another look at the hattie weber museum

September 20, 2024September 19, 2024Leave a comment

I could have included this in the last post, but because it happened to fall into September I decided not to. I’ve drawn this before a few times (that could be the name of my book) and it is the Hattie Weber Museum of Davis, a little museum all about Davis that is in the old Library building, Hattie Weber being the first paid librarian in Davis. I feel like I am repeating myself, over and over, drawing the same buildings, writing the same words, being the same predictable person day in and day out. I always have been, I think. I mean, we probably all are, but me more than most. Maybe it’s reassuring, maybe it’s samey. My sketchbooks feel like a Museum of Davis though. Maybe that’s how I should approach the book I inevitably must write (or compile, I mean I don’t know if putting a book of drawings together is really ‘writing’). A book that shows the changes in the past two decades, both in the city itself and in my style, and maybe in me as well. You know, back then I would go to work, draw stuff, eat noodles, watch football, listen to the same three or four bands, write stuff on my blog, whereas now… Ok. I felt a bit ashamed of myself drawing this building yet again, as if I was totally out of all ideas. Let’s look for example at the previous times I have drawn it…

So this one was done in 2016, in early September. That was eight years ago, same time of year, shortly before an Election (one which I very much did not like the outcome of), drawn from a similar (but not exactly the same) angle.

Fast forward to August 2020 (another Election year, one which I liked the outcome of a lot more, but was no less stressful) but look, I am drawing on this side of the street now. Samey, predictable? Not me guv! Of course, summer 2020 was a real moment in time, wasn’t it. I drew this one for the Pence Gallery’s annual Art Auction, I think it sold. It’s probably the best one I did.

This one also sold at the Pence Gallery, back in 2011 when I had that big solo show. That was really fifteen years ago? Time flies. It’s eight years since my retrospective exhibition at the UC Davis Design Museum too. I have done a lot of drawing since then, a massive amount. But, as we’ve determined, it’s all pretty much drawings of the same thing, just later in life.

Whoah, what the flip is this? A completely different angle altogether! It’s like jazz or something. I was in the little rose garden looking north or northish. Look, there are people! I must have been in a good mood that day. It was September again, the weekend before the academic year started, out at the Farmer’s Market in 2022, the heady post-pandemic days. Two years from any Election, a completely stress-free environment, yep.

And then, back to the earliest one, May 2011, an innocent time when I was still putting little borders around my sketches, and drawing with a black Micron pen. there was an old school-bell outside the building in those days, whenever I would come downtown with my at-the-time-very-little son on the bus on a Saturday morning (the ‘real bus’, he used to call it) he would occasionally ring this bell. Anyway this is the Hattie Weber Museum over the years, but it doesn’t tell its most interesting bit of history, way before my time, when it was actually the original Davis Library, and was located in an entirely different place, at 117 F Street. They moved it here at the start of the 90s, and the museum opened in 1992. And I’m sure I’ll keep drawing it as long as I’m in Davis. I’ve just realized, I have never actually sketched inside…

a few more from August

September 19, 2024Leave a comment

When I draw I always add it to the chart I make to track all my sketches for the year, and looking at this summer it feels like I’ve drawn a lot less than usual, but it’s not really the case. The format is a bit different because of the sketchbook I am using, with the portrait pages rather than the long landscape pages, so in the way I arrange it, it looks like less. I should have done it differently, but never mind. I still have a bunch of drawings from this summer wandering about Davis over long lunchtimes on slow days, and rather than post them all individually I’ll bunch them up like I usually do with my summer sketches at this time of year. What story is there to tell other than it was summer in Davis, it was hot, I was a bit bored. So like they do in montage sequences of films, here are a few more from downtown that I drew in August. At the top, well it’s on A Street which is where downtown meets the university, and I’ve drawn this building a few times before, Guilbert House.

This one is on 3rd Street, and drawn a little differently. I have drawn this house in the background of a sketch before I think, they often have fun stuff dotted around it, I think it’s one of those student houses. Anyway I was drawn to the pedal machine thing they have on the driveway, I must have seen this at Picnic Day or around town, it says “Vibey” on it so that must be its name. I decided to do the background with only paint and no lines, for some reason, but I don’t really like that much.

