the north in january

February 1, 2025February 1, 2025Leave a comment

Today is February 1st, and outside it is pouring with rain. After a long dry January, maybe the driest I remember in a while, it finally started raining yesterday with the first ‘atmospheric river’ of the year. I’m finding it difficult to handle the overwhelming barrage coming out of the new guy in charge over there, and to mitigate the levels of stress and mental despair I plunge into the sketchbook and keep drawing the world, keep documenting the place, it’s one little thing I can control. This month I have drawn almost every day (there were three days in which I didn’t draw, but I had usually drawn more the day before to make up for it, and I need a rest sometimes, plus I do have a busy full-time job, though as I’ve shown in the past, I tend to draw the most when I am busiest, usually in January, to offset the energy). To continue showing my sketches from around Davis in batches, all of these are from north Davis, not necessarily the Old North, but all above 5th Street. Above is a church I have drawn before numerous times, Newman Chapel, on the corner of 5th and C. I’ve not drawn it from this exact angle before. It was the end of the day and the sun was getting real low, but I drew furiously because what else am I going to do but draw furiously as the sun goes down. You’ll notice the date was January 20th, and I wasn’t going to sit in front of the TV. I did have to colour most of it in at home though, losing my light fast.

I’m not religious, but I like to draw a church. I don’t need to say “I’m not religious but…” in front of a sentence like that, because who cares, but end up doing so anyway. It’s like when football fans want to say something nice about another club, like “I’m not a Spurs fan, but that stadium is great,” or “I’m not an Arsenal fan, but I bloody love Ian Wright”, or “I’m not a PSG fan, but I will admit I really wish I had their kit from 1994, don’t tell my friends from Marseille”. It’s not the same thing as when people say “I’m not a racist, but…”, or “I’m not homophobic, but…” because that means they will usually turn out to be a racist or a homophobe. When I say, “I’m not religious, but…” it’s usually to say that I like drawing churches, and especially cathedrals. I’m not going to say, “I’m not religious, but…” and then follow it with a sentence that says the opposite, espousing scriptures and deities and son on. But I do really love a cathedral, the bigger and more stony the better. I was pleased to hear Notre Dame in Paris has reopened years after that dreadful fire. I have been considering getting myself the Notre Dame Lego set as a birthday present to myself, but looking at all the very tiny pieces, I suspect it might take me six years to build that too. It would look great on display though. I have this dream to visit all the major cathedrals of Europe in one long trip. Start in the north, end in the south, or maybe start in Rome, end in Scotland. Wait, Scotland doesn’t have cathedrals, I learned that on my trip to Edinburgh and Glasgow when I called Glasgow Cathedral a cathedral. Yes, it will say ‘cathedral’ but since the Church of Scotland is no longer governed by bishops, they technically don’t have cathedrals. Fine. It’s a bit like how Westminster Abbey is not actually an Abbey (it’s a ‘Royal Peculiar’), but it’s fine, Big Ben’s Big Ben, whatever. (And it’s the bloody Gulf of Mexico, shut up). I loved the architecture of the Scottish Cathedrals / High Kirks, and then down in Toledo, the massive beauty of their cathedral, one of the best I’ve ever seen, then all the big Gothic medieval masterpieces in France, the grandness of those in Rome, and of course the onion-domed cake of St. Basil’s in Moscow which let’s face it, I will probably never get to see. Until this trip, which will need to be funded by a massive arts grant or a lottery win, I will be content to just draw the churches in Davis, like this one on 8th Street, the Davis Lutheran church. I’ve sketched it before, and I pass by it many times on bike rides home. On this day it was very windy, and I stood opposite with my paints fixed to the seat of my bike with a rubber band, trying to stop the bike from being blown over. A few close calls. The wind was so strong I did wonder; I’m not religious but is someone up above trying to wind me up? I went for a beer downtown after this. There are still a few churches and religious buildings in Davis I’ve not yet drawn, I’ll get around to them all some day.

