late July, downtown Davis

August 27, 2024Leave a comment

The Seawhite accordion sketchbook that I filled in the second half of July was very much a double A-side. The campus side, well that was We Can Work It Out, and the downtown side is Day Tripper. Or the other way round. The campus side is Strawberry Fields Forever, the downtown side is Penny Lane. Or maybe the downtown side is the B-side, the I Am The Walrus to the campus Hello Goodbye. No, it’s a double A-side, and this is side B of the double A-side. It starts off on 1st street with that big white Dutch gabled building I have drawn before. I realize now, this ain’t a double A-side, it’s an album, and clearly a greatest hits filled with old favourites (but surprisingly not the Bike Barn or the Silo). This is like the Red and Blue Albums condensed, all the greatest bits but for some reason no sign of I Saw Her Standing There.

Now I drew this out of order, not starting at the left and going right, but starting in the middle. In fact apart from that first one (which I drew last) I drew this all over the course of one weekend while my wife and son were out of town visiting family. The weather was suddenly a bit cooler after a really awful heatwave, so I took advantage. I went downtown on the Saturday afternoon and drew the Amtrak station below. I’ve never enjoyed drawing the train station, because those curves and arches always seem to get the better of me, but I had some shade and a big electrical box to lean on. You can see some haze in the sky, that was smoke from the Park Fire that was burning further up north. It didn’t end up drifting down this way thankfully, but it was a terrible fire. I drew this, and then went for dinner at Froggie’s.

You can’t have a series of downtown sketches without the Varsity Theatre slap bang in the middle of them. I spent the whole of the Sunday out there drawing, finishing off at home with the colour and hatching, and was quite tired by the end of it. You can see the poster for Deadpool and Wolverine in this picture in a couple of places, I had been to see that on the Saturday; fun, very silly, very violent. As you can see I’m using street signs and trees as dividers between the pictures. That’s something I did in the original 2010 accordion book. I think I’ve drawn the Varsity about 21 times now. I need to do an itemized list of which places in Davis I have drawn the most, and keep it like a league table.

Next up, the old City Hall, we’ve heard this song a few times too. It’s part of the restaurant / deli Mamma’s now, which I’ve still not been to.

And below, the old house on D Street in between the Pence and the Mustard seed, which I have drawn many times. It looks like it is called Mabel’s Market now, and I’ve not been in there yet. Ten years ago when it was an art studio and gallery space called Art-Is-Davis I took part in a small joint exhibition in there called Scene In Davis. That was a fun evening. I think the first time I sketched this place (in that 2010 accordion book) it was an Antiques shop.

And that’s your lot, I hope you liked this little tour through downtown. I did buy a second one of these sketchbooks which I will fill, not sure when.

late July, UC Davis

August 19, 20242 Comments

Here’s what I did in the second half of July. Or rather, half of what I did. When I was in London I bought a Seawhite of Brighton accordion sketchbook, one that is just under 7″ tall (that’s 17cm, I did buy it in England), and each page is about 3.5″ wide (about 9cm that is), and there were about 16 of those pages/folds, and well, you do the math. I mean, the maths. I have got one of these particular accordion books by Seawhite before, about 12 or 13 years ago, but it was bigger, and I never got past the first drawing. This time I was determined, a series of drawings of UC Davis, with another series of drawings of downtown Davis on the other side. To be honest it wasn’t hugely ambitious, it’s all stuff I have drawn a million times before, right, and the individual drawings aren’t exactly long panoramas themselves (unlike the four very long ones drawn on Hutchison in the 2016 panorama Moleskine). It does look pretty good all stretched out though, it does get a ‘wow’, but the idea was to show the two sides of the Davis we know, or I know. For the UC Davis side, we have six locations all drawn in ink and watercolour: Hart Hall, Shields Library, Heitman (formerly the Hog Barn), Mrak Hall, the Memorial Union, and Turner Wright Hall.

No stories with these, just the images as they are, UC Davis in the middle of summer. It’s quiet. In a month’s time all the people will start coming back and the quiet days will turn back into busy days, and before you know it the rest of 2024 will whizz past and we’ll all be six months older. I’ve enjoyed the quiet of summer, if not the heat (it’s relatively cooler now though, which is nice), and my daily sketching has slowed a bit since I did this book, and I have not been to many places, nor have I organized any sketchcrawls, that can wait. I drew some London pictures to go on the wall, and also to go into the Pence’s annual art auction. I have (as of last week) started getting into lino block printing, which I’ve not done since some time in the late 80s at school, and it’s fun so far. The biggest creative project I’ve done this summer (even bigger than this accordion book) is the faculty family tree I finally created for our department at UC Davis, which you can read about and look at in this article here. That was a project many years in the conception but which I finally decided to create when the idea hit me on the London Underground. And finally, I’m running again, albeit slowly and more heavily than before, aiming for the 5k on Labor Day and then (gulp) train up for a 10k by November…

Check back for part 2, a whole spread of downtown Davis.

midtown, downtown, train back to my town

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020Leave a comment

Ok…this one goes back a while. Back to March, in fact. In my defense, I only got the sketchbook back recently, so I could not write a post about it at the time. Well I could have, but stories without pictures? I was invited by Prof David Del La Peña of UC Davis to take part in a special sketchcrawl, which was to be part of the annual conference of CELA (the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture) in Sacramento. The sketchcrawl would move from midtown Sac and end up in Davis, linking up by train between the two. I joined them after lunch in Sacramento, and we were given accordion Moleskines to draw a series of fast sketches in, on location, at various spots about downtown. Also in attendance was Chip Sullivan, who I was not familiar with but he is very well known as a sketcher and educator and knows James Richards well. So I started off by drawing him and David near the conference center in midtown.

