‘we’, my family’s all Irish, we grew up singing the Wolfe Tones.) I don’t really like fireworks, and I don’t eat hot dogs, and can take or leave those big corn on the cobs, but it’s fun seeing all the adverts for deals on big trucks. I used to like it though every year going up to Oregon to visit my wife’s grandma, whose birthday was the day before, and all the family would be up there, it was nice. I’d go off on the bike to Jacksonville to sketch the old buildings, then we’d have beer and barbecue outside, all the kids running around, good times. As with the rest of America we always celebrate April the 7th much later, usually in early July around the 4th, it’s traditional, probably because the weather is better and kids are out of school. You have to wait much later for the fireworks though because it has to be dark, unlike on our Fireworks Night in England, the 5th of November, when it’s dark at around 4:30 and fireworks go on for hours. My dad liked to set off some fireworks in the back yard, everyone did. I liked a sparkler, but was really careful not to pick it up by the wrong side after it went out, I never scarred my fingers but my mind was scarred by all those public service adverts about that. I remember coming through the park and some other kids shooting rockets at us from milk bottles, me and my friend running away past the tennis courts to escape. Fun times growing up in Watling Park. I’ll not forget my first November 5th in America (which over here is not until May the 11th), as it was the day we moved to Davis, and someone on TV said that November 5th was like “England’s version of July 4th”, and so I told people that yes that’s the day the Romans left. “Look to your own defence,” the Emperor Honorius told the Britons, adding “et memor esto, memor esto, quintum Novembris!”, before buggering off to fight the Visigoths. Leaving us to deal with those bloody Angles, Saxons and Jutes, comin’ over here, inventing our language. (I say ‘us’, my ancestors were all in Hibernia, probably) Anyway, this year we sat in front of the TV a lot, watching the new Captain America movie where he has a fight with the Red Hulk for some reason, and then we watched the brilliant Hamilton, from which I have learned so much American history. After visiting Washington DC and seeing all the old monuments, decorated with the very lofty ideals the nation was founded upon, and seeing the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, seeing the MLK monument and the big Lincoln on his chair, seeing the Reflecting Pond where all those civil rights marches happened, and the Washington Monument (that I know so well from that Spider-Man movie), and the poignant war memorials especially the Vietnam Memorial, and despite everything going on right now it gave me a definite feeling of pride for the country I’ve chosen and what it’s supposed to stand for, even if for some reason they celebrate 7/4 in July and not in April. I sketched the living room as we watched Hamilton (my walls aren’t blue but it seemed like a good colour to repaint them in this sketch), and our Easter basket is still there because you know it was April, and my telecaster is there for when I’m asked to play the National Anthem. And then we went to watch the fireworks from the Green Belt with all the other local families. You can hear the echo against all the buildings in north Davis, and then after the very large display ending the whole show, the car alarms all start going off. It’s not Independence Day until the car alarms go off.

celebrate davis 2025

July 10, 2025July 8, 2025Leave a comment

Every year the city holds an event called ‘Celebrate Davis’, in which loads of local businesses and organizations put up stalls at Community Park, food and drink vendors, musical performances, and then a firework show which scares our cats (we live nearby). This year they didn’t have the fireworks, much to the pleasure of the neighbourhood pets, instead having a big drone show. There was a little train for the kids to ride on, plus an inflatable forest. There was also an exhibit of classic cars by a local group of auto enthusiasts, and that’s what I was going over to sketch. It was really hot out, and I was feeling tired, but I like to sketch old cars, even though they are difficult, it’s a good challenge. I drew this blue Chevrolet ZL1, and was chatting to the owner for a bit. The car folk were a nice crowd, and very willing to share a story about their cars with people taking a look. I also drew the one below, a Chevy Camaro SS, but just quickly in pencil so it’s just the outlines, I decided not to ink and paint it.