We have a lot of really nice houses in north Davis, not all of them in the Old North blocks with a history paragraph in John Lofland’s book, but I pass by and think, I’d love to sketch that some day. The one above is a big house on Oak that I ride past and admire, it’s the sort of house I think I always wanted to live in. These days I do worry about the trees around the houses in my neighbourhood, after those big storms dropped so many a couple of years ago (especially on our street) and along Oak there were quite a number of huge limbs that dropped as well. The houses are very individual, with lovely character and yards. Ours is much smaller, with no real yard. Never mind all the cathedrals of Europe, my task feels like just drawing all the houses of Davis, like a one-man Google Street-View with a sketchbook. I’m really just drawing my own world, the world I pass through every day, so that when I inevitably start to forget this will be a reminder. I have been thinking about this a lot, aging and the mind, and recently have been contacted by dementia care homes in the UK asking about drawings of the local area, because the images do inspire older people’s memories. I have my own memories for each of the sketches I do in Davis, but as I’ve said many times before, I only see the surface, others will see their own stories. The time when I had that show at the Pence and a lady was looking at my drawing of the Mustard Seed restaurant, and telling me that what she remembers was that in the 60s that was her friend’s house and they would stay up late playing cards. I loved that; I just liked the shape of the building and the red British phone box in front. I feel like I’m illustrating stories that already exist but might not have been told; it’s hard to explain.

The little house above was drawn on one weekend afternoon when I went out to explore the Old North with Lofland’s book, so that I could draw buildings about which I at least had the start of a story. Lofland’s book ‘Old North Davis’ is brilliant for that. However this house on F Street, again I’ve passed a million times, is not mentioned in there so I don’t know if it has a name, like the ‘Greeble’s Home’ or something. What a sketchable house it is though, those long triangles and the framing of those two trees (both leaning slightly away from it, which is good if there’s a storm). It was late afternoon, so that 4pm sunlight was doing its thing. However I didn’t draw there for too long, as my legs were starting to feel a bit tired, so I drew just the outlines and then went and added all the details and colours while sat more comfortably.

Finally, the last sketch of January drawn on the North Davis Greenbelt. I have walked/run past this a great many times, but never climbed the small rise in the grass for the slightly better view. I thought of drawing the paths and trees, but settled to just sketch the little colourful house over there. It was a day when I was working from home (while most of my coworkers have a hybrid schedule, typically I am in the office every day, but every couple of weeks I will take a work-from-home day especially if I have a lot of remote meetings or workshops). It was mid-afternoon and I had a bit of time before a campus-wide webinar about the future of graduate study, so went for a walk along the Greenbelt, thinking that I really need to kickstart my running schedule again (it has been 2.5 months since my 10k now, but the weight of the world needs counterbalancing with the weight of my, well, me, so I’ve been not exercising and eating lots of junk food, for the sake of the world). I’ll start next week, or maybe after my birthday. So I did a sketch stood up on the grass, and then walked back home in time for the webinar. It was interesting, but not one I needed to take notes for, so I just coloured this in while listening to the speakers. Multi-tasking. Anyway, as I write on this Saturday morning, the first of February, the rain is pouring down outside, and I haven’t looked at any news yet to see what other stupid thing has been said or done today. I think I will just listen to the rain, it has been a long time.

the first street (or the last street, depending on your direction)

January 29, 2025January 29, 20252 Comments

Well this past week has been a big pile of pants, but we press on. Here are some more drawings of Davis from this long and wounding January; I am trying to post them all in themed batches where I can, the last one were all along one block of E Street in Old North Davis, and these ones are all along First Street (also known as 1st Street) in the downtown-to-campus corridor. First Street was named after William Randolph Hearst, a rich oligarch who had so much money he could do whatever he wanted, glad we don’t have those any more. I’m joking it wasn’t, and we definitely do. No, it was named after England’s World Cup Winning Hat-Trick Hero, and only surviving member of that famous team from ’66, Geoff Hurst. We don’t have those any more, English World Cup winners. I’m joking, it wasn’t, and we definitely don’t. I actually call this street ‘Last Street’, because I live in North Davis and coming from that direction, this is the last street in downtown. However we are so coming-off-the-freeway-centric aren’t we. What’s in a name? Don’t let’s get started on that. Ok, the sketch above, I was very pleased with how this turned out. I think this building is part of UC Davis called the Center for Child and Family Studies, they have a pre-school I think, my son went to another one in town. That was a long time ago now. I liked the light on the side of the building and the view down First Street, that is a very busy road. I used a bit of Buff Titanium for the side of the building; this is a new colour I got recently, Daniel Smith, I have seen it in other people’s palettes and wanted to give it a go. It’s a fantastic colour, very versatile and subtle, and handy for those warm washes on off-white buildings, mixed with a little orange or ochre. The sky was being very helpfully interesting to paint. It was cold, and I drew mostly at lunchtime (plus a little bit post-work) colouring in later for the most part.

