the empty lake

October 21, 20241 Comment

The UC Davis Arboretum is currently undergoing some major work to the waterway, an ambitious project called the “Arboretum Waterway Flood Protection and Habitat Enhancement“. I don’t know what it will look like in the end, but right now, it’s jarring to see the big serene Lake Spafford completely drained of water. Like seeing the man behind the curtain. Now I know how deep it is. The ducks probably aren’t too happy, but we’ve all got to have work done on our homes. Round our way the painters have been painting all the condos, coming in the yard and scaring off the spiders. I’ve drawn this lake many times over the years and now it’s empty, for the time being. I’ll be interested to see how this all turns out! So of course I drew it, at the end of September. I’ll be back down to sketch it again. “Waterway to have a good time.” We did hold a sketchcrawl in the Arboretum at the start of October, I’ll post those later. For now, more September trees.

September Trees – Part 2

October 9, 2024Leave a comment

Time for side two of the album of trees from September. It is October now, the weather is still very hot (over a hundred for several days now) and I haven’t stopped drawing trees, though I am tired of this heat and need some cooler weather now please. It was cool standing in the shade of the big tree above, on Mrak Lawn. You can see one of Arneson’s Eggheads there, “Eye on Mrak/Fatal Laff”, one of the most photographed of the Eggheads. This was on the Friday before the new academic year began, just before the rush, the last moment of calm. I like the new year starting, usually, but this year I was feeling a bit of apprehension. I have quite enjoyed the quiet, even though the Davis summer is long and hot. I know that once all the people are back and things are moving that I always feel differently – I’m a city person after all – but maybe I am just always seeking the quiet spaces now, away from the noise. The world feels so noisy these days, with the news and the adverts and the endless sewage of voices that are shoved in your faces every time you look at your electronic devices that supposedly connect us all. This leaves our heads feeling noisy, as thoughts bounce around in there like birds trapped in a glass room not really sure where to land. The trees absorb some of that noise, I think. They just stand silently, no plans to go anywhere. They are alive, I wonder sometimes if they are happy with where they have ended up or if they don’t like some of the other trees nearby because they are always dropping leaves or attracting squirrels, or if they don’t really think about it because they are, you know, trees.

It’s at this time of year the trees start changing and getting ready for winter. Not all of them do, some stay the same. I start thinking about when I might start wearing my warm sweaters again – not any time soon, if this heatwave continues. It’s getting busy at work as we get on with the general running of this big university, helping the branches of academia grow and develop, insert tree-based analogy here. On the other side of the world this week, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the 2024 Urban Sketching Symposium is about to start. Sketchers from around the world are descending upon that colourful capital and starting to post their experiences already, their sketches, their photos, their connections with each other. October is not a good time for me to go to a Symposium. Last year it was held in New Zealand, another far-flung place I have always wanted to visit, but at another time that was not really possible for me due to timing (April). The last one I went to was the huge one in Amsterdam, 2019, when about 800 or more sketchers descended on the Dutch capital in the middle of an unbearably hot summer, back in the pre-Covid world that feels like a different planet in so many ways (though it’s still unbearably hot). Sure, we are ‘back to normal’ now, but so many of us are still not really. I think I’ve reverted back to the solitary reclusive sketcher that shies from the big events, and the small ones too. This has been happening since before the pandemic, but the past few years have made me even more so. It’s hard for me to really explain it. I sketch, I post on my website, I also post on Instagram, and while I keep up with a load of sketchers online who still inspire me daily, I don’t interact so much with all the wider groups these days, your Facebooks and so on. The algorithms are a mess. Instagram’s ok but a bit limited, I’ve stopped posting on the old Twitter, and Threads is useless. I post to Flickr, but not in the old groups which all feel so 2006. This place right here is my main outlet, old fashioned though the blog is. At the launch of Urban Sketchers I was a correspondent for the main USk blog, but I have not posted there for years since it’s not really for that any more, and is more about the network of local chapters. I never did set up an official local chapter round here. Keeping up with all the global sketching community is overwhelming now, it’s massive. I’m in my little corner doing my thing. I am feeling more reclusive than ever with sketching (and in general, if I’m honest), going back to the default setting of hiding away. Maybe I just need a proper Symposium experience, like in the old days, to kick me out of this, and give me some new ideas and energy.