“Where Are We Going” it said on the sculpture near K Street. Well it turns out we were going down to the Cathedral, and I sat behind the large open angel wings of a statue. I remember drawing this Cathedral (Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament) years ago, 2006 or 2007, back when Pyramid Brewing was right behind, and California was so new to me. I remember trying to draw the Crest back then as well, the classic movie theatre a little way down the street. As we stopped for a moment to mention something about sketching I drew the sign, taking just a few minutes, before we moved on.

Sac sketchbook p4

And then we moved to the newest part of downtown, the area around the Golden One Center, the massive basketball arena. We saw Paul McCartney there a couple of years ago, an amazing show, one of the first performances held at the stadium. Macca sang for three hours and was incredible. I remember when this was part of the downtown mall, I would come here occasionally, but it is long gone now. You’ll notice I decided to deraw in pencil that day. I find that in those accordion moleskines I find drawing in my usual pen to be frustratingly difficult. The paper, the size of the page, the fact that it’s flopping all over the place, plus the extremely limited time in each spot – so I just went with pencil, which moves so fast across the page, and splashed on watercolour when I could. It was a sunny day with great clouds.interesting shadows, but cool enough for scarves. My favourite weather. We walked from there over to the Crocker Art Museum, not with much time to do a larger sketch (such a tight schedule, and distances to cover!) but enough time to pop into the gift shop. Oh but I did get a sketch, of another sketcher in a red coat. And then we went to old downtown…

Old Downtown has lots to sketch, I really should go sketchign there more often. This time I decided to draw some of the fire hydrants, one with a yellow cap, one with a green cap. This was followed by fast sketch of the Pony Express statue, before we walked to the Amtrak station.

Sac sketchbook p7

I sat with a couple of the people attending the conference, Penelope and Tatyana (I think one came from Texas, another from California, but this was in March and my memory has faded). It doesn’t take long to get from Sac to Davis, but there was a table and a defined amount of time to sketch. You can see from the window that the Causeway was still full of water, after all the rain we got last spring. I have sketched the inside of Amtrak trains a few times before.

And then we got to Davis, with just enough time to draw that iconic and sketchable Davis building, the Varsity Theatre on 2nd Street. And then we relinquished our sketchbooks, and walked back to the UCD campus.

The books were shown at an evening event during the conference, I was unable to go to it, but it would have been fun to see how everyone else interpreted the afternoon. Everyone sketches at different speeds and with different amounts of detail; I consider myself a fairly quick sketcher but it was hard to keep up! My feet were pretty tired afterwards, and I needed a good rest that weekend.

along hutchison drive

September 10, 20169 Comments

In July I started a new sketchbook, a long panoramic accordion Moleskine sketchbook, with the intention of doing some very long drawings on the UC Davis campus. As it turned out I managed three scenes, all on the same street (Hutchison Drive), though only in pen with a dab of colour here and there. If you click on the image above, you will see the whole thing in closer detail. Below, I’ve cut the three scenes down – still too long to see, so click on them for a closer view.

First of all, the new Pitzer Center, still under construction in this sketch, on the left. A good place to start! Then, the Music Building, followed by Wright Hall and the Art Building. Good place to stop.

Next up, the Silo complex, also under reconstruction. First of all you see Rock Hall, the Chemistry Building’s lecture hall. Next up, the back of the Bike Barn building, this side has been various things since I have been here, and I’ve sketched it many times. This whole area is being rebuilt and improved at present. Next up is the Silo itself, where I often eat lunch. I stopped once the sketch got across the street, where the Silo Bus Terminal is, and drew a tree as a dividing line to the next part.

Finally, on the other side of the street, Walker Hall, which is currently empty but will eventually be completely renovated and this side rebuilt, when it becomes the Graduate and Professional Students’ Building. I think that is the name. IT’s going to be pretty cool, but I do like this building, and will probably draw it again…

This sketchbook will actually be on display along with many more sketchbooks in my upcoming exhibition, “Conversations with the City“, at the UC Davis Design Museum in Cruess Hall from Sept 19 to Nov 12. If you’re in town, do come by to see it!

look around, round, round

April 29, 2012April 30, 20122 Comments

(Click image to see larger size)
Here is something I drew a while ago (Martin Luther King Jr Day, in January, hence the flags), in my panoramic accordion sketchbook, but did not scan and stitch together until now. I sat out there for a couple of hours, followed by another hour or so on a day later that week, and just sketched and turned and curved as best I could. It’s a good exercise, but tricky all the same. It looks even more different now it’s on a computer screen. The plan is to fill the whole book with similar scenes from Davis as the seasons change. Other seasons may be more colourful, but this represented sunny winter. There is a detail below. All drawn on an accordion sketchbook from Cass Arts in London in uniball vision micro pen.