This next one is a block or so up First Street towards downtown, a building I have not only sketched before (twice) but also held an exhibition at, one of those 2nd Friday Art About ones I used to do years ago, they were very nice in here. It’s a very sketchable shape, and I stood across the road in the shade, listening to an audiobook while I drew. It was ‘Guards! Guards!’ by Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite books when I was a teenager, and still a fantastic story. This month I have so far listened to four Terry Pratchett audiobooks, all recent productions excellently narrated (by Jon Culshaw, who does amazing character voices, with Peter Serafinowicz as Death and Bill Nighy as the Footnotes) in the ‘City Watch’ series. So far I’ve listened to ‘Guards! Guards!’, ‘Men At Arms’ (another which I fell in love with in the early 90s), ‘Feet Of Clay’ and ‘Jingo’. Next in that sequence is ‘The Fifth Elephant’ (which I remember being so-so about when I read it), then ‘Nights Watch’ (which I remember absolutely loving), then there’s ‘Thud!’ (which I was indifferent to, so we’ll see if a re-listen changes my mind) and ‘Snuff’ (which I never read; I’m still saving some Pratchett books for later in life). This year, 2025 (in case you need reminding), marks ten years since Terry Pratchett died. He was the author whose work I felt most closely connected with while growing up, and I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. I think about his illness, and about age, and how he handled it all and how he stood for people. He has missed a lot of how badly the world has gone. I will listen to those new audiobooks, which have many other narrators, in the run up to the anniversary, and read the old books too, although my own collection was left in England in my sister’s garage, and that garage was subsequently demolished when the neighbourhood was rebuilt, probably with my whole collection of Pratchett books inside it. Now is a good time to start rediscovering them all, but I will probably always leave one or two unread, because if I do that then he’s not really gone, is he.

And here are two buildings on First Street that I have not only drawn before, but in fact drew on the same day of the year eleven years previously. I drew both of these after work, finishing a little early to catch the fading light and the soft muted shadows. I coloured a lot of them in afterwards but I was keen to grab those shadows. The building above at 221 First Street was the ‘A.J. Plant Home’, according to the City of Davis historic pedestrian and bike tour which I have discussed in previous posts. Built in 1911 in the Dutch Colonial Style, it used to be a frat house but is now home of AGR Partners, some agricultural firm. Not ‘Alpha Gamma Rho’ which is a real fraternity somewhere else in Davis. I have drawn this building a number of times, the first was back in February 2010 though. What a time of my life that was. I didn’t expect that I would still be drawing that building in 2025. Below is the Delta Delta Delta (or ‘Tri-Delta’) sorority next door to the one above. Tri-Delta was the first sorority at UC Davis, with this chapter being founded in 1974. We didn’t have these types of things at university in London, so I never experienced that part of student life, but let’s be honest, I would never have been in a fraternity anyway. I’m just not that sort of personality, am I. There are people that are, and there are people that aren’t. It’s a nice looking little building this though, some of these places are big and a bit grotty looking (think beer-pong and robes for curtains), some of them a big and seem to be quite moneyed, and some look like this, quite nice and well-kept. It’s a different world to mine. I do occasionally get asked by people for prints when I’ve sketched these buildings, since they contain a lot of memories for people, though whenever I posted them on the old Society6 they would invariably be taken down at some point as some sort of violation of their terms, I assume because it has the frat house logo on it, and they don’t like that on a print you’re selling, even if the same frat house has asked me for it (and my own cut of the sale is very small compared to Society6). That particular print site ended up being useless anyway, screwing over its artists and taking more and more of a cut, so I took all my stuff off it. I did start a Redbubble site, though so far that’s proved worthless to me, so I’m not currently doing prints to order, certainly not of frat houses. But I’m still drawing them all, still documenting the whole of this city and this university in my sketchbook, and sharing them to look at here. More to come.