It was the very first Urban Sketching Symposium that effectively brought me out of my shell in the first place, so to speak. We’d only been a thing for barely a couple of years, but the idea of getting sketchers together for a few days of workshops, talks, sketching and mostly interacting in-person was always on the cards, so Gabi and co organized the first event in Portland, Oregon. Not too far from Davis, really. I nearly considered not going. I was part of Urban Sketchers from the start but that old feeling that my place is to hide away. I’d been going through a bit of a personal crisis at the end of 2009, feeling at my lowest ebb, and I think I took a decision in 2010 to figure out how to somehow grow more, take charge of myself a bit. I was encouraged by other urban sketchers to come to Portland, so I took the leap. It really was a lightbulb moment for me when I got there. The Correspondents had a dinner the night before the Symposium, and for so many of us, gathered from not just America but literally all over the world – Kumi from Tokyo, Gerard from Belgium, Tia from Singapore, Isabel from Mauritania, Simo from Italy, Liz from Australia, Lapin from Barcelona – who had not met in person before, but all knew each other and recognized all our different styles immediately. It was exciting to finally meet Gabi Campanario from Seattle, Matthew Brehm from Idaho, and Jason Das from New York, with whom I’d spoken a lot online already, plus several others whose work I loved and still do, Veronica Lawlor, Shiho Nakaza, Laura Frankstone. The Symposium itself started next day, and there were about 75-80 of us total, and it was far less rigorously structured than the Symposia now – we only realized on day two that name tags might be helpful – but as we all wandered about Portland in our groups, it felt like everyone there got to know each other, and I met a lot of people I’ve stayed sketching friends with (and huge fans of) since, such as Kalina Wilson, Rita Sabler, Don Colley, Mike Daikabura, Orling Dominguez, Elizabeth Alley, Vicky Porter, to name a few I discovered there for the first time. I had dinner with a group of the local Portland sketchers and have been back a few times since to sketch (and eat and drink!) with them on their monthly sketchcrawls. The talks were especially fun, the bit where I asked Frank Ching about curvilinear perspective and Gerard Michel got up and gave an animated explanation to the room in French was brilliant. One of my favourite moments was in Matthew Brehm’s talk, when he described it as the ‘Woodstock of Urban Sketching’, and he was absolutely spot on.

It really was where I lost my shyness as a sketcher too. I remember being in Frank Ching’s architecture workshop down in Portland’s Saturday market, and I didn’t know where to sit and sketch, normally looking for the out of sight place where I would not be bothered. I was sketching with Shiho (who introduced me to the pen that day that I still use daily) and we decided, why hide? Why not just sit in the middle of the market, and let people go around us? I think we were back to back. And it was fine, and people came up and watched, and I didn’t mind, for the first time ever I didn’t mind being watched. It was as if suddenly I realized, it’s ok to go out sketching, it’s normal, and not only are other people doing it, but by doing it ourselves we are giving other people permission to do it. And I drew pirates. I remember sitting outside a little bar one afternoon with a group of us and just seeing each of our minds racing with ideas, none of us able to sleep much, and I realized we need more of this to get sketchers together. On the plane ride home, I couldn’t sit still for ideas, and filled several pages of a notebook with thoughts and phrases and plans, and wrote down “Let’s Draw Davis!”, deciding to start a monthly sketchcrawl in Davis, making fliers that I would post about town and start an email list and make it open to anyone, and promise myself that I would get out of my shell and actually start trying to meet other artists and sketchers in this little city, and encourage others to become urban sketchers. I even brought extra pencils and little sketchbooks with me in case people wondered what we might be doing, and would like to get sketching themselves. And it worked! I’ve met a lot of the local art community over the years, and continued meeting sketchers from over the world, and organizing big events in London, all the fun art stuff. Yet now I find myself shying away again. Maybe I need to, if you will not excuse the pun, branch out a bit.

Let’s get back to the trees. The previous trees were from the Northstar Park, not too far from my house. The big old oak above though is outside the Chemistry building, right opposite the Bike Barn, and has seen a lot of construction right next door while that new Chemistry wing has been built. A number of smaller, younger trees had to be sacrificed for that building to happen, but thankfully this big old mighty tree remains. Its trunk is such an interesting shape, and I pass under its shade most days on my way to work, I am very grateful for its shelter from the sun. I try to find the path with the most shade, the sun does not fit well with my skin. I drew this in pencil as you can see, it made the drawing go a bit faster. It looks like a traditional map of languages, starting out with the big trunk of Indo-European, branching off early into Indo-Iranian and European, then getting all Indo-Aryan, Italo-Romance, Germanic and so on. Like Minna Sundberg’s illustration of it from about ten years ago. I love a language family tree. Languages were my obsession for many years; I’ve kind of let that go a bit, but I still get very excited when I read about it. It’s nearly twenty years since I wrote my Masters thesis, which was based around medieval English and its relationship with French. As far as family tree models go, they are very useful but of course don’t tell the whole story – certain languages having strong influences/cross-pollination on others not in the same branch (or even tree), mixed-language societies where code-switching leads to blurring of the boundaries and pidginization, enforced standardization, but on the whole they can be very helpful in showing how languages at their core developed from each other. Besides, as we have established, I just really love a drawing of a tree.

This is the second tree in this set which has a lot of yellow blooming on the sunny side. This one is next to the Bike Barn, drawn on the first day of Fall quarter. I did another type of tree drawing this summer – I finally updated our Faculty Family Tree. It’s something I have wanted to do for many years. Back in 2008, for the UC Davis Centenary, one of our Emeriti in Statistics, Professor Mack, created a massive genealogy, with lines carefully hand-drawn in pencil, small black and white photos, and names of all sorts of historical mathematicians and statisticians (that bit was typed by me), all collected into one huge board that we displayed for the Chancellor, and have had on our wall ever since. A lot of new faculty have joined us in the intervening years, some have left, and I thought that it would be nice to update it somehow (especially as we can now add Newton and Galileo to the map). And yes, you’ll notice I said ‘map’ there and not ‘tree’ because it was while I was in London this summer, on the Underground, that I had the idea of finally doing this project, and drawing it in the style of the tube map. I had kept a spreadsheet of the lineage of all new faculty who had joined us in the past sixteen years, and got to work in Illustrator, taking about a month to draw the whole thing up. I had it printed as a poster, and it made its debut at a special event in (funnily enough) Portland, at an event for our alumni held at the Joint Statistical Meeting and hosted by our Dean. It’s now on display in our main office on campus, and the great thing is I can update it every year as I find out more information, or as people come or go. It was even featured in the L&S Magazine back in August. Perhaps the biggest tree I have drawn this year.