This one isn’t downtown at all but very much in the heart of campus, Haring Hall, as drawn from the Silo. The ghostly phantom walking past there is to remind us that I do draw people as long as they look like the people in the road-signs at crossings. I’ve only been inside Haring Hall a few times, and that was only to visit a now-retired professor who I knew and would have to get an occasional signature from, and I always liked his office full of books and things, as a proper professor’s office should feel like. I still occasionally see him at arts events and new building openings on campus, but I do think of his old office when I look at Haring. Anyway I drew Haring in the middle of August, before you know it it’s the middle of September.

And finally, late August. I actually didn’t do much sketching in August this year, as it turns out. I’m making up for it in September by drawing loads of trees, more on that later. I have also done lots of shoe drawings (they are long and take up more space in the chart). The drawing above is of an optometrist, “Eye Sea” (eye don’t get it), I have drawn this building before but not so big. It’s an interesting shape. It’s not my optometrist, this one, I go around the corner but I did come here once many years ago, it was a different optometrist back then, because I wanted some different frames and they had a good selection. I remember I picked up a pair of ridiculously small glasses, comically small lenses. They had no rim on the bottom half, and a very thin rim on the top; I would call them my ‘Half-Svens’, because former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson used to wear little rimless glasses, and he was pretty cool. Poor Sven; he died just two days before I drew this sketch. I must have thought about that subconsciously when I chose to draw it. I liked Sven a lot, ever since first seeing him on the pages of World Soccer in about 1991 when he was Benfica manager, I think. He didn’t look like football managers looked, certainly not English ones, and nothing like the old grizzled ones you’d see coaching the big clubs of Italy or Spain. He got around a bit, did Sven, and was much loved, the football world lost a real individual when he died. He left the world a farewell message before the cancer took him: “Never give up. Do not give up, is my message for life. And please don’t forget this: life is always, always to be celebrated.” Thank you Sven, rest in peace.

Chemistry latest – pretty much finished

September 16, 2024Leave a comment

The new quarter is upon us, it starts in a week. The quieter days of summer are over, and the busy busy is back. I’m usually well up for it, but I’ve enjoyed the slightly less stressful couple of months; the last year was a lot of work, a lot of headaches. Still, I’ll feel different when the game starts, I always do, and every year I get energized by the start of Fall quarter on campus. Here is another campus sketch from August, the latest in the new sing of the Chemistry Building, whose development and construction I have followed for about five years now. You can see all those posts by following the ‘Chemistry‘ tag. When a building gets to that end stage, it does become a lot less interesting to draw as it stops being an active moment in time and becomes its long-term self, interesting in the fact that people will come in and out a lot but there won’t be many outwardly different changes. I’ve drawn the Manetti Shrem a lot less since it was finished in 2016, and I’ve not drawn the Pitzer at all since then. Walker Hall I’ve still drawn a few times, but that building is starting to look different already as the freshly planted trees on the Hutchison side are starting to grow and break up the long expanse of architecture. I have probably got one more Chemistry sketch left in this series, the final-final-final one, but the one above is pretty much the end result already, the fences are down and the landscaping more or less done. The windows are all installed, and I think all that needs adding are the people. I wish we had a new building sometimes; ours is relatively new, having opened just a couple of months before I joined UC Davis, but growth happens. I have had a small part in drawing some maps for new rooms in existing buildings, but imagine being part of designing a completely new building, that must be exciting especially when it all opens. The Teaching Learning Complex for example, that was so fun to watch all that come together. This one has been too, and as I pass this way every day it has been easier to follow. I’m looking forward to taking a look around inside once it the new academic year starts.