old north, E street

January 28, 2025February 1, 2025Leave a comment

January is flying by. That is, if that flight is a plane going to the other side of the world which is delayed and redirected to the wrong airport and you lose all your luggage and there’s no legroom and people in front of you keep reclining their seats the whole way even during dinner and you have to sit next to someone who watches movies on their iPad without headphones and there’s non-stop turbulence. Januarys are gonna January, but do they have to January like this January? It goes on and on and on, and then when you think it might be done, it goes on even more. This particular January feels like it will go on for about four years (if we are lucky), but I keep telling myself, these times too will pass. They will get worse, and we will look back on them like some sort of golden age. This January has been horrible for California, with the absolutely devastating wildfires in and around Los Angeles, I’m in shock thinking about it. We have had no big fires up this way thankfully, but this has been the driest January I remember. It’s been cold but not too cold, and we have also had a lot of wind but nothing like what was down there. The rain may finally come next weekend, but after the fires it brings threats of landslides. All these thoughts do make me appreciate places as they are, and I have spent a lot of this month burying my head in the sketchbook to make sense of the world, and going around Davis to catch up on drawing it all. The older houses around the Old North Davis neighbourhood in particular. As mentioned in previous posts, I have long been a fan of John Lofland’s book about the area and sometimes carry it with me as a guide to the historic buildings, especially if I need context for drawing them. The house above, which is on the corner of 5th and E Streets, is one I have drawn a number of times over the years. I like triangle shapes, and sometimes there are nice shadows from the very tall white-barked trees. According to Lofland the house itself is known as the Tingus Home and was built in 1936, for George and Constance Tingus. It’s across from the Fire Station, and traffic from the busy 5th Street rushes by. I remember many years ago I sold a print of a sketch I did of this building to a local company who had done some work not on this house but on the red-bricked one next door, which was visible in the drawing. It’s in this one too, but it definitely deserves it’s own drawing; see below. It’s known as the Granucci home and was also built in 1936 (for J.F. and Annie Granucci), but in a more distinctive brick which is not very common for houses here.

It’s lovely, but the sketch is a little inaccurate; I drew it over a couple of days, doing outlines on site across the street and adding in details and colour after (it was cold, I was losing light; I spent more time outside on the one above) but I failed to spot that the roof is not actually that big. The tall part is from another building at the back of the original small house, which you can see if you look at the picture above. My poor eyesight didn’t catch it, and I didn’t notice when adding colour from the photo I took. I had already scanned and posted it to Flickr before I saw the mistake. So in my sketchbook, I tried to correct it by adding a more distinctive line between the roof roofs, though it didn’t exactly line up. I never re-scanned it so that version stays in the book for now.

This is the third one along this block of E Street, and while I drew from across the road because I liked the shape of the big tree and the shadows it cast, the house itself is an artistic wonderland. I would love to draw that all some day (I am not inclined to be sketching over people’s fences), but it’s a really nice yard to walk past. It does appear in Lofland’s book, not named, and the old photo looks a little different to this. I love the red paint of the building now.

Finally, the same block but the other side of the street, this old house was known as the ‘Arnold Home’, as according to Lofland’s book, it was the house of a Math professor Hubert Arnold for half a century, and he collected over many decades an incredible collection of artistic ceramics which were then donated to the Crocker Museum in Sacramento.

I’ve a load of drawings from this January to post. Constantly drawing in my spare time, continuing my quest to document the landscape of this city where I have ended up spending the last nearly twenty years of my life, is my attempt at keeping myself away from the despair of January and all its news. At least it’s sunny.