And finally, two big old oak trees on the north-west corner of the Quad – above, the first day of the quarter, below, the last day of September. Everyone is back now, behind me groups of sororities and fraternities and clubs and other campus groups, as well as the Jehovahs who have been there patiently every day this summer, were gathered outside the MU grabbing the attentions of all the newcomers on campus. Bikes are whizzing by, and e-scooters which go faster and more silently, and e-bikes which go faster still, and now those e-bikes that look more like mopeds, but people ride them on sidewalks and bike lanes much faster than any regular bike; one nearly knocked me over behind Hart Hall the other day. I’ve not been out during the busiest parts of the day yet when classes interchange, but late September/early October is when most of the crashes happen. Yeah it’s great having the people back. I’m still drawing trees, and probably won’t stop any time soon. The Symposium is starting now. Maybe I should think about finally submitting a workshop, trying to teach something. I never feel confident enough to feel like I have anything to pass on; maybe I could teach about drawing trees. Yes, maybe I could. I will try to come out of the shell a bit more, be less of a recluse, I will, but for now, you’ll probably find me under a tree.

September Trees, Part 1

October 6, 2024Leave a comment

I drew a lot of trees last month. It started out when I decided to draw the big tree outside Rock Hall, followed by a big tree outside Physics on that same lunchtime, and just went from there, filling my sketchbook pages with trees over the following couple of weeks. We lost a lot of trees in Davis the past few years, mostly during the big storms at the start of 2023. I miss their shade, especially on the very hot days, and this hot summer is lasting right into Fall as we are currently in a first week of October with multiple days over 100 degrees. A tree is a good place to stop and think for a while. Trees are alive, very much alive, and to sit in its shade makes you feel like you are protected by a large giant. I’ve not been much of a tree climber; when I was a kid I would climb trees because I was light as a feather, but never too far up, because I wouldn’t float down like a feather.

I don’t really have a lot to say about the trees themselves. I could be all naturalist and tell you all what type of tree they are after drawing, but I didn’t bother checking; many of them are types of Californian Oak, but don’t quote me on that. I should know better. When I was 11, I won a competition which was held in schools across the London Borough of Barnet, when I designed a ceramic butterfly. I was really interested in pottery when I was at junior school, and thought it might be something I carried on doing as an art form into later life, but in my first ceramics class at secondary school I got the impression that the teacher, Mr Herring, hated me for some reason. I got the impression he hated a lot of people, but he gave me a discredit on day one when, after he had thrown a huge lump of clay at a pupil, I told him my old pottery teacher told us never to throw clay. He also told me my drawings were really bad. I got a second discredit for not doing my homework once – the homework was literally drawing, but he’d made me feel like I couldn’t draw – and that resulted in me getting my one and only detention at school. In all the time taking those classes I don’t remember making one actual thing. But before Mr. Herring’s class put me off doing ceramics for life, I had won a prize at primary school for my ceramic butterfly. In fact, they told me the main reason I had won is because of all the preparation drawings I had done, they liked them so much. My prize was a book called ‘The Young Naturalist’, and it was all about looking out for insects and identifying plants, it was stuff I was always quite interested in when I would go camping with the cubs and scouts. However, I could not really read it much at home, because my older brother and sister took all levels of piss out of me telling me that a ‘Naturalist’ was one of them people that goes around the woods in the nude with other nudey people, and that I must be one of them if I had that book. Now even though I knew full well that they meant ‘Naturist’, and I knew the difference between the words, I could not be completely certain, they might have been telling the truth. Either way, I thought it best to hide that book, in case anyone got the wrong idea and thought that I, a freckly red-headed 11 year old kid, might be secretly spending my weekends dancing about woodlands in the nip. To this day, I try to avoid using the word ‘Naturalist’, and have even so far resisted getting my US citizenship because I’m a bit worried about the ‘naturalization process’, nobody is making me take my trousers off and go dilly-dallying about an orchard. So that’s the reason I can’t really tell one tree from another.