the green and red, eighteen years later

September 13, 2024Leave a comment

It was August the 20th, the traditional height of summer. The Premier League season had begun days before; Spurs played Leicester the very day before this, and after dominating the game we ended up drawing, of course. And so the next day, I too ended up drawing. Ooh, that was a weak link. Why does August 20th stand out to me though, it has no significance in my life does it? No major birthdays, celebrations, anniversaries. Anyway, I chose this date to come down to D Street, to that little alleyway with the cute little shops that leads through to E Street and to the rear of the Pence. I like the red parts against the green, the brickwork in the chimney of the (very expensive) Mustard Seed restaurant, the lights hanging across on garlands. The woman who walked past did actually have a red bag too so I had to quickly draw her in as she passed to get the unifying look. I had to add a lot of the paint after I got back home, because of time/my legs. I thought back, it was on this date back in the summer of 2006 that I cycled down to D Street and did a sketch of the red phone box outside the Mustard Seed, a little piece of home. This has always felt like a significant point in my Davis existence. It was that first summer here, hotter than I could possibly have imagined; would we have moved to the Bay Area instead of Davis if we’d really known how hot it would be? I doubt it, I’ve always appreciated the air-conditioning, and Davis has been a great place to live and work all these years. That summer I was working at the Avid Reader bookstore on weekends and a couple of evenings per week, while also working full-time at the UC Davis Statistics Department, having been assigned there as a temp before they decided to take me on full-time as the graduate coordinator (I’m still there all these years later, but now the manager). There were a lot of incidents of the air-conditioning going down amid power outages across town, I remember one night a lot of people crowding into the Avid Reader just to stay cool until our closing time of 10pm. On this one day, it was a Sunday and my wife was away in Hawaii with her Mom and nephew, I couldn’t go because of work; the bookstore, but also I had no more vacation days at the university, having spent my small accrual on a solo trip to London earlier that summer, a trip I still look back on with great fondness). So I was all by myself on this Sunday, and I had recently bought a small watercolor set. I had with me a WH Smith spiral bound sketchbook that I had bought and started drawing in during that trip to London. It was not long since I started to look at other people’s blogs online, people who sketched daily, as I had been trying to do for a while, and it inspired me to really get a move on with that and do a lot more of it, especially around Davis, to really start looking at my new town. I didn’t know how I was going to sketch yet. I drew with pen a lot before moving out here. I bought sets of pencils, and they seemed to smudge a lot. I still have a bunch of watercolour pencils I bought to start adding colour. But I was really interested in the whole watercolour thing. It was a cheap set of pan paints that I bought from the university bookshop that got me started. At this point I did not use pen and watercolour together, I had not found a pen that didn’t run by this point (when I did, it was the Pigma Micron, because that’s what some other sketchers online used and so I copied that, a few months later). That green bike in the foreground, I rode that everywhere. My wife got it for me the first Christmas we lived here, it did me well, until eventually it gave up and the wheels just stopped turning. I rode that thing everywhere. That summer I think about riding across Davis with the sound of Belle and Sebastian’s new album The Life Pursuit in my head, wondering how many summers we would have here until we moved on elsewhere. So far it’s nineteen. That’s a lot of hot summers.

The phone box is still there; I don’t think it ever had a phone in it. Years ago when my son was very small we would get the bus downtown, and come down to this phone box and pretend it was a space ship that would take us to the moons of Saturn. I think it’s locked now, presumably to stop people going in and exploring other planets. I’ve drawn it a few times over the years, and when I went back on August 20th, eighteen years after I drew this, I thought about drawing again from the same spot, but since my bike has a flat tyre that I am too stubborn/lazy/unskilled to fix (see previous post) I wouldn’t have got the same view. I would not have wanted a comparison anyway, this old sketch is its own thing and a particular step in the story. So I turned and drew the other direction. There’s a lot of green and splashes of red, so it’s on theme.