berries

January 26, 2025January 27, 20253 Comments

The last Christmassy thing I drew this festive season, right at the end. Not a lot to be festive about now is there. These little holly berries are another Jellycat thing, we have a few of those now. Sometimes, little things with smiles on them can cheer you up. The internet isn’t going to do that, social media isn’t. Social media. This phase of human history has been a bit of a social experiment, hasn’t it, and maybe it’s time to evolve again. I stopped posting to Facebook a long time ago, except when making Let’s Draw Davis events (which I haven’t organized since October, I have become a bit shy on that front). I stopped posting to Twitter (‘X’ is a stupid stupid name) due to the increasingly awful richest man in the world owner; a shame, as it used to be quite good. I’m still using Instagram despite the terrible shift in the owner, mostly because on the whole it’s been a good place, but I’m stopping using Threads because rather than being a ‘nice’ version of Twitter, for me it’s become an exhausting app full of posts I really don’t want to see but are which are designed to just draw you in and exhaust and frustrate you, and not even from people I follow. Threads might be my least favourite of all, I’ve decided. Look, if anyone follows me on there, all I do is complain/cheer about Tottenham, I don’t really post my sketching stuff there. I don’t interact with people, I follow accounts about sketching or football or history, and I don’t look for engagement either. Yet because the app defaults not to the ‘following’ list but the dreaded ‘For You’ list, I get pulled by gravity into looking at posts either complaining about the afore-unmentioned billionaire and whatever stupid crap the other one who shall not be named has said or done today, or it’s really mind-numbing engagement posts that for some reason the algorithm has decided I should see, such as “I don’t understand, why do the British have a different accent from me?” or “Can someone explain, why do the British eat baked beans, what are they?” or “Can someone explain, what is the difference between Britain and Ireland?” followed by frankly hundreds of stupid responses either actually explaining it or having a go at them for asking it. For a while most of the posts that showed up for me were along the lines of “Hey! I’m new to English Pre-Meer League, what team should I support?” as if they actually want a real answer. But of course they don’t. All of it, or at least 99% of this all, is just bait, we live in a world of endless click bait. And we all know who the master baiters are. Now even my phone is at it, I have been getting a lot of texts lately from spammers and scammers, I delete and report every one but it’s like Space Invaders, they keep coming. But Threads, sorry, it ain’t working out between us. I always preferred being petescully to ‘pwscully’ (that was always going to be my novelist name, but I couldn’t think of any good stories). So, I’m doing the latest New Twitter Replacement, Bluesky, which does seem nicer and easier to use without getting so much of the distracting noise (ironically, just like how Twitter worked for me, before every other post became an ad for whichever right-wing SuperPac paid whats-his-face the most money). I am ‘petescully‘ again at Bluesky, and sure half of my posts will be drawing related, half will be me moaning about Spurs, and the other half will be… until I’m bored of that. It’s almost exciting, like back when we were all doing MySpace and LiveJournal and something new would come along. To be honest, I’ve never been interested in big followings like some sketchers get, or being part of any global conversation, or even engaging in debates with people online who I do not know. I am one of those who just likes yelling at the void. I just like to draw, and look at the world and draw, and then ramble about whatever in this place, the good old sketchblog. This predates all the social medias that have caused so much of a headache, and a lot of people gave this sort of thing up for the instant expansion all that short-attention-span social media offered. I’m still here. I hope you like the berries.

the old westone

January 24, 2025January 24, 2025Leave a comment

The first sketch of 2025, but this one turns back the years, a very long way. On my last trip to London, I finally brought my old guitar back to California with me. Much to the relief of my mum I’m sure, since it’s been sitting in the back of her cupboard for years. This is my old Westone Concord I, which was given to me on my 14th birthday by my older brother. It was my first electric guitar – technically not my first actual guitar, since I picked up a really crappy acoustic at a car boot sale the year before for a fiver – hey it did the job, I learned my first chords on it and I learned how to change guitar strings on it. This one though was my first proper guitar, Japanese built, sleek and heavy with a very smooth lacquered wood finish and rounded edges, it was something to love. I didn’t want to put it down, and I rarely did. Between this and the drawing all the time it was a wonder I got anything done, though I did spend a lot of time in libraries reading language books and planning round-the-world trips. I never got that good at it, really, just enough for the sort of thing I liked. I could not and still can not play fiddly solos and do all that guitar hero stuff, but then I was never much into that sort of music. I played a lot of Beatles, Pogues, Irish music, and of course Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks. I started writing songs on this guitar right away. I wrote a lot of songs as a teenager, as you do. A lot of crap but also a lot that was immensely fun, something I’m well proud of. This was my only electric guitar for a long time, and over the years it got a little battered, the frets worn down (making it obvious I played the ‘D’ chord a bit too much) and the pick-ups and connections totally knackered. I also never had an amplifier; I would sometimes plug it into my mum’s stereo, into the jack used for a microphone (there would be a lot of karaoke singing at our family’s parties, lot of Irish songs going on), but I usually had to play with headphones on. At school though, whenever I got access to an amp, that thing would get turned up to 11 and a half. The sound it makes is dirty. A proper punk sound. I still have tapes of it, echoing through the school canteen, ending with the dinner ladies yelling at us. A friend had a small amp I’d use sometimes too when we’d get together to make really bad music. Bad, but great. I remember drawing this before, during my A-Levels, or maybe GCSEs, we studies a lot of still-life which was mostly bottles, vases and guitars. I always loved its distinctive shape. The Westone guitar did not make the cut when I moved to America. My main instrument was my big Hohner acoustic, and even that did not fly with me in 2005, I brought it over a year and a half later. So this one floated about in London, at my brother’s where my nephew played it, then one year it turned up at my mum’s again, and that gave me something to play whenever I’d come back. I’d always intended to bring it over some day, but airline allowance and everything, it was too hard. This time though I flew with Virgin which has a good policy on instruments (thanks Branson!), and I was expecting to pay the extra to have it checked in at the gate. No you’re fine, they said, it doesn’t take up much room, it’s not that heavy, and so I was able to bring it on as an extra carry-on, very easy. So, after all these years, I have all my guitars reunited. I do need to fix the frets, and the connections, maybe get new pick-ups (as long as they are as dirty a sound as the current ones), and maybe then learn how to play it better. Nah, I’m good! The Westone is back! It’s 2025, already a way worse year than even imagined, it’s time to rock out.

