it was fifteen years ago today…

November 1, 2023November 1, 2023Leave a comment

Did you know that it is 15 years to the day since Urban Sketchers first launched? November 1, 2008, and now it’s huge all over the world. I was thinking about that the other day when passing through old North Davis and realized I needed to draw that house on the corner again, the one I had drawn in late October 2008 and was my first post on day 1 of the Urban Sketchers blog. Not however my first drawing on the site, because a photo of my sketchbook was used as the first blog header. Still I remember drawing that little house, which was pink in those days, on a crisp Fall afternoon, with golden orange leaves above it ready to fall. I think I’d left work a little early that day; I lived in south Davis then, but was riding around the old North neighbourhood exploring with my sketchbook before heading home. Some things have changed. That tree is long gone, as is the taller tree behind the house. It’s also no longer pink, and has a solar panel on the roof. Fifteen years ago, George W Bush was still president, right before Obama’s first election. Lewis Hamilton was about to become Formula 1 world champion for the first time. Spurs were not as great as now, but we had just won a trophy earlier that year, and we’ve not won one since. My baby son is almost as tall as me now. My hair is a fair bit less red than it was then. I certainly feel older, but I’ve been to a few interesting places since then. I’ve drawn thousands of sketches since then.

I did draw the house again five years ago, at the end of October 2018. My drawing style had changed (the pen for sure was different) and that big tree out front was gone, but the tree behind was still there. The house was still pink then. It’s a cute little house.

And here is that very first shot of the Urban Sketchers site (not of the post with this house in it) on the day it was launched by Gabi Campanario with that small group of global correspondents, a photo of my screen and sketchbook from Nov 1, 2008, my little computer screen in our old flat. I was thinking about how in another five years it will be 20 years ago today, and we should rewrite Sergeant Pepper in honor. “It was 20 years ago today, Sergeant Gabi taught the band to draw, we been sketching in and out for miles, but we’re guaranteed to save a file” ok look, I have five years to write something significantly better. Maybe I will use AI. Speaking of which, tomorrow (November 2) is the launch of the new, final Beatles song, “Now and Then”, and I’m pretty excited. I’m likely to shed a tear.

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Funny Bones

October 31, 2023October 31, 2023Leave a comment

It is Halloween, so nearly time for my joke (“What do you call the day after Halloween? Goodbye-ween.”) So here are some skeletons. On Sunday it was the annual Zombie Bike Ride in Davis, when people dress up and ride a route around town all day looking at the different spooky spots on the way, and the houses decorated with Halloween stuff. It’s big over here, as you may have heard, and people go All Out. Some are less imaginative than others (I mean, we put out some pumpkins and not much else; the black widows on our porch are real), and some are incredibly creative. This one house which is on the north Davis greenbelt by the path had a really cool display, skeletons and pirates, a circle of really cool witches, a big inflatable dragon, and a band of skeletal banjo players, plus probably a lot more. It didn’t not look all gross and overdone, it is not even that big a house, but it was a delight to look at. So of course I had to stand on the greenbelt path and sketch. We had watched Scream (the original one) the night before; I’ve not seen that since the 90s, and it was still very 90s, and gorier than I remembered. We were going to watch The Lost Boys that night – so very 80s, but still so very brilliant, I love that film. People stopped and looked at all the fun stuff while I sketched, and I started to draw the skeleton banjo players below but realized the time, and ran home so we could go to the pumpkin patch to see what was left. I drew the banjo players the next day. Something about them just makes me smile. I suppose they remind us we are all smiling inside. Anyway, we spent last night carving our pumpkins (my wife and son’s ones were pretty awesome; I just carved one that said ‘Aloha’ and drew flowers on it) and watching old Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes, plus an old Addams Family episode. Tonight is the trick or treat night; we won’t be doing that this year, but the downtown has its annual Treat Trail. Anyway, Happy Halloween!

