pete folds none

June 14, 2009June 25, 20099 Comments

#10 of 30. Folding clothes is really really difficult. Look, I’m not setting out to write the message that ‘anything is possible if you put your mind to it’, I’m sure that’s true and I can vouch for it, in some areas. Don’t tell me that practise makes perfect. But folding clothes is flipping near impossible to get right, at least for me. It’s like magic, I mean I am always constantly amazed at it, the spectacle never wears off, to the point where I don’t want to know how they do it. I don’t go to the theatre, I just go down to the Gap and watch them fold t-shirts.

I don’t really. But you know what I mean. Maybe.

i’ll meet you on a bus at dawn

June 13, 2009June 25, 2009Leave a comment

I’ve talked before about my summers as a tour-guide above the streets of London. It was a very physical job. And highly enjoyable. Like sketching, you learn to look. On each tour I’d notice something new, a face in the masonry, a pub with an interesting past, an actual Han Solo in carbonite movie prop in a video store window (it’s in Gloucester Road), and take note, and use it to illustrate my next tour. Useful if stuck in traffic (a frequent occurence) to know lots of little facts. I can probably still remember most of them. You don’t want to know them.

Still, there would occasionally be that one person who knew it all, and would interrupt with the one nugget you left out while whipping down Fleet Street, or correct you at every turn if you weren’t quoting sources like footnotes at every red light. One person in particular (a British man with a very embarrassed looking daughter) did this incessantly on one tour, pissing off several other people, some of whom even kindly offered to throw him into the Thames. I generally ignored him, but as we passed into Parliament Square, I announced (as per our training) that the English Parliament, which dates back to about 1250 (“or ten to one”, which always got a giggle), is known as the “Mother of Parliaments”. Well, it is. The interruptive guy frowned and raised an eyebrow. “The Mother of Parliaments? What about the Icelandic Althing?”

“No, that’s the Father of Parliaments,” I shot back. “But you always know who your mother is.”

This is number 9 in a series of 30.

the sweetest thing

June 13, 2009June 12, 2009Leave a comment

The last one from Monterey. I sketched this fabulous building from the 1880s, the Thomas Kinkade National Archive, in the Harry A. Greene Mansion. Or Willy Wonka’s Summer House, as I prefer to call it.

I sat across the road on Sunday morning sketching this venerable candy stick, wondering if there might be an old witch stuck in an oven inside. Why would someone put a giant toffee apple on their roof? Perhaps it attracts the flies and mosquitoes, they stick to it, nobody gets bitten, they’re laughing. Makes sense, really. I might try it. Better than spraying insecticide everywhere to prevent West Nile. Stick a load of half-sucked sticks of rock or candy canes out in your garden. Maybe that’s where the Christmas tradition came from, you don’t know.

Here’s the obligatory action shot.

put the book back on the shelf

June 12, 2009June 25, 20098 Comments

#8 in a series of 30. The way I’ve put it makes it sound like a fetish or something. I’m just lazy. I have good intentions, but instead of reading them I stay up and draw the edge of the table, or whatever. Still, it’s the hope of reading them that counts, and hope is the main buzzword in this brave new world, isn’t it? Perhaps I hope they’ll read themselves to me.

Still no name for this deeply personal autobiographical series.

all along the rocky shore

June 11, 2009June 10, 20091 Comment

The Monterey Peninsula is some of the most incredible coastline I’ve ever been to, and it’s teeming with wildlife. And massive expensive houses. We drove the 17-Mile Drive, getting out every so often to take pictures, paddle in the rockpools, spot whales (and we did! out in the distance), and I even managed to scribble a few quickies before hopping back into the car. There’s me sketching quickly by the rocks. The last time I’d been, the fog rolled in and out like an army of ghosts, but this time it was warm and sunny. pete sketches monterey

We visited the Point Pinos lighthouse, which was very interesting. It dates back to the 19th century, and is pretty well preserved. You’re not even allowed to use the toilet, it’s so well preserved. When I was a kid I used to want to live in a lighthouse (so many of them in north London). I think it was because of that show Round the Twist, where they all lived in a lighthouse, or it might have been because of Fraggle Rock. Let’s face it, it was the latter. My son enjoyed ringing the huge bell downstairs, but we weren’t allowed to go up to the lamp. During World War II, in fact only days after Pearl Harbor was bombed, Japanese planes flew by Monterey Bay, and this lighthouse was used as part of the coastal defences.