new year’s eaves

January 23, 2025January 23, 20254 Comments

The last sketch of 2024, a walk along the North Davis Greenbelt, another tree, the last of the year. Look at me writing “Happy New Year!” on the page ironically, as if 2025 was ever going to be any good. And yep, even worse than expected so far. These days too will pass, but what follows. I will keep drawing as much as I can, and I have been. I suppose I should keep drawing trees before they all get cut down or burnt, or fall over, or get sold off or deported or eaten. New Year’s Eve, I find it a bit useless, celebrating at midnight when the thing you are dreading most – January – arrives. At least I have the football, at least Spurs are good – oh, right, the opposite. We have a manager (who I think we still like) from Australia, and we are getting beaten Home and Away, losing to our Neighbours, our injured players are all at the Flying Doctors (and the Young Doctors), and Ange Postecoglou is looking like a Prisoner. It’s driving me Round the Twist. Happy New Year (yeah right).

old east davis, the day before new year’s eve

January 22, 20253 Comments

A few more left from the last days of 2024. We are already into the most 2025 part of 2025 so far and I’m already looking back on 2024 wondering what the hell happened. The way I’m getting on with each day is by furiously drawing in the sketchbook as if my sanity depends on it, because of course it does. I am making good on my mission to draw all of Davis, though I get frustrated by the old adage that I’ve drawn it all. I haven’t drawn all of Davis, just enough of it so you get the general idea. I don’t go into Old East Davis that much, partly because it’s not that big, partly because I don’t really have a need to since I live in a different direction. For a number of years after first moving to Davis, this was my route home from downtown, though that time of life is so long ago now (of course it still exists in the archives of this sketchblog). It’s 2025 now, so that means I’m going to start approaching the ‘Twenty Years in America’ mark. The thought of that overwhelms me. The thought of everything overwhelms me really, which is why I focus on the sketchbook page, I guess. Anyway, this sketch above is one of those big historic houses that were built in the early years of Davis (or Davisville as it was then), the Schmeiser House. It was built in 1911 (so it is older than the Watling Estate where I’m from, in Burnt Oak, though we do have a Roman Road, Watling Street). When I say this is a sketch of the Schmeiser House, it’s only the porch and the front yard, most of the sketch is the view looking up I Street (which sounds like it might be Roman, like “I, Claudius”). I have drawn the Schmeiser House before, ironically that was on Dec 31, 2016, which was a time with a lot of parallels to now in many ways, except this time we know what’s coming, or we think we do. Now feels a bit shitter. It’s funny that I should draw this building at this same time of year in this same historical moment though, like its the subconsciousness telling me something. Incidentally this house has another nickname, a bit of an unfortunate one, ‘the Swastika House’. Theodore Schmeiser, who built the house, was a pioneer whose father Gottfried had emigrated from Stuttgart, Germany, and the brickwork on the chimney features a pretty big swastika motif. Now I know what you’re thinking, especially this week, and no it’s not just a ‘Roman salute’. In this case though it genuinely is a bit more innocent, the house was built in 1911, when you-know-who was still just a crap painter in Vienna, and the swastika was generally seen as a good luck charm, especially among Germans. Good luck with that now. Honestly though, it was not a big deal then because nobody thought it would become what it became. You see swastika motifs in a lot of old American civic buildings, and even here in Davis there was a local football team called, wait for it, the Davis Swastikas. They even wore big swastikas on their shirts. Like I say, good luck with that. Apparently they disbanded after a player broke his neck, probably not from mental gymnastics though like nowadays. The big swastika on the chimney here is hard to actually spot because it’s low down, and I didn’t draw it in this sketch anyway. The house is on the City of Davis Historic Pedestrian and Bike Tour, and of that list, I must have drawn almost everything now?