chemistry – latest news

October 28, 2023October 27, 2023Leave a comment

And so onto our favourite current construction project on campus, one that’s been going on for a very long time now, the Chemistry Building’s new wing. Last time out it had gone from green coverings to orange, and then into a very Fonzie-esque black leather with studs. Now the final cladding is going on and it’s a kind of fashionable grey rectangular tile pattern (a bit like the Tottenham stadium) which was being placed as you can see here. This being another in-progress view, it’s fun to look back on those in years to come, it will never look exactly like this again. I like this sort of documentation.

october’s gonna october

October 28, 2023October 27, 2023Leave a comment

More lunchtime sketching on campus. You’d be forgiven for getting a bit tired of the subject. Perhaps you come here to see drawings from my global travels, and they come along every so often, even if the ‘global’ bit is mostly just ‘London’. But you get to see a lot of Davis, and UC Davis specifically, that’s where I spend my days. Most of us spend our days in some place or other, looking longingly at the lovely locations the rest of the world seems to be at on Instagram, wishing you could pop over to Paris, take a trip to Tokyo, or dash over to, I dunno, Dortmund, but we got stuff to get on with. October’s gonna October. Here then are a couple of sketches from last week, I left them a little unfinished because they are finished enough, both from Hutchison Avenue on campus. Above, the Student Community Center, always a hub of activity. Below, sat outside the Silo looking over the the Katherine Esau Science Hall, with that huge greenhouse on the top.

drawing boards

October 27, 2023October 26, 2023Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago we held another Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl, this time at the UC Davis Quad, and we had a good bunch sketching with us. I drew the boards, I always seem to draw those at this time of year. I never get ‘board’ of them , hur hur. I see this one is for ‘Cherry Pie Comedy Improv’. I went to a Comedy Improv night once years ago, I asked them whether ‘Improv’ was short for ‘Improve Your Joke Writing’. I didn’t really, I made that up. I don’t know if I’ve ever been to an Improv Night, I’m sure they are very good, never really appealed. I was brought up on Whose Line Is It Anyway, the original British one, Clive Anderson hosting, Paul Merton, Tony Slattery, Josie Lawrence. Proops. Sessions. I suppose showing up at a sketchcrawl is a bit like doing an Improv, using your honed skills to come up with sketches, though thankfully on a sketchcrawl nobody laughs at it (so very much like an Improv night). “Whose Line and Wash is it Anyway”. I do remember going to party when I was at secondary school organized by someone who really liked Whose Line Is It Anyway (as did I) and we all played games like on the show. I barely remember it at all, come to think of it, that was so long ago. That show was so long ago, I’ve not seen it since about 1992. But back to the sketching.

Here we see some sketchers that I’ve sketched with many times, above are Alison Kent, met on my first sketchcrawl in Davis back in December 2005, along with her husband Allan Hollander (below), I have sketched them both many times. On the right of Alison is Robert Dvorak, well known art instructor who I have also sketched before, and the last time I saw him was when I bumped into him sketching a workshop in Yosemite. Also below behind Allan are a couple of other sketchers, we had a lot of students join us that day, many from the Landscape Architecture and Design programs.

I organized this sketchcrawl before I realized how invested in the Rugby World Cup I was going to become, so for my last sketch, I found a table in the courtyard of the Memorial Union, jumped on the strong wifi connection, and watched part of the first half of Ireland vs New Zealand. I was rooting for Ireland of course, but it didn’t start so well. I cycled home fast for the second half, and it was an exciting finish, the Irish nearly made it, but New Zealand held out for the win. (I think they will win the World Cup this Saturday, against South Africa, who narrowly beat England after coming from behind, I’m still a bit gutted about that) (Look at me, I’m a rugby fan all of a sudden!)

I really enjoyed seeing everyone’s sketches at the end though, it inspired me to do a lot more sketching. We’re still holding the sketchcrawls monthly, though I’m not sure the date of the November one, I think someone else might organize it. I’ll post it here when known. You can check out the Facebook group to see other people’s sketches: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LetsDrawDavis.