Being around the trees does make me think though. A little thinking can get you into a lot of trouble, a wise man once said (it might have been Brick Top in Snatch), but this is a place for my thoughts. One piece of music was going through my head when I drew these trees, the song ‘Trees’ by Pulp. It was on their final album in 2001, ‘We Love Life’, an album I very much adored, and brings me back to those first few months in Aix-en-Provence, listening to that CD in my shared apartment above the bakery. Pulp have been very much in my head recently, because after 30 years of being a fan, last month I finally got to see them live in concert. It was an amazing experience, my mind going right back to the 90s. They played at the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, a pretty decent sized venue. My wife and I travelled down from Davis, I bought the t-shirt, we sat pretty high up. The opening band were not great, a duo playing very odd experimental (self-indulgent) music, the classic avant-garde-a-clue. Pulp on the other hand were amazing. The bass player Steve Mackey died last year so this your is a tribute to him. They reformed in 2023 for a series of gigs, and these ones over here in the US were their first gigs over this way in many years. Jarvis was great. I was a massive fan of Pulp in the mid-90s, ever since I saw one of their video for ‘Lipgloss’ on the ITV Chart Show in late 1993 (I used to watch that show on Friday nights when I was 17, that and The Word; I didn’t have a social life then, just like now). I loved His’n’Hers, Different Class blew me away. They played loads of favourites, ‘Babies’, ‘Do You Remember The First Time’, ‘Disco 2000’ (which reminded me so much of those sweaty nights at indie clubs in Soho in 1995-96) and of course ‘Common People’ which is still one of the great pop songs of all time. Their 1998 album This Is Hardcore is another album I adore; the title track is an absolute classic and I was so pleased they played that one live, but they didn’t play ‘Help The Aged’ (which we rewrote as a football song in 1998 called ‘Help The English’ and those are the lyrics still in my head). They played some songs from We Love Life too, but unfortunately not ‘Trees’. And yet, that is the song that has been in my head the most this month, as you can see.

Each of these interludes between trees is going to be a little story or thought all of itself. That’s ok. This will be a long post. There will be eight trees. And there will be more in the next post, about nine. The great thing is, you don’t have to read the words, you can just look at the pictures. The words are here to break up all the pictures really. I drew these trees around UC Davis and downtown Davis, some with the fountain pen like the one above, the rest with the uni-ball signo pen like the one below. I listen to podcasts a lot when I sketch, and since the Pulp show I have been gorging myself on podcasts featuring interviews with Jarvis Cocker. There’s something about his dry, gentle Sheffield voice that is so reassuring. I listened to the audiobook of his 2022 book ‘Good Pop, Bad Pop’, which he read himself. It’s a book about the stuff in his attic, and how talking about the stuff (and deciding whether to keep it or chuck it) becomes in a way the story of his life. I feel that way about my drawings, and this blog, I guess. I could go through the random things in my own house, or those things from my childhood still somewhere in my mum’s loft, and draw them, picking apart the story of my own existence. Self-reflection, or escaping the present into the fog of nostalgia? It’s best to be careful about these things. In that interview I did recently on KDRT it was remarked that my posts are a kind of life story (this one is, that’s for sure), and I think that’s part of the excuse to draw, is the excuse to look back while looking at the world in front of me. The tree above is right outside a funeral home, and I kept thinking that I should do all my thinking while I am alive, because (to paraphrase Paul Weller) there’s no thinking after you’re dead. Wow, that got dark! Best get back to listening to some Pulp, that will cheer us up.

Speaking of 90s music, one of my other favourite bands Oasis have finally announced a truce and will play a number of big shows next year, you may have heard. Of course I was very excited to hear the news, but had mixed emotions about it. The shows of course have had insane levels of interest, and the whole fiasco about dynamic pricing – you wait online in a queue for seven hours for expensive tickets to a show in a massive packed stadium where they will probably sound a bit shit, and if you are lucky enough to actually get through, you find the cost of the tickets has doubled or tripled? And you are on the spot. I didn’t even try. It was overall a very bad look, left a sour taste. Like Pulp, I was obsessed with Oasis in the mid-90s but never saw them play live, it was too hard to get tickets. I considered Knebworth in 96, but that would have meant hanging on the phone all day, and besides I had to work on the Saturday at ASDA. One of my co-workers did go, I think I even covered for her on the Sunday, and she had an amazing time (while I made tea and toasted teacakes for shoppers). I didn’t mind. I had already seen the Sex Pistols that summer at Finsbury Park, and nothing in the world was topping that. I never had the patience for competing for tickets to the big gigs, though looking back Knebworth would have been fun. I did eventually get tickets to see Oasis in France in 2000, when I was living in Belgium. It was I think in Metz, and I didn’t really know how I was going to get there and back from Charleroi, so when the band had a big fight in Spain and Noel Gallagher quit, they cancelled those shows and I was partly relieved. When they split in 2009 I thought it was a long time overdue; there are a few songs on the last few albums I really enjoy but nothing like the energy of the 90s. For the past fifteen years, I have loved Noel’s ‘solo’ albums, and even those Beady Eye albums made by Liam and the remainder of the band. Most of all I’ve enjoyed the interviews, and the silly drama of it. The music is part of my own personal history, it’s not for everyone but there were big reasons that it hooked onto me when I was 18-19. When the announcement came they were finally getting back, well it wasn’t like when Pulp re-formed and people were like, oh ok. With Oasis the whole world all seemed to have an opinion. People delighted in telling the world they hated them. Well, I loved them. Part of me wanted them to never get back, because it was over and done with, but well, playing some live shows with all the old stuff is all part of the fun. The Sex Pistols did it, after all, and they still hate each other thirty years after that. I’m mostly looking forward to the interviews, to see what the pair of them will be like together again after all this time (and when they will split up again).