I also drew the old red fire truck that was out in the main field. I grabbed a beer at the little Sudwerk stand (the guy selling me my beer recognized my accent as British and said he was a soccer fan (a fan of “the PreMEER League” as they say here) and I asked who. He said with a little embarrassment “Manchester United”, even after the terrible season they had been having, and I said not to worry, I am a Spurs fan and we have been even worse, but we’ll beat United in the Europa League Final (and we did). I stood and sketched the fire truck, going quickly in pencil. I like drawing things like this because it’s not just about the sketching, or the recording of an event, or even that I like fire trucks (though my teenager has long since outgrown the toddler-era delight of them, and I used to draw them back in those days for their amusement), but it’s like figuring out a puzzle, working on a bit of perspective, this goes there, that goes there, it all comes together. I sketched fast, my beer in its plastic cup was at my feet and likely to either be knocked down by the kids running around next to me, or invaded by ants who love a beer. (Do ants love a beer? I know that fruit flies like a banana but I’ll have to check on ants. I know they like the cat food, and if I leave the Nutella unguarded even with its lid on our kitchen becomes like Ant Glastonbury).

There was live music too, and while waiting for my wife to come over and join me for the drone show I sketched the band that was playing, they were very good. I think they were called ‘Immediate Spank’ and the best sketches I could get were from a distance and very very sketchy, as you see below. I was quite tired by this point, and focused on shapes and colours, the atmosphere. It’s quite fun drawing like that, but it’s also pretty much all the detail I could see. Interesting band name though. The sort of name I would forget and call something else, Immersible Tank or Immaculate Wank or something. Coming up with a band name is hard. The only band I’ve been in was at school, and we were called Gonads. That was my idea. Actually I was briefly part of another band at college which rehearsed a few times but never played, they called themselves the Lemon Sharks, but I didn’t really get on with them, I wasn’t a very good guitarist (they weren’t exactly Top of the Pops themselves) and my mates were not impressed by them, so that doesn’t count. Gonads on the other hand was chaotic fun, and we delighted in getting booed off stage every year at the big school variety show. I wish I could go back in time and sketch us, but I’d probably die of embarrassment.

And then we watched the Drone show, which was a first for Davis I think (did they have it last year? I don’t remember). We saw the drones rise from the field like an army of robots in a sci-fi film. We are very much in the future now, the idea of something like this did not exist when I first moved to America. They formed into the logo of the City of Davis, and then slowly formed into a series of other Davis related shapes – bikes, double-decker buses, a large deformed frog, it was fun guessing what was what – plus some logos of sponsoring businesses. It was fun, I enjoyed it. The fireworks are not completely going away, we still had them on July 4 (my cats hid under the couch), but this was a creative new addition to the event. After this, we took the short walk home. It’s nice living close to these events.

views of the campus (with flowers)

July 8, 2025July 7, 20254 Comments

A couple of months ago I completed a commission meant as a retirement gift for a senior administrator on the UC Davis campus, and I drew the view above of Mrak Hall, seen from the UC Davis Arboretum, with more California Poppies (and other colourful flowers) in the foreground. I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. I walked over there in the morning before starting work to map it out, and also get some photos of the building in good light with a nice reflection in Lake Spafford, and then drew it all properly at home. (I might even be in the drawing myself). I hope they liked it, I enjoyed making it. I’m not doing a lot of commissions at the moment due to being generally work busy, but I like ones like this. Besides I had just done a special retirement gift for a distinguished professor in our department, which was actually two drawings in one. The first one (see below) was another view of the Arboretum, looking over at Mrak from a different angle. I had drawn that one before and used my old photos and drawing as a reference, because I wanted to include the tree next to the water that was sadly removed a couple of years ago (and is missing from the drawing above). Of course, I wanted to frame it with colourful flowers, of which there are many in the Arboretum.