Friday 13th October, 17 years later

October 26, 2023October 26, 20231 Comment

I said before that every day is Friday 13th these days, but at least the actual Friday 13th has a Saturday after it, I suppose. Halloween is coming up too; I am less interested every year, unfortunately. Remember that one year I drew loads and loads of Halloween stuff, had a Halloween party and drew the invitations, drew most of the decorations, we made costumes, I’ve not even got a pumpkin this year. Well, a very small one at work, on which I have drawn a cartoon of King Charles III with a pumpkin on his head, ‘God Save The Pumpking’. That sits on my shelf. We had a real Friday 13th a couple of weeks ago, and it was no less of a Friday 13th, so to de-stress a little I of course entered the sketchbook at lunchtime. I remembered back 17 (seventeen!) years, to Friday October 13th 2006 no less, a barely recognizable world away, when I also drew at lunchtime, and I had drawn the side of the Bike Barn, the first time I had ever drawn that building. That sketch is below. I wanted to draw it from the same angle, to see what had changed (obviously my sketching style has changed, though I still can’t draw bikes, that’s the same). Those taller trees are gone, replaced with much smaller trees. People now whizz by on those electric scooter things that so many people have now, silent platforms whizzing up behind you on the bike path. Still I think in 2006 I was definitely expecting actual Hoverboards by 2023 and we don’t have those yet, these are the closest thing. They may as well be Hoverboards. In the sketch above I’m drawing on Stillman and Birn Alpha paper with a Uni-ball Signo UM-151 in black-brown, coloured with watercolour. Below, well that was my first Moleskine sketchbook, and it was the ‘regular’ Moleskine paper not the watercolour stuff I have used since 2007, I didn’t know about that then. It wasn’t in the landscape format I’m so wedded to now, but I had seen so many sketchers online using this Moleskine sketchbook that I thought, right, I’ll try that too. And boy did it not work for me. See people would use it because it was popular, but nobody seemed to actually like it. The paper was too waxy, so most pens just couldn’t write well on it (I discovered several years later that the Uni-Ball Signo UM-151 in black actually works perfectly on it, it’s the only thing I’ve used that I’ve liked), and as for using watercolours, well forget it, you may as well be trying to watercolour paint on a jar of honey. Pencil was fine, but the paper is so smooth that there’s no character. It’s also very yellowy, which has its charms I guess, but that yellowy tinge when you scan it makes you feel a little ill. What pen did I use here? I think this was before I was using the Micron pens, so it was probably a regular old Uni-Ball from Office Max, those were good but nothing like as good as the UM-151 and didn’t perform well on this paper. (I tried my new fountain pen with fantastic document brown ink on this paper recently to see how that would be and that was not a pretty sight). For colours, I used the coloured pencils I would draw with that year. I had this set of watercolour pencils, but I’d already learnt that I wasn’t going to work so well so just used them dry. I liked it, but have never gotten on board with good coloured pencil use, that particular art avenue never opened up for me. Still, I really liked this sketch, and for a piece of observation and development this was an important one for me, maybe my best Davis sketch to date. A good feeling about a sketch can propel you to keep going, and this one definitely did that. You never know where it will all end up, so in the meantime just keep on sketching.

Seventeen years though. 2006! People talk about that time now in retro terms, which is scary, like we would talk about the 70s back in the 90s. This was the end of that long first summer I had spent in Davis. I spent a lot of time riding around on my bike, in the heat, listening to this one album by Belle and Sebastian that came out that year, I got a new guitar, I started drawing a lot, having started to discover other sketchers online starting to form connections (two years before we coalesced into Urban Sketchers, when we all had our own blogs and created Flickr groups, and before all the Social Media madness overtook everything) (except MySpace, that was still a thing for another year or so). That summer I went back to London for the first time since emigrating, and spent about three weeks there, just seeing friends and family, very relaxed, still young. 2006 as a time period feels so long ago. I don’t know how different Davis feels then from now, compared to how much London has evolved since then, for me obviously I’ve just been here longer, sketching everything. If I moved here now as opposed to then, it would probably not feel so different. The world at large though, that feels very different. In some ways better, in a lot of ways worse. I’m glad I was young when I was. In these days of constant information/misinformation bombardment it can be very stressful. I’ve always had a sketchbook to climb into, that’s still why I use it. I’ve changed – maybe. I’m just older, have a bit more confidence, have many years of work-work and sketchbook-work under my belt. I found a note I’d written from Friday October 27, 2007 (sixteen years ago tomorrow), the other day. It was in the pack pocket of that Moleskine, funnily enough, and I was clearly in a bit of a funk about being able to do anything, something I’m still familiar with. It said this:

“While scratching my unshaven chin and frowning at a pile of papers I came to a sudden conclusion today. I cannot write, only wrong. I make no art, only fart. I can’t compose, only decompose. My guitar is better displayed than played, at least by me. My sketching is sketchy, my drawing barely draws breath, and my painting ain’t. I can’t debate, only outdate; I can’t converse, only confuse; I can’t think, only splash ink. *I might feel different when I shave!”

I mean, all of that is still true, I still feel like that every now and then (and I always feel better when I shave and cut my hair). But it’s still a busy-October way of feeling. Too many Friday the 13ths.

tree by Turner Wright

October 24, 2023October 24, 2023Leave a comment

Another lunchtime, another part of campus, this was outside the Art Building, by the Turner Wright Hall, next to those Arneson Eggheads that look like they are in a one-way argument; a spot I have sketched before, not that that’s ever stopped me. I liked the colours. I’m drawing a lot at the moment, because (I think) it’s something I know how to do, and in moments when you feel like you can’t really do very much at all, that means a lot. Even if sometimes it feels like a waste of time/energy that could be spent better, it actually isn’t, and in the long term, well I have this huge body of art work to look back on, and people seem to like it. It’s never enough though is it. There always has to be another drawing. Like, do more, do better, try out another idea, another pen, another type of line. There’s no ‘finishing line’ though, not even the end of a sketchbook, because I tend to race towards the end of that sketchbook (I have about a third left in my current one) just so I can start a new one, that magnificent feeling of Page One. I’m drawing in these books, creating them and controlling the narrative, but I think I’m also reading them. Some sketchbooks, they are like novels you just can’t put down, you’ve drawn on one page and you can’t wait to see what happens next. The plot point might be “the Silo” or “the Arboretum” but it might somehow be the best sketch of the book, one of those ones that inspires you to draw a load of other sketches in a similar way – or not, maybe it will be a sketch that convinces me to give up on a certain palette or pen. All the sketchbooks just show the story of my life, the mundane, the world I’m in. I’m not that interesting, Davis might not be that interesting, but there it is, here I am, I’ll keep on drawing it (“everything is interesting if you take an interest in it” a younger man once said, hoping that would be his catchphrase, and it’s still true). This sketch shows I’m really into the trees on campus still, worried about them all after so many fell since last year. I decided not to colour in the trunk but let it stand out against the background colours. On to the next page.

more F street

October 22, 2023Leave a comment

I went down to F Street, near the Paint Chip, drew the view across the street, crunchy leaves already falling. Another view of Davis, that’s what you’ll see here. Really wouldn’t mind travelling somewhere actually and drawing some other streets. Gotta keep drawing. I keep thinking about that old old idea of publishing a book of Davis drawings, and why I’ve not gotten on that yet. I think that would be quite nice.