Music has been on my mind lately. I got that record player, and belted out the Sex Pistols’ version of ‘Substitute’, the first song I ever learned on the guitar. My uncle Billy played that song to me on the same vinyl record back in about 1988 or 89 and I was transfixed with the sound. You could play like that, simple angry chords, and it was great. You didn’t even have to get it right. I learned the chords from ear, got the words all wrong, played it fast like the Pistols and slower like the Who (marginally slower), and to this day I still get it wrong but it doesn’t matter, my version is right because it’s my version. I have loved playing the guitar since then. I got an acoustic guitar at a car boot sale for about a fiver, a fairly crappy old thing but it played and stayed in tune, and I learned all my chords on that. At school I would play the basic nylon string guitar in the music room, I always got a tune out of it but it was quiet, it was hardly right for playing Anarchy in the UK. I started writing songs almost right away. One of the first I wrote was called ‘Strike’, written as a homework assignment in Music where we had to write a song about something in the news. Me and my friend Kevin performed it in class, me on the guitar and him on either the keyboard or tambourine, I forget now. The chords were some thing like G-E-D-C-G, with no melody, and the opening words went something like “down to the station I usually hike, today I’ve got to take my bike, because there’s a strike.” That’s all I remember. I didn’t even have a bike. Still it was a start, and I started writing any old nonsense after that, looking for chords and tunes, some very catchy, some very crappy, latching onto whatever was floating about. At this point I loved the Pogues, the Pistols, the Beatles, the Jam, the Who, and loads of Irish folk and rebel music, I had this song book with guitar chords that we picked up at one of the Irish music festivals. I got my first electric guitar on my 14th birthday (thanks to my big brother), a trusty Westone Concord, though I didn’t have an amplifier so never plugged it in until I was in front of an audience at school. I wrote and performed a lot of songs at school, I had that band called ‘Gonads’ with my mate Hooker singing (a much better singer than I ever was) and we would get booed off annually at the Christmas Variety Show, which we loved. Funny enough I remember first hearing Oasis after leaving school and thinking, wait this is the sound I was after, I could never get it but this is what I was going for. I had given up the idea of being in a band by then. I did keep writing songs for years, in waves, and I think a part of me would write them with my old mate’s voice in mind, and they were never for playing or showing anybody, and eventually I stopped, seemed a bit self-indulgent. I do still find myself coming up with tunes though, playing them into my phone as 20-30 second unfinished sketches, and there they stay. I like to think that informs my sketching somehow, inspires me to draw more quick and less ‘finished’ sketches, but come on now.

This collection of trees is a bit like an LP isn’t it, with a Side One and a Side Two. A lot of these ones were drawn downtown while walking about on a Saturday afternoon, before heading to Armadillo Records to look through some vinyl. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1989. I stood outside Froggy’s on 2nd Street to draw this one above, I was attracted to the reddish orange hue the tree took on at head height. Reminded me of myself, maybe? My hair is fading now though. The leaves haven’t fallen, but the bark is getting – wait, stop turning everything into some sort of tree tie-in. So, in this post I’ve covered even more mawkish autobiography than usual, from triumphs/failures in ceramics as a kid, finally going to see Pulp, failing to see Oasis, learning to write songs as a teenager, to now when my hair is fading and I’m obsessively drawing trees. In that radio interview recently Bill Buchanan described me as restless, and he was right, I’ve always been like that. Now I have started drawing trees, I can’t stop seeing trees to draw, especially those parts where all the big limbs start sprouting off from the main trunk. I wonder if the tree knows beforehand how many big branches will sprout out, which ones will be the main branches, which ones will get cut by some arborist or some force of nature, and just how far will some of those branches go? It’s all starting to feel like another autobiographical analogy again, and we’re not having that. Trees are just trees and I’m glad for them. They keep us cool and provide us with the air we breathe, and yes they can occasionally fall and ruin carports and rooftops, but that’s nature’s way isn’t it. Side One finishes with a tree and a bench in central Park, Davis, and that’s where we leave it. The bench is green in real life, if you’re interested. I could have left it out, but it seemed important to include.

sketching in the record shop

October 2, 2024October 2, 20242 Comments

This is Armadillo Music in downtown Davis, I have sketched the outside before but never sketched the interior. Well, I sketched the interior of the old store back in 2011, when I had my first art show in Davis for the Art About, but the store moved a couple of spaces up F Street to its larger location several years ago. I have been in a few times, but not really had much reason to look through records these days. When I first moved over here, my wife bought me one of those suitcase record players, and I brought over a bunch of my old records from when I was a teenager, not that many but as many as I could carry in hand luggage back in 2006 or 2007 or whenever it was. My old Beatles records I was given by my uncle Billy, largely, but also a bunch of old singles. I still think about the ones that I ended up leaving behind because I could only bring so many. But you know, I didn’t listen to them. That little record player wasn’t very good, as it was too small to play an LP without it flopping about, the speed was a bit off, and the sound from the speakers was, well it was fine but not with much depth. That record player sat in my closet for years, and the records have sat in my cupboard. My son recently started getting into music a lot, and one day came home with a vinyl album from one of his favourite singers (Laufey), so we got the little suitcase player out and he played it in the living room. Sounded alright, but right away I was online thinking, I should get a new record player.