And for the second half of the piece, I drew a panorama of our very own building, the Mathematical Sciences Building, also bordered by flowers which aren’t actually there. The drawing might have springtime blooms, but I used photos and a sketch I had done in winter, because I didn;t want the building to be blocked by all the green foliage on that big tree. The big tree next to it fell in the big storms a few years ago, so I am very grateful for the continued shade of this tree, but it’s nice in winter when you can see through it. I’ve spent a lot of my life in these locations now. I’ve been in Davis nearly 20 years, an achievement in itself. Maybe I will have a party. Ok I’m not doing that, but maybe I will have a commemorative sketchcrawl in the Fall. In fact it was in December 2005 that I went on my first sketchcrawl in Davis, and I have been drawing it ever since.

bunches of flowers

July 7, 2025Leave a comment

Time for some flowers. I started drawing a lot of flowers in Spring, it felt like the right thing to do. The ones above were from a bunch of flowers I got my wife for Mother’s Day (from the local florist Strelitzia), which thankfully the cats did not eat or knock over. Drawing botanicals can be a good stress-reliever, I greatly recommend it, alternatively it can be quite stressful in which case don’t do it. The world always seems a bit nicer when there are flowers about. It’s a shame they die, but that’s life, it’s natures way. Below are some more flowers, which I drew from photos I took around Davis, and were used as borders for a special invitation flyer I made for the retirement of one of our distinguished faculty this year. Once I started drawing flowers, I could not really stop. The orange ones are California’s Golden Poppies, and the other ones are other types. I’m not exactly King of the Florists, don’t expect me to name them. Still I do like drawing these flowers in this particular style, and you never really know how it will come out, it just happens a bit organically. It is nature’s way.

davis farmers market

July 5, 20251 Comment

Still making it through the sketch backlog, here are some from the Davis Farmer’s Market in early May. (I say Farmer’s Market, but I think it might be the Farmers’ Market which actually makes more sense, as in the Market of the Farmers (plural), it’s not the market of a single farmer who owns all the stalls and controls the means of production, I’m not an economist so I couldn’t really say) (actually a quick butchers at their website shows it is simply the ‘Davis Farmers Market’ with no possessive apostrophe at all, confusing things even further, is it a place where you can go and buy various farmers? Do they all line up like the droids outside the Jawa’s Sand Crawler? “Farmer Giles, two for a pound, ger your Farmer Giles here.”) (It is a truth known to all British folk that to be a real farmer, you have to be called ‘Giles’). Anyway I went to the Farmers Market and sketched. And then bought a Farmer to put in my salad later. Not really, I don’t eat salads. This was on the hottest day of the year so far, it was a whopping 94 degrees, which is very hot for early May. It is currently early July and the weather is of a similar temperature, and I am not a fan of hot weather, but I live in the Central Valley and it’s Hot. I thought about going down to the City today because it is generally a lot cooler down there, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered. I do need to get out and sketch though. It keeps my mind off of everything. I think about apostrophes rather than catastrophes.

Let’s have a look at some of the people who were at the Farmers Market that particular Saturday. Markets are good places for quick people sketches, because they move more slowly than they do at, for example, a bus station or a 4am Black Friday stampede outside Walmart. I do tend to mix and match a bit, so you might get one person’s head and another person’s body or legs, or the t-shirt the person you have drawn was wearing replaced by that of the next passer-by with more interesting attire. (Wow that sentence was a slog wasn’t it. “You can type this sh*t George but you can’t say it.”) Then there was this couple, one of whom was definitely wearing a cape and a witch’s hat, along with a mask, and well it was more interesting than the usual khakis and baseball caps or whatever. I bet it felt hot in all that black though. Below, some more people, there’s no way that cellphone man was wearing a green t-shirt with a big white square on it, I must have seen that on someone else. I wonder what was inside the box? I can’t just make stuff up so I left it blank. These are drawn in my little Seawhite book, which is not the best for getting much bang out of the watercolour, they look a bit like dry markers. The colourfully dreessed woman at the bottom with flowers in her hat was at a stall with North African food which looked very tasty, but I have not yet tried. I was listening to a singer/guitarist next to me who was actually very good. I overheard a woman talking to him too, she was a songwriter. I like listening to people talk about song writing. It’s such a personal act of creation, and I do it myself, but I don’t share it, just my drawings. And this blog writing, which as we have determined isn’t really writing. Anyway, this also isn’t fine art drawing, just me going about with my sketchbook trying to record the real world, and this is what comes out. People passs by in the background, just a few lines and a splatter of paint, but they were real people too, now only ghosts on a page.