After 17-Mile Drive we lunched in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where Clint Eastwood was once mayor. I popped into a little candy store that sold British chocolates, at a price. $2.95 for a Curly-Wurly!!! Can you believe it? They used to be 15p. There was a Lamborghini parked outside. Curly-Wurlies are surely not luxury items. I imagine this rich movie star now, supermodel girlfriend, Lamborghini zooming down the coast, chomping on a Curly-Wurly. Didn’t stop there. $3.95 for a Fruit-n-Nut! Four bucks for a Walnut Whip, sod that mate, I’ll go without. I didn’t even check how much the box of Maynards Wine Gums were. We drove on to Carmel Mission, which is an absolutely gorgeous building on the edge of Big Sur, which looks like a trip back into the Mexican West. Another quick study, this time in wine red copic, and then off again.

as long as i gaze on

June 10, 2009June 9, 20092 Comments

Monterey, sunset. Micron pen and watercolour, in a watercolour moleskine, and pretty much all but done in the dark. That’s ocean fog hanging out there in the distance.

a poem, a stink, a grating noise

June 9, 2009June 9, 20093 Comments

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

– John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

We were in Monterey at the weekend. Down at Cannery Row (motto: “Yes, We Can”), where they pack souvenir shops in like, um, sardines, I sat and sketched since that day was also Drawing Day 2009. This gave me a contractual obligation to draw. Cannery Row (not in fact named after the actor Sean Cannery) was made particularly famous by John Steinbeck’s book about the place, that people pretend to know well when they go there even if it’s the first time they’ve ever heard of it (and to be fair, since bits of it are mentioned somewhere every few yards you feel like you’ve read the book, seen the movie and bought the fridge magnet). It’s funny how if a writer is associated with somewhere then they make sure to drum on about it as much as possible, like those pubs where Dickens/Twain/Kerouac etc drank (Dickens for one drank in every single pub in London, I’m surprised he was ever sober enough to actually get any writing done). Writers hold a special appeal to tourist boards. You never get areas devoted to, say, Joe Bloggs the stockbroker or someone.
The drawing to the right is of the beer garden of the Captain Bullwhacker’s pub (I think that was the name), which was heavily pirate galleon/British pub themed, and undoubtedly where Steinbeck once popped in to use the loo, maybe.

Also blogged at Urban Sketchers.

like a train in the night

June 4, 2009June 25, 20094 Comments

No 7 of 30. Inter-railing, everyone has to do it once. In America they call it Eurailing (at least I think so; Americans can’t get Inter-Rail tickets because you need to be a European resident, but they can get Eurail tickets). You get a ticket, for less than a monthly travelcard in London, and you can go on any train in Europe as many times as possible for one month. I made the most of it. Lots of stories to tell, and I won’t be telling them here. I should do a series about that trip though, perhaps using notes I made on my travels.

I really travelled light. The bit about the socks is true. Photos prove it; I’m wearing odd colours in most of them. I also never took a guide book. Instead, I constructed one myself, in a simple spiral bound notebook. For weeks I prepared, photocopying this from one book, that from another, pasting in colour metro maps where possible, writing down addresses of possible hostels and sights I might visit, and which stations had the all-important luggage lockers. I was being methodical but allowing for every possibility – if I was in Prague but decided to go to Amsterdam, or perhaps the other direction and see Budapest, it was all worked out in my head (in fact I went to Krakow). I carried therefore the ultimate reading tool – the 1998 Thomas Cook Rail Timetable. Worth its weight in gold. At the back of my self-made guidebook though I left space for my travel notes – and there I logged obsessively every move I made. I enjoyed every single moment.

i am not a number

June 1, 2009June 25, 20092 Comments

6 of 30, or half a dozen of the other. Mankind’s relationship with the mobile has been well documented. Some people appear to have the phone attached permanently to their ear. How they can find so much to talk about is beyond me. Others have those little bluetooth headsets and walk about the street appearing as though they are talking to themselves, which is perfectly acceptable these days. I often think about donating some of those earpieces to the street crazies who do walk about mumbling (well, yelling) to invisible companions, so that people will not think they are mental. What people don’t talk about however is that since the advent of cellphones and other such gadgets is that we are losing our memories. Not forgetting stuff per se, rather just not needing to memorize stuff. We have the capacity to memorize incredible amounts of information, but if we don’t need to, then those parts of our brain don’t just start working on other things, like wallpapering the skull or writing operettas; they lay dormant. We have the internet instantly accessible so that we can look things up whenever we want, negating the need to actually learn and retain things. Are iphones banned from pub quizzes? I bet it’s hard to enforce. Not long ago, people would remember and recount whole stories, now we look up the words to Humpty Dumpty. Years before, and I’m talking in early to mid medieval times (before general literacy) memory played an incredibly important role in law and government – what was said and remembered was every bit as credible as what was written down (these days we feel we need constitutions and statute books and so on – we see things differently in the modern age, where the written word is king). What ultimately will be the cost of us not needing to use those parts of the brain which were previously used for memory?

One of the things behind this series is for me to remember where I am right now, and to remember who I am as well, because one day I might forget. Save the world while you can, folks.

pool your thoughts

May 30, 20092 Comments

This is the pool at our apartment complex here in Davis. I never go there. My mum however is visiting from England, and was sat out there catching some of the unending sunshine that we get here in California, so I joined her and sketched some of the pool area (after watching the FA Cup final played out in BBC website updates). This is what where I live looks like.