So I bought a brand new up to date Audio Technica turntable, much smarter looking, with bluetooth capability so you can connect speakers or headphones. It connected well to my trusty little Bose speaker and sounded great. The difference is huge. However, when I was growing up I always had nice stereo speakers with my old record player, so I decided to get some new bigger and more powerful speakers too, stereo, that are both wired and bluetooth (I plug them into the record player, but I also connect my devices to them wirelessly). Not as mobile as my little Bose, but it’s for a different thing. Sure, this all takes up a bit of room that really I do not have. Space is a finite commodity in a small house, and I had to put them where I had all my sketchbooks piled up (I am in the process of finding a better storage solution for the sketchbooks, one where I can access them but they won’t get dusty). And now, I can get my old records out and play them the way I remember them sounding. It’s a bit middle-age retro of me, but it was inspired by the teenager in our family after all. I also bought it on the fifth anniversary of my uncle Billy dying, and he was the man with all the records when I was a kid, I would go over to his on a Saturday afternoon and he’d play me loads of records, then we’d go and get snacks and rent a movie and watch that until time to go home for dinner. So I was thinking of him when I finally got my record player. I realized it was the first one I’d ever got myself. My wife got me the suitcase one; my old record/tape/CD stereo system I had in England was given to me for Christmas when I was about 16, brand new at the time and the first CD player I ever had, and before that I had this massive (and practically indestructible) deck from the 60s or 70s with huge box speakers that used to make our little street rattle when I would play Never Mind The Bollocks. Sure I had the big old headphones on a coil as well but nothing like turning it all the way up, but that’s how it was in our street, we were never a quiet sleepy lane.

I won’t be turning it up to 11 nowadays. Anyway, I thought I should get a new record to christen the new player. Vinyl albums are expensive now; they were not cheap when I was a kid either, I used to go through second hand stores and car boot sales looking for my records, only buying cheaper singles from Loppylugs (my local store, where I’d spend hours), or going to the Record and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill or Camden. I never bought albums on cassette (tapes were for taping things on to!) and when CDs started to enter my life I went for them in a big way. I wasn’t really a big record collector like my uncle, and I have no intention of becoming one. I missed the vinyl format though (I still get up instinctively half way through Beatles albums to switch the side over) and the little crackle, the warm feeling. But they are heavy and take up space. Still, I wanted a record, so I popped down to Armadillo on this Saturday afternoon after drawing some trees, and spent a while flipping through the racks, like the old days. Not looking for anything in particular, just browsing. One aspect about Armadillo now is that they actually have a little bar in there now, so you can have a beer while browsing, or after browsing in my case. So I sat with a pint and sketched the store. There were some other people sat at the bar, one guy who was Arizona or Texas or somewhere was talking about eating rattlesnake in the desert, and declared loudly to his younger companions “Oh I hate Oasis, they are just a Beatles covers band!” At which I bristled, and wanted to say, “Well it’s not for you, is it” but I don’t to talk to strangers. After all, get me on the subject of, say, Phil Collins or Ed Sheeran and you’d get a much more dismissive response. I remember when I was in the surgery that time and they started playing Phil Collins, and there was not enough anesthetic in the hospital to cover that agonizing pain. But enough about that. I ended up buying a remastered version of Joni Mitchell’s album ‘Blue’ which I do have on CD, but always felt like more of a vinyl album. And it sounds great. I’ve no intention of becoming a record collector, but I will get a few albums that I’ve always wanted on vinyl (perhaps including the newly re-released Definitely Maybe) and spend a bit of time browsing in record shops. If anything, they are good subjects to sketch.

Muir Woods

October 1, 2024October 1, 20242 Comments

We went to Muir Woods, in Marin County north of San Francisco. I’ve never been there before so it was pretty cool. It’s a National Monument, so our National Parks pass got us in. I love all the Redwoods. (I don’t love John Redwood much, but he’s not a tree, he’s a Tory.) These trees are genuinely enormous. The first time I came to the US we visited Armstrong Redwoods, but haven’t been back since. I’d like to visit the Redwoods National Park, though it is quite far north near the top of California, and I’m not liking the long car rides. Muir Woods was really beautiful, though to get there you have to go up some pretty windy roads with steep drops. It’s part of Mount Tamalpais, and backs onto the Pacific, though we didn’t go down to Muir Beach. We took a long walk along the main groves, without any steep climbs, and while it was pretty busy it was still nice listening to the sounds of nature amid all the green shade. One area, Cathedral Grove, is designated a quiet path, but nobody told the people behind us who were talking very loudly. These trees are big, I wouldn’t get them upset. It all reminded me of the recent Planet of the Apes films, they were all up here weren’t they. I sketched this one big tree that had an opening in it, where people would stop and get their photos taken as if the tree was consuming them. Don’t give the tree any ideas, I say. I was inspired by all these trees though. I’ve spent the rest of September filling most of my sketchbook with drawings of trees, and once you start it is hard to stop. Each tree is different, and old, and very alive. After our walk around the woods, we drove down into Mill Valley for a smoothie, before driving around the Marin Headlands and getting some nice photos of the Golden Gate Bridge.