And then as the Farmers Market drew to a close I drew the stall with all the baskets, next to the Market Info hut. All those people lining up to ask (a) where the apostrophe is and (b) where they can buy farmers. they sell hats and t-shirts with the Farmers Market logo on (you can add your own apostrophe if you feel you need to) you can get your market goods (not farmers) specially wrapped up into a gift basket at Christmas time, which is nice. Anyway, this was me sketching at the market, and already that was two months ago. Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana, etc. I had an overpriced chocolate croissant and went home.

hot x buns

July 1, 2025Leave a comment

I bloody love a Hot Cross Bun, and you just can’t get good hot cross buns over here. You can get warm angry rolls, and you can get heated mad muffins, and you can even get burning furious beignets, but a proper hot cross bun cannot be found. There might be things that resemble them in the stores, but nothing that actually tastes like the ones we get in England. But here are some proper hot cross buns. Well they did have some colourful dried fruit in them which I can allow because that was nice, but the rest of it tasted right and was had warned up with butter on and a nice cup of tea. Those Easter-y things that I miss so much from back home, chocolate Easter Eggs, hot cross buns, the four day weekend and people complaining about other people not appearing to celebrate it, I miss those traditions. These ones were made by a British parent my wife knows (thank you they were delicious!) that made a huge batch of them. Definitely made my Easter. One of my Easter traditions is to watch The Long Good Friday on Good Friday, the old London gangster film with Bob Hoskins. It’s a great film but when you watch it in 2025 the, er, outdated terminologies are a bit, yeah. Still, some of it was filmed at Copthall swimming pool which is where I learned to swim, dive, and talk like an east end thug. I do love a hot cross bun though. When I was a kid, I used to get a lot of big chocolate eggs at Easter, there was no shortage in my house. My dad loved them. I love a Cadbury’s Creme Egg too though unlike in America, they are an all-year item in England. I have a photo of me as a baby, literally two months old (“Peter’s First Easter” my Mum had written underneath in my photo album), with my Nan where she is feeding me a Cadbury’s Creme Egg, chocolate all over my two-month-old baby face. Different time innit, they probably thought, well it’s still an egg, sure it’s healthy. I was allowed to stay home when I was a young kid on Easter Sunday when the rest of my family went to church because I didn’t go for all that stuff, and fair play to my parents for not making me, but I had to do all the hoovering and dusting and any washing up while they were out. We would have a big Easter dinner, though often we’d have that on Easter Monday. Films like Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music were always on the TV, and of course my favourite, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, the old animated version which inspired me to put on a stage version when I was living in France years later. I completely missed all the religious allegories when I was a kid, and was surprised as an adult to finally make the actually obvious connections. I don’t remember any hot cross buns in it though, just some cold grumpy beavers. I’m reminded of a joke from Easter with a punchline “Hot Cross Bunnies!” but I can’t for the life of me remember the actual joke itself, one of those “what do you get if you blah blah blah blah?” jokes, and I’m happy not to actually know it, so if you remember it, please don’t tell me. I prefer living in ignorance and coming up with my own versions.