I also drew this house on 4th street, because I have to draw picket fences, and that tree was really quite the shape. I don’t know if there’s any particular historical story with this house, don’t know if there are any unusual embarrassing historical symbols in the chimney, it just looked nice. Then again I look at that list, and indeed this house is there: it is the McBride House, built in 1912 by E.S. McBride, a local councilman. By the way, back in 2017 for the centenary of the City of Davis I held a special sketchcrawl with a map showing all the pre-1917 buildings or places left in Davis, or as many as I could find anyway. I don’t know if I’ve drawn them all yet, but I’ve got to be close now. I must write a book some day, to celebrate twenty years in Davis. Now there’s an idea…

logos books on the corner of the alley

January 18, 20251 Comment

Last sketch of the sketchbook, not the last one of 2024. Logos Books is a good little bookshop downtown, they sell second-hand books and you can pick up some great bargains. They get their books from those donated to the Friends of the Davis Library, where people donate their books, I’ve done that myself. Logos hasn’t been here as long as I have, but there was a similar second hand bookshop here before wasn’t there? I remember Bogey’s around the corner where Bizarro now is. I just remember that first day I ever came to Davis, and looked around the shops downtown while my wife interviewed for a job at the university, I went into the soccer shop and talked Spurs shirts, and I went into the second hand bookshop and saw old language dictionaries and 1980s-era Berlitz phrasebooks, and the existence of those two things made me think it might be worth living here. Fast forward more than 19 years and Logos still has 1980s Berlitz phrasebooks and I still get my Spurs shirts from Soccer and Lifestyle. Back then, Spurs were on the way up and in the top four, and now… mate. To be fair we ended up fifth that season due to the dodgy lasagne, if I remember. I did like sketching this, a couple of people said hello and told me they followed my sketches on Instagram which is nice. I always get surprised by that. I have quite a few bookshops in that sketchbook, it was a very literary one. Started with one in Kauai, we had a few in London, and ended up with this one in Davis. You can see all the sketches from this book in this folder.

xmas day 2024

January 17, 2025January 17, 2025Leave a comment

And back to America. This is a sketch from Christmas Day, in my wife’s mom’s living room in Santa Rosa, the fireplace after all the presents and stockings had been given out. I had done my back in the day before crouching down on the kitchen floor to find pots and pans for our annual turkey roast on Christmas Eve (it was delicious, but agony). For Christmas in Santa Rosa we have crab. I had been worried that my back would mean I couldn’t go, but was alright on the drive over, and we did our annual presents thing. While people chatted afterwards I sat and played Christmas tunes on my ukulele and sketched the living room. We didn’t go away anywhere for Christmas this year. I’ve often thought it might be nice to have Christmas in somewhere like Salzburg or Norway, or one of those other places in the Rick Steve’s Christmas Special, but it’s a lot of planning, and you want to see family. In the evening we went down to see family in Petaluma, always nice. Next day we walked (or in my case limped) about Target buying half price wrapping paper, and my back started to feel a little better. I never miss the chance to go and get half-price rolls of wrapping paper, and I cannot resist immediately using the wrapping paper like a lightsabre, it’s literally impossible, even with a bad back. I like shiny wrapping paper, and always go for the good stuff, the cheap stuff can go for stocking stuffers. Another Christmas in California, but now it’s 2025.