the cyclery on the corner

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024Leave a comment

Another downtown sketch of another downtown corner. Mid-August, the quieter days before the students all come back. I sketched on the corner of 3rd and F, looking at the bike shop called the ‘Davis Cyclery’. That reminds me, I need to get my bike tyre fixed. I have left it for ages now. I need to just bring it to a shop, or to the Bike Barn, but I put it off because it costs so much now, and I always feel (at least with the Bike Barn, less so with the shops downtown) that they always go on about other things I need to do with my bike, when it’s like all I want is the not have a flat tyre, thanks, everything else works fine. I want to be able to fix it myself, is the thing. So I gave it a go, I flipped my bike over and tried to remove the back wheel, and failed miserably. I watched YouTube videos, all different types of bikes, they just seem to pop it off like it was a piece of Lego, yet when I try it I could not get the thing off. It clearly does come off, but I have not figured out how. I feel like it’s the sort of thing I should know how to do. Maybe I could just go and ask someone to show me how to do it, but I’m not going to do that am I. (I hear Marcellus Wallace in my head, “That’s pride, f***in’ wit’ ya. F*** pride! Pride only hurts. It never helps.”) No, I’ll get it done at some point. In the meantime I have been walking a lot more, which is good for me anyway. I stood on the corner of the street near a fire hydrant I thought I had sketched before (it was actually a very similar one on 3rd and G, case of mistaken identity) outside the University of Beer, which now has pandemic-era patios out in the street. I needed to add people in, so I drew a couple of people as they crossed the street. Now when I draw people I keep it very generic and mix and match elements of whoever is passing by, so you get an idea of the type of people who are around rather than the actual people; I’m pretty sure the guy crossing the street wasn’t wearing a green shirt and was probably a lot taller, but definitely had that a beard and sunglasses, while the woman with black hair ended up with someone else’s red t-shirt and, well, someone else’s boyfriend too, because I wasn’t quick enough to draw whoever beard-guy was with, and I wasn’t quick enough to draw whoever black-haired-girl was with with, so they have ended up together, like a romantic comedy set in a sketchbook. Hopefully their respective partners don’t see this, recognize them and get the wrong end of the stick. “Honey those aren’t even my legs, I have tattoos!” “Who gave you that t-shirt, you weren’t wearing that when we had lunch!” While contemplating these fictional domestic dramas, I popped into the bar afterwards to rest my own legs and have a pint, though it has been a while since I used to go in there and sketch, and then I walked home.

the former Uncle Vito’s

September 11, 2024Leave a comment

Mid-August, E Street, Davis California. This was Uncle Vito’s Slice of N.Y., a pizzeria and bar that I used to come to occasionally (if you call about once a year or so ‘occasionally’) for a beer, but since the pandemic they have closed down and the spot stands empty. It’s always sad to see spaces sit empty (or stand empty, whatever the correct verb is, maybe it’s lie empty) but at least the amazing 1930s New York style mural along the E Street wall is still there in what I like to call colourful black and white. Some day another business will finally move in, a boba tea shop or a frozen yogurt shop and they will paint over this with some ugly pastel, and it will be a loss for Davis. Anyway, I needed to sketch one day, and I stood looking down E Street along the big mural down towards the contrasting colourful trees and panelling outside the Hotdogger. That violinist I don’t like much wasn’t there on the corner that day, but someone did start playing some music on the piano across the street. I listened to my football podcast, as the Premier League season was just starting later that week, though I was already bored of it even before a ball had been kicked. It’s already the international break now, England have a new interim manager, and as for Spurs already we have won, drawn and lost, not in that order, so our season will be another Spursy season. I would like to go to New York again. The last time I was there was for my 40th birthday, an increasingly long time ago now already. I want to go everywhere, but I always want to visit New York. Go back to Pete’s Tavern, I liked that place. As an urban sketcher, it’s one of the cities you can never be bored of sketching. I presume, anyway. If I lived there I’d probably be longing to go and sketch somewhere else, that is usually how it works with me. Right now, my travel itch is getting to me as I keep looking at Instagram and seeing people sketching places far away and wishing I could just get on a series of trains and explore with the sketchbook. I’d probably get tired, and need a rest. After a while sketching this, I had to go back to the office, and my legs were feeling stiff anyway, so I decided to finish it off later at home.