the rest is April

June 24, 2025June 24, 20253 Comments

As I’ve said, I am a bit behind in my posting, though not in my sketching, and it’s another one of those times when I have a backlog of regular day-to-day sketches of Davis to post but not really a lot of stories to tell about them. I am sketching more than ever it seems, as I do when I need to think about something else; yay for anxious and uncertain and turbulent political times, I guess. I’m hiding in my sketchbook. Anyway, as a way to catch up, here are a bunch of sketches from around Davis in April. It’s already past mid-June in the real world, and if April thought things were bad, wait until they get to June. At least Spurs have won a trophy and sacked a manager in that time. Ok, let’s dive in. The building above is on 5th Street, and the bench outside commemorates where young Officer Natalie Corona was tragically shot several years ago, right here. I’ll always think of that awful thing happening when I pass by here. I stood over the street in the shade of a tree to sketch, headphones on. A woman passing by on the other side called over to ask something, I couldn’t hear over the traffic and whatever podcast I was listening to, football or history or something. Turned out she was asking where the train station was. I couldn’t tell why she had to yell it across a busy street and not ask one of the people passing by on that side, but I pointed in the vague direction of where the station is and put my headphones back on.

Here’s another from downtown, this time on the corner of 2nd and D, across from the First National Bank. I don’t know if this was the actual first national bank, seems like a wild claim to me, but I was drawn to the spots of yellow. These are days when I just need to draw something. I get out, eat lunch, have to draw. Helps me focus. I always go on about why I draw. I brew it down to the simple because I like drawing, which is good enough for me and good enough for you. Do I always like what I’m drawing? Probably not, but I like the act of drawing. I am up early right now and going for a run soon. It will probably be slow and not very interesting, running around the same circuit of streets and paths as always, nothing new to see, and not breaking any records or even really pushing myself, but its exercise, and when I do the interesting runs I need to have done the boring ones. It’s all exercising the muscles, practicing pacing myself, seeing what I can do in a certain amount of time and being alright with it. I track my running, but I track my drawing too. I don’t really push myself too hard to do anything out of the ordinary and I probably should, but while I’m thinking about doing that I’ll just go out drawing the world and see what happens. I tend to end up drawing places I’ve drawn many times before, but I’ve been living in this small town for 20 years now so I’m really just tracking the changes. I’m sure Cezanne felt like that as he was sitting under a tree in Aix-en-Provence painting Mont St. Victoire yet again. But I never drew that corner before, so it’s a new place ticked off the list.

Here is another sketch of the newly reimagined G Street, a couple of the big useful yellow chairs that have been placed in random spots on the side of the now pedestrianized road. I have never sat in one of these types of big chair other than for one of those photos where you go “look at me, I’m really small” and pull a face. It was warm out while I sketched this and being mid-April my nose was probably running, but I can’t remember all the details now. I am not really in love with G Street. It may be a while before it figures out what it really is. My favourite place on G Street was a couple of blocks up, the Regal Cinema with the stadium seating, but it has closed now because cinemas are closing. We still have the Regal on F Street which is slightly bigger but I don’t like as much, and we have the Varsity on 2nd which is great for the arthouse and quirky movies, you probably won’t see ‘Quick Angry Car Chase IX’ there (or whatever action films are called), though we have seen some really good films there. But I miss the other cinema on G Street because it was a couple of blocks less to cycle from my house, and one of my favourite restaurants Thai Nakorn was next door, also now closed.

On to more a familiar street for me, E Street, and Bizarro World Comics next to Chipotle. I stood in the little alley next to the Bull’n’Mouth (formerly De Vere’s; I feel I have to keep saying that in the same way we would say “X, formerly Twitter” but it’s not really a comparable comparison at all, and I don’t say “Bizarro World, formerly Bogey’s Books”, but that’s because Bizarro World used to be on 5th Street and moved here after Bogey’s went bye-bye). Anyway, that’s where I stood. I have bought comics from them over the years, though not recently since I’m not reading as many now. I have never rented movies from them, but if that’s still a thing, good on them. We were talking about that last night, how when I first moved to Davis we would rent movies and shows on DVD or even Video from Blockbuster (which was where Panera is now; I stopped calling it “Panera, formerly Blockbuster” right away because Panera sells big sandwiches that you don’t have to return nor rewind). Then Netflix came along and it was brilliant, getting our DVDs in the mail from our wishlist, mailing them back when we want, getting another, and you don’t even have to rewind DVDs, this is the future. Blockbuster went the way of MySpace (but we didn’t throw away our Blockbuster cards, did we? No we still hold on to them just in case, don’t we). Then Netflix was like, you don’t need DVDs, you can just stream stuff! Wow, mind blown. And they had all the movies, and all new shows they would make themselves and binge all at once, and we finally had broadband internet capable of handling that, what a time to be alive. Then bit by bit other streaming services came along, and Netflix seemed not to have quite as many movies you wanted to watch, but that’s ok because this other one had so many, and then this other had, and then this other one, and now there are so many different streaming services which you have to pay for, and none of them seem to have the movies you want to watch now so you still end up having to look for it on Amazon Prime (which you pay for) and then pay a rental fee to rent that movie so you can watch it that night. Just like when we’d go down the video store, except instead of watching trailers for other movies at the start of the video, you get to watch a couple of minutes of the same tedious adverts. What a time to be alive, eh.