by the stream in Watling Park

January 16, 2025January 17, 2025Leave a comment

And so, the last few sketches from my short trip back home to London last month. While at home at my mum’s if I wasn’t out on a sketching day or visiting my dad in hospital, I’d sometimes go for a walk around Burnt Oak to see what’s changed; quite a lot, some good, some not really. I still look for what’s the same. The park at the end of the street has never had the best reputation, but Watling Park is where I spent my childhood with my friends from our street and the kids from all the other streets, so I thought I should bring my sketchbook back down there, since 2024 was all about drawing trees after all. It was a damp gloomy decembrous day, my tummy was full of mince pies. I stood by the stream and drew trees going across it. The sketch below is what I drew first, a tree that had fallen across the stream, I sketched quickly in pencil and added paint right there. Across the stream a very excitable dog was running around and up to people, I think it was a Staffy, and the owners weren’t bothered if it jumped up at people. I wasn’t keen on it jumping up at me while I painted so I worked fast. They didn’t walk on this side of the stream though. The one above was drawn in pen, but I didn’t colour it in until the plane journey home. This part of the stream has walls into the stream (see below), while the section above does not, though I was in roughly the same place, just turned around. The tree that had fallen, I think that may have been the one when I was a kid that had a Tarzan rope attached to it so we could swing across. The stream is so narrow that a kid can jump across anyway (well, usually) but the Tarzan rope was always the more adventurous way. I spent so much of my childhood here, when I wasn’t indoors drawing. So did my older brother and sister, and my uncle Billy, I always think of him when I think of the Tarzan rope. The view above, that’s the park I know. That little arched bridge, this is the middle one, there are three in the park. The stretch of stream between that one and the one by the old Bowling Green was full of bushes and hideouts, an adventure playground for us. There were stingy nettles, but also dock leaves, that is where we learned that old medical trick to heal the stings. That stream is properly called Burnt Oak Brook (we knew it as part of the Silkstream, though didn’t know the word ‘tributary’ in those days); we just called it ‘The Stream’, and it ran over towards the Meads, past the allotments. It was full of little stickleback fish, shopping trolleys, bits of old bike. We used to try damming it up with sticks and mud and whatever we could find, to see how long the dam would last. The stream always came back.

The Silkstream itself flows through various parks and underneath Burnt Oak and Colindale, and was sometimes treachourous. We grew up knowing there were dangers when playing by the waters; I don’t mean in those public service shorts that would go out on kids TV in the early 80s, “Charlie Says” and so on. When I was about five or six, there was a horrible day when some children died in different parts of the Silkstream, not in Watling Park but further down in Silkstream Park and another park in Hendon I think. The water was high from the rain and deceptively strong. One of them was a boy, also called Peter, who lived in the next street over from us, he was in my year at school. It was the first time I’d really experienced knowing anyone who had died, other than my grandad, and at such a young age I didn’t really understand. I remember a lot of kids at school crying, and kids in our street being in shock. I think I was playing down Watling Park myself that day with my neighbours, in those days that park was our babysitter, if we weren’t at home or in the street outside, that’s where we could be found, don’t go beyond. What I didn’t know until recently was that when this happened, and people started to hear about it, some kids heard ‘Peter’ and assumed it was me (there weren’t many Peters in our area, a lot of Marks and Lees and Davids but very few Peters). They went to my house and told my sister they heard I had died in the stream. I can’t imagine what she must have thought. I think she went straight down Watling and found me, we don’t remember now, she always knew where to find me, and I was probably in my neighbour Tasha’s house, the other place I spent my childhood. She was close to Peter too, and his family, and we found it difficult to talk about it back then, we were all so young. It didn’t stop us playing by the stream, but only in this part of it, which always felt safer and closer to home, but that day definitely stuck with us. We as kids in the area never stopped thinking about him.

There are a lot of changes happening in the park at the moment. The big playground by Cressingham Road has been taken out, hopefully another one will go in because that’s the last playground in the park. However there are three big ponds being added, and new paths across what used to be the big fenced off sports field, but is now part of the park proper. and on top of the hill, it looks like a little bandstand or something is being built. Hopefully not just a place for the junkies to sit out of the rain. I hope these are positive updates for the park, what they have done to Montrose Park looks great, although they did build a sports centre over part of it too. London is great for parks and they need to be both protected and improved; Watling Park has a bit of a wild feel to it, but it wasn’t always that way. When I was a kid there were still tennis courts, beaten down though they were, and when my brother and sister were younger there was a putting green, I always wondered why they referred to the little patch of grass where we’d play football as a putting green. There used to be another playground near Abbots Road, I would be there every day on the swings or the see-saw, and that huge tall metal slide with the cage on top that would never pass a health and safety inspection these days, and whose metal slide surface would heat up to about 500 degrees on a hot day. Still better than those horrible plastic slides that generate enough static electricity to power a small car. We’ll see what it looks like when I’m next back. The drawing above is of another tree I saw on that walk, next to a row of houses on Fortescue Road, I really liked the ramshackle fences. I only had time to draw a quick outline, so in fact I drew most of this a few days later. I think I remember a schoolfriend lived on Fortescue and I went to their birthday party when I was about six or seven, but that’s all part of the blur of childhood.

Ok, back to posts and sketches from California. Until next time, Burnt Oak. See you in the summer.