Bechard Calissons, Aix

September 8, 2024September 9, 20241 Comment

The last of the drawings I did when I got back from our trip was not a London one at all, but a drawing of the Béchard Patissier on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence. They make and sell ‘Calissons’, a small diamond-lozenge shaped candy made of marzipan that is a famous local delicacy of Aix. I like them, not everyone’s cup of tea, but I always make a bee-line for this place when I visit Aix. Other places do nice ones, but I think Béchard’s calissons are very tasty and well presented, usually in those big white calisson-shaped boxes. I just really like the way the store looks too, and it hasn’t changed at all in all these years. I did draw it when I visited back in 2015, but this time I just took a photo intending on a more detailed drawing later to hang on the wall, which is what I have done. It’s up on the wall now next to those London ones. You can see me there reflected in the doorway, wearing my striped Red Star Paris football shirt (I didn’t bring a Marseille one on this trip). I was going to put this drawing into the Pence’s Art Auction hut I liked looking at it too much, it reminded me of walking up Cours Mirabeau all those years ago, usually on the way to see something at the cinema, I saw the Fellowship of the Ring in there when that first came out and dive right into reading the books afterwards, so I always associate those stories with walking those cobbled streets of Aix at night. I am actually re-listening to the audiobooks of The Lord of the Rings now, and I really love the Rings of Power show. The buildings here in this part of Aix, the Quartier Mazarin, are a particularly golden ochre, especially in the sun, going back to the 17th century. The red and white displays go well against that stonework. Even though I drew this after I got back home to Davis (I have sketched this on site nine years ago already), I enjoyed drawing this and thinking back to those days and nights in Aix twenty-odd years ago.

The Dublin Castle

September 6, 2024Leave a comment

Another in the series of London drawings I did this summer after our trip, all of which have some meaning to me. This is The Dublin Castle, on Camden’s Parkway. I wrote some things about Parkway recently, but I did not stop by or sketch the Dublin Castle on that trip. I started coming here in the mid-1990s, and there were always live bands to see out the back. That famous sign on the right, with the black and white squares announcing who would be playing, is a piece of classic Camden iconography. It hasn’t changed in there, and that’s what I love about it. This is the pub that made Madness famous, giving them their first gigs and forever being associated with them afterwards. In fact, when I was in there one quiet afternoon ten years aqo I sketched the bar, and who should walk in but Suggs, the lead singer from Madness, who was chatting with the landlord. I didn’t sketch him (as I’d already finished most of the drawing) and I also didn’t go and say hello (what would I say? Would I tell him I once went to Aarhus in Denmark simply because if anyone ever asked where that was I could sing “in the middle of Aar Street”? I’d only embarrass myself). I like Madness a lot though, I never got to see them play live but I saw that they were playing in Oakland a few months ago at the same place I saw Belle and Sebastian, and I was very tempted. Lots of acts have passed through this pub, your Blurs, your Amy Winehouses, and all your up and coming Camden bands have squeezed onto that stage. I would go to the club nights there too, the beer soaked floor and sticky toilets, all my favourite music pumping those red painted walls, and you never knew what sort of conversation you’d get into with whoever you ended up being sat next to on those old pub seats, it might be some old geezer going on about John Lydon’s brother Jimmy and the four-by-twos, or it might be a conversation about Serbian poetry, to name but two things random people have started talking to me about in that pub. On our nights out in Camden in my 20s, usually with my mate Tel, this would often be the last stop, this or the Mixer, starting out at the Rat and Parrot (now gone) or the Earl of Camden (I think it was the Hogs Head) and on to the Spreadeagle (still there) or the Parkway Tavern (now gone). I’d avoid the World’s End, my mate Tel liked it there (though the Underworld was alright), and I always enjoyed sitting outside at the Edinboro Castle, though it felt a bit posh to be doing that in Camden Town. Speaking of the Edinboro Castle (not ‘Edinburgh’), that is one of the three ‘Castle’ pubs in this area, the others being the Dublin Castle and the Pembroke Castle, apocryphally to keep the railway workers