And further down E Street, another building I have sketched before a few times. I like the triangle bits, they remind me of Darth Vader’s mouth. They also remind me of those houses you see a lot in north west London, in the rows of suburbia that spread for miles, leafy Middlesex (I mean, “north-west Greater London, formerly called Middlesex”). If I ever leave Davis I’ll probably miss drawing this building. If I ever leave Davis I will probably get the urge to come back to draw whatever new buildings get built. I get that with London, the need to come back and record what’s still there and what is new. This gets me back to the whole ‘why I draw’ thing again. I draw to record the changes, so I can look back over two or three drawings I have done of the same place years apart and saw, oh yeah, looks a bit different. I have drawn many hundreds of drawings of Davis, thousands really (let’s say millions) and so I have this record of two decades in this place, scenes of my everyday life. Nothing special, not an unusual life, not an unusual town, just a place like any other. Things happen, most of the time they don’t. Things change slowly, sometimes a bit more quickly. That’s one of the reasons I draw. Mostly though it’s just a side-effect, I draw because I have to. Even when I try to take a break from it, I can’t really. I will still scribble on my notepad, or draw cartoons on my iPad, or design football shirts on the back of scrap bits of paper or envelopes lying on my desk.

That same evening, I popped into the aforementioned Bull’n’Mouth pub (formerly De Vere’s) and sketched the colourful bar area. “Is It Beer You’re Looking For?” it reads, above a large selection of not-beers. I did have a couple of beers; I find it harder these days to actually finish a beer, most of the ones now are way too hoppy, or make my stomach feel funny, or I just don’t like the taste. I drink a beer slowly when I sketch anyway. It’s a nice pub still, I probably liked it more as De Vere’s but that’s because of the Irish theme, which they don’t do any more. I used to like having a pint of Smithwicks here, but they don’t serve it now. Other than that, it still looks mostly the same. I like their cosy little library area.

And finally, on the last day of April we find ourselves once again at the comic shop next door, Bizarro World as seen from across the street. A building with a tree in front of it, the typical Davis sketch. I wander about in my spare moments, looking for something new to draw, but I’m so predictable. A building with a tree in front is like comfort food for a suburban urban sketcher. Now I am thinking forward, it’s already June but it will soon be July, and then August, and then I will be in Poland for the 2025 Urban Sketching Symposium, held in the city of Poznań, my first Symposium since 2019. I’m actually feeling nervous, not scared exactly, but apprehensive. The Symposia are so big now, I worry about feeling lost. I do know some people who are going, but it’s been a long time and I feel a bit outside of everything these days, the whole urban sketching community, like I’m a little bit from a previous world. I’ve become very shy since the pandemic, the thought of being lost among all those sketchers… I get overwhelmed and just wander off on my own. I’m sure it will be ok. When I’m around a whole world of people also sketching, I remember that it’s not just me, I’m not alone in my sketching obsession. And so instead of worrying, I’ll just keep sketching. That was April, another April in the bag.