this side of third

September 26, 20243 Comments

I went downtown on September 11th, the flags were up to commemorate 9/11, it’s a lot of years later now but I still remember that day clearly. I was in London, day off from my full-time summer job of being a tour guide on the open-top buses in London, a couple of weeks before I was set to move to the south of France for a year. The radio when I woke up that morning was all about the economy and how we didn’t know what was going to happen less than a year into the Bush presidency, and well they weren’t wrong, they didn’t know what would happen next. It was some time in the early afternoon I think, I was listening to music in my bedroom and for some reason I decided to turn the radio back on, when I heard they were talking about the news of a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers in New York. I had just dreamed about flying over New York a few days before, having always wanted to go there. Like most people I thought it must be just a strange and terrible accident. I turned on the TV just as the second plane hit, and then knew it was something far worse. Well we all saw the rest, that horrible day etched in memory, at least those of us that were around then. The next week in London was surreal, New York being like a sister city to us, with extra security everywhere, and my bus tours were full of stranded, slightly bewildered Americans unable to fly back home. When I moved over here, 9/11 was still relatively fresh, Bin Laden hadn’t been caught yet, and over the years it’s become one of those events from the past like the Kennedy assassination, or Pearl Harbour, or Chernobyl (which along with the Challenger explosion was the big disaster event of my childhood; I had the newspaper clippings on my wall, next to posters of Michael J. Fox and Glenn Hoddle). It’s a little mind-blowing to me that this was before the memories or even births of many people I meet today, but that’s how the world works isn’t it, a lot of history happened before I was born too. Spurs winning the league for example. Anyway, enough history talk. I was downtown on this 9/11, the flags were up, and I stood on 3rd Street outside the Manna Korean restaurant (I’ve never actually eaten there) next to Zia’s Italian Deli (been in there many times, especially at Christmas for my panettone). This is a typical downtown Davis view, if I am ever to do a book this would probably go in there, this is the Davis you recognize every day.

piggies

September 25, 2024September 24, 20241 Comment

I don’t think I’ve ever drawn at the Marketplace in north Davis. That’s because it’s not very interesting, just a strip mall and a load of parked cars right in direct sunlight, though there being a couple of unusual sculptures. One of those is just outside Noah’s Bakery and Mountain Mike’s Pizza, which is of three large pink pigs dancing around. No sign of the Big Bad Wolf. Maybe I the Urban Sketcher am a Big Bad Wolf, but I just draw your house rather than blow it down. I had walked over there (not cycled, my bike as I mentioned has a flat tyre and I’ve been too lazy to do anything about it, but at least I am getting my steps in) to buy a card from CVS, probably my least favourite shop, and some chocolates from Sees, probably my most favourite chocolate shop. It was our twentieth wedding anniversary a couple of days later; we had been supposed to go away that week but ended up postponing the trip, so we went for a nice dinner instead. The trip away will be nice though. I sat in one of the very few spots of shade to draw this before going to See’s. The chocolate at see’s is available at every airport in California, but it really is great and I always bring some home to England whenever we go home, and always for anniversaries. My dad loves them; twenty years ago, just before our wedding in Vegas, my wife had given my dad his first box of See’s and he had, typically, devoured them before even looking at the label. But he really loved them, so I’ve usually brought some over for him ever since. I sat outside Jamba Juice, I had one of their smoothies, but didn’t really like being in the shop as it smelled funny. There were a couple of families sat at a table next to me outside talking about schools, reminding me of my old maxim that that overheard conversations are almost always not interesting at all. As I drew I wondered what I was drawing this for, was it to check off the Marketplace in my list of Places In Davis I Have Sketched, I’ve done that now. I knew I wanted to sketch these three pigs at some point. Apart from the tree, I pretty much lost interest in the sketch early on, and knew I would not end up colouring it in, except for the piggies, and the pizza sign. I don’t eat pork anyway, I just don’t dig on swine.

shoe business

September 24, 2024September 24, 2024Leave a comment

I like to draw shoes. They are a good subject because they stay where they are and I can draw them at home. I have been drawing my kid’s shoes since 2009, ever since the first baby shoes, which was a little slip-on with a little rocket ship on, not meant for walking in. I filled a small (very small, 3″x5″) Moleskine thin paper cahier-type sketchbook with black and white pen drawings (why? I was not yet comfortable enough with my drawings of shoes to commit to drawing anything bigger and in colour, something I grew out of very quickly). I filled Volume 1 fast enough, and for Volume 2 I chose a slightly (!) bigger book of about 5″x5″, one of the ‘Handmade’ brand of books that can take a bit of watercolour, though not as well as regular watercolour paper, but it means I can actually colour them in. It seemed a good idea at the time, drawing in a square format, because at the time the shoes were smaller. Volume 2 has a lot more pages, and so I am still in Volume 2 fifteen years into the project. These days, the shoes fill a double page spread, and that seems to be about right. I don’t draw them often, but well, here are the latest set. Some are drawn twice for different views (and because I was bored in the hot summer evenings and really wanted to draw more). Above, hiking boots from our trip to Utah last Spring break. They got very very muddy at Bryce Canyon. My attempt to clean them in our sink led to our pipes being clogged up with red Utah mud, which must have congealed and caused a blockage because when we flushed the toilet next day, all the water backed up over the floor. That is never a fun moment, but I know enough now about our plumbing (from previous times this has happened) that I was able to poke around with one of those long drainage snakes in the outside outlet to unclog it all. The joys of home ownership. Well, lesson learned, next time we will clean boots outside with a hose.