the joggers on the corner

October 21, 2023October 20, 2023Leave a comment

Another one from 10/10, this one was drawn after work, because I just needed to sketch some more while there was still daylight. I went downtown and decided to draw with the black fountain pen again, this time on the corner of 3rd and F, where those two statues of people running in opposite directions are, near the old City Hall (now an Italian restaurant and deli called ‘Mammas’). I stood and sketched furiously, and I enjoyed what I drew, it’s a colourful scene. It might even be my favourite sketch in this sketchbook. You know sometimes when you’ve not yet grown into a sketchbook yet, then one drawing feels like it kicks off a bit of confidence, this might be that one. That said, I’ve been a bit irritated with my sketching lately as well, but I get like that from time to time. There were a lot of people about, after a long day I wasn’t in much of a mood to enjoy the early evening atmosphere, and just cycled home when I was done. It’s a nice little corner this though, with that bench underneath the big old tree. I’ve lived here quite a long time now, and when I pass this way what I think of, bizarrely, is the day Michael Jackson died. We had come downtown that evening (probably off to Chipotle for dinner) and there were a bunch of people gathered here mourning Jacko, with some folk with their guitars singing some of his songs acoustically, I distinctly remember them singing ‘Man in the Mirror’. That was in 2009, that long ago? Of course when I first heard that Jacko had died I did admittedly assume they were talking about Jacko from the hit TV show Brush Strokes, and planned my own vigil where I played that song “Because of you, these things I do…” over and over with a cheeky chirpy Cockney smile. But it wasn’t that Jacko, Karl Howman remains alive and well (I presume). The restaurant behind that is now Mamma’s, that used to be Bistro 33, a nice restaurant that we went to a few times for work lunches years ago, I really liked their Creme Brulee. So the statues, they are called ‘The Joggers’ and were created in 1986 by Tony Natsoulas, a local artist who grew up in Davis (I think he works out of Sacramento), I like them. That reminds me, the Turkey Trot is coming up in a month. I have been doing some running, but not like before, my right leg is still aching a bit and I’ve been trying to not to do too much on it. I’ve given up the plan of beating my Labor Day run pace, now I just want to get through the 5k race in decent shape and make our usual trip to Black Bear afterwards.

three shots of Davis

October 20, 2023October 20, 20234 Comments

Here are some images of Davis. This triptych of downtown places – the City Offices, the historic City Hall, and the Amtrak station – was commissioned by the City of Davis to bring to South Korea, to the city of Sangju, our ‘sister-city’ in Korea. There it was presented last week to the Mayor of Sangju, Yeong-seok Kang, by the vice-Mayor of Davis, Josh Chapman, heading a delegation from Davis visiting Sangju to strengthen our civic and cultural ties. That was posted on Instagram. I had a very short time-frame to do it, and so worked on it most of one Sunday (after a Saturday afternoon scouting the locations downtown), plus a couple of early mornings and a late evening or two, and getting it all done just in time for its trip to Korea. Quite an honour to be an artist representing my city in another country (well my drawing is, not me in person), maybe some day I will get to draw Korea. I’ve seen quite a few international sketchers I know sketching out in Korea the past couple of weeks, such as Paul Wang and Sylvain Cnudde. My oldest friend from London, the mentioned-in-previous-posts Terry (Tel) who now lives in Japan, he did spend a few years living in Korea selling books and getting into adventures, he said the food was very spicy. One of my favourite footballers of course is from Korea, Heung-min Son, our beloved Sonny, and I always get a “Come on you Spurs!” from Korean students in Davis when wearing my Tottenham shirt. So I’d love to go and sketch there someday; I don’t know Sangju though, the sister city of Davis. My son tells me that the High School sends students there on an exchange trip each year. (Funny enough I was his exact age when I did an exchange trip to Austria back in 1991). Still, I’m so busy with work right now that I could not have gone with my drawing to Korea, the academic quarter is a bit too busy. I learned that the next Urban Sketchers Symposium will be held in Buenos Aires next year, Argentina (land of my other heroes Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa), I had thought of attending or even applying to teach a workshop or lecture (which I’ve never yet done at a Symposium, mostly because I’m not confident anyone can really learn anything from me), but it’s in October, so I won’t plan on going, it’s always an awkward time. I missed out on Auckland in April this year due to the tricky timing. I do always long for a sketching trip, but at least one of my drawings flew across the world this past week!