some trees on campus in april

June 22, 2025June 22, 20252 Comments

April was a long time ago now but I’m still posting old sketches. I am forever behind but it’s good to see how the world used to look in the before-times. It’s midsummer already (astronomically, though not seasonally, summer has just begun). Here are a few from a couple of months ago which are very tree-focused, two trees from campus below plus a panorama of the UC Davis Quad showing a lot of trees all at once, like some kind of tree party. The annual Picnic Day is around this time of year but I avoided that kind of thing this year, wasn’t up for the crowds and walking around feeling hot and bored. No sketching Picnic Day 2025. This drawing was done after work one day when the novelty of extended periods of sunlight in late afternoon had not yet worn off, and it wasn’t too hot yet. I like this one a lot though, I might use it in future things at work if I want a regular campus panorama scene. Here are a couple more trees.

Glory Glory in Bilbao

June 22, 2025Leave a comment

Well this happened a month ago – Tottenham Hotspur finally won a trophy after 17 years without one. That’s the stat, 17 years without a trophy, as if to say the football was good 17 years ago, good this year, and not in between, when that’s not really the case. But we won the Europa League, the third time we have won that particular trophy (the first was in 1972, the second in 1984 which I still remember). The final wasn’t pretty, and I had to be at home that day to watch it, but we beat Manchester United 1-0 and that’s that. All those years of scintillating exciting football and nearly getting there with one of the best Spurs teams I’ve ever seen, followed by a few years of that team declining and leaving and chopping and changing the managers and styles, the Contes and Mourinhos boring us to death, and then we bring in Big Ange Postecoglou, an Australian of Greek origin with big bold ideas who “always wins something in his second season” and changed the whole style to something far more attacking and fun to watch. It started well, top after his first ten games, the stadium singing Robbie Williams songs to him, saying “look Mate” a lot and looking at the floor when answering questions, that cough and those sighs, but then we kept getting so many injuries, and he would not change his cavalier style. We ended up fifth, but teams were figuring us out. So the second season, and we never got off the ground in the league, although we did beat the champions Man City away 4-0, everyone else beat us, except United who were terrible. Somehow we managed to stay alive in the Europa League – the new format helped, no heavyweight teams dropping down from the Champions League meant the most difficult team we faced was Eintracht Frankfurt. Even Manchester United making the final was a bit of a fluke, they were even more terrible than us this season (though in the end they finished a couple of spots above us, we did beat them four times over the course of the season which is amazing). So we go into the final, the teams 16th and 17th in the Premier League, the worst version of Spurs and the worst version of United I have ever seen in my lifetime, teams with records that in any other season would probably have seen them relegated, and yet one of them would get into the Champions League?! That is the prize of winning this easier Europa League, and we did it, with a goal scored by accident by Brennan Johnson, and an off the line clearance by Van De Ven that will go down in the history books and probably some of the physics books, and just for now, I don’t care about being 17th, about losing more games in one season than ever before, we won the cup. Bilbao will live on forever for us Spurs fans. It was like the end of Lord of the Rings. We had beaten Bodo in the semi before Pippin a sorry Man U in Bilbao by a nice goal and getting Merry at the Lane, Baggin’ the trophy and opening more doors as we soar on to the Champions League. The return of the Kings. My brother and nephew were watching at the Spurs stadium on the big screens set up there, and it sounds like it was a fun night. I felt relieved more than anything, after the disappointment of 2019. But a trophy is just a trophy. We came 17th in the league, we kept losing so many games – I like watching Spurs win games, and entertain as well. Big Ange who does not change his style refused to change it in the league, and we nearly got relegated, but for some reason changed it in the Europa and we won the thing. It was fun seeing the big parade, and now we can get all those people off our backs who say we never win trophies (Newcastle can do the same now too, and it’s been way longer for them). But 17th man, it ain’t good enough. So less than two weeks later, Big Ange got the sack. I’m fine with that, he would have been sacked by October anyway. He leaves as a trophy winner, no hard feelings, now we start again with our new guy, Thomas Frank. Come on you Spurs!