Here are two pairs of Converse shoes, one pair in light green, the other in light blue. Converse are nice shoes to draw, they aren’t covered in unusual patterns that are difficult to render in pen, and everything looks better with a big star on it somewhere. Classic designs. In fact the very first shoes of my son’s that I drew pre-dated drawing the series, and looked a bit like baby versions of these. It was part of a ‘collage’ drawing I did which I called ‘Miscellaneous Details’ (after the David Devant song) and actually sold at a gallery in Davis, the Artery. Here it is. The little shoe (Vans) was my favourite bit, with its shell-toe and velcro straps, and up to that point I think I had never drawn a shoe, so I decided to pull out all of my son’s shoes up to that point (there were only about three or four of them) and start drawing them all in order.

My Mum always used to say, get a good pair of shoes and a good bed, because if you’re not in one you’re in the other. It is also from her that I inherited the superstition about shoes on the table, you should never put a new pair of shoes on the table, it’s bad luck. New or old or not as new, just don’t take the chance with these things. I still never do. In fact, it made drawing these shoes a little tricky, as I have to put the shoes on the table to see them while I draw. I get around that with some mental gymnastics. First of all I always put a few layers between the table and the shoe – an old cereal box, a Safeway ad, the scarf I let the cats sleep on – that helps prop it up but also tricks the shoe into not realizing it’s on a table. I realize that saying that out loud sounds a bit weird, but since I’m typing it silently I’m technically not saying it out loud (just don’t tell the shoes) (I’m not saying I believe shoes are living things, but they do have soles). Also, it’s not really a table, it’s a desk, so in the court of superstitious law I think I’m in the clear. These last ones are Asics running shoes, a little bit of mud on them there which is always a sign of good use. I have never had Asics shoes myself but I appreciate the brand, because I loved their football kits in the early to mid 90s (Sampdoria, Blackburn, Newcastle, Villa, some classics, and don’t forget the flaming brilliant Japan kit of 98). Maybe I should look at some Asics running shoes myself, as I prepare for this 10k in November. Anyway shoes, until the next round.

Third and D

September 23, 20241 Comment

Another one from downtown, early September. The corner of 3rd and D streets. There’s a new Mexican restaurant called Maya’s that opened on the corner, I’ve not eaten there yet but will try it. The downtown post office is just beyond. September is already ploughing towards October. As I write, I am up late on the night before the academic year begins, and Davis will be a lot busier from now on, not a bad thing at all, though I like the quieter summer. I did go to bed early, but I could not fall asleep and was listening to an audiobook (“Good Pop Bad Pop” by Jarvis Cocker; last Monday I went to see Pulp play live in San Francisco, a thirty-year-long dream, and have been reliving all my old Pulp love since. I will write a bit more about that, as well as my thirty-year love of Oasis, now that they too are reuniting, though I won’t be going to see them). I woke up very early this morning to watch the Formula 1, the Singapore Grand Prix, and then I went on a long run of 4.5 miles, my furthest distance yet. I felt exhausted the rest of the day, but that might be the effects of getting both my Covid and Flu shots yesterday, one in each arm. I was pretty tired yesterday evening too; I went to the Pence Gallery for the annual Art Auction (one of my two pieces sold, the drawing of Denmark Street) and but I came home early, too tired to stay out. Today I ended up sleeping most of the day, anything I tried to do, whether it was drawing or writing or organizing my clothes, just knackered me out, so I slept on the couch, only waking up to put on that movie The Dark Knight, which is a good film but really is about half an hour too long. Well I’m up now, with the urge to write, but now I’m at it I can’t quite explore any thoughts. I used to keep a diary and be good about that, and it was a good place to explore ideas, but I haven’t for several years now, probably because I write really small and my eyesight’s getting worse. Anyway, here’s a sketch of 3rd and D. Maybe I should draw this scene in 3D some day.

run run run

September 21, 2024September 21, 2024Leave a comment

I’m running again. Not very fast admittedly, but longer distances than usual. I’m not sure what I’m running from; maybe I’m running towards something. Regularly enough for it to be a habit, not too regularly that I do myself an injury. I did that last year, when I overdid it training through the summer, and caused myself a leg injury not long after the Labor Day run, sidelining me for weeks. Rest days are important, kids. I am still running in my comfy Nike running shoes from a few years ago. They still give me a spring in my step, but maybe it’s time for a refresh. I ran the Labor Day Race 5k a few weeks ago; my participation medal is below. I came tenth in my age/gender category. Three minutes slower than last year, but I have not run as much this year; my last race was the 7k Lucky Run in March, and I’ve not run as much this summer. I’m a lot heavier too, carrying around all those extra thoughts I guess. Still, running is good for the head. I am preparing for my biggest challenge yet, which is the 10k at this November’s Davis Turkey Trot. All my practice runs lately have been longer than before, as I am edging towards that distance, though they are still slower pace. I can’t wait though, and would love to do it sooner, but I don’t want to sign up for a 10k in some other city on roads and paths I’m not as familiar with, the first one should be here. I know someone in England who did ten 10ks in one month earlier this year, for charity, so I’m inspired and hope this one coming up won’t be my last, unless I really hate it. Once I put my mind to something though, I can’t easily be dissuaded, I am well up for it.

I’m not going to run a Marathon, or even Half-Marathon, any time soon. In fact the only reason I would is so that I could say, “I ran a Marathon. I took so long, by the time I reached the finish line it was a Snickers.” (Another long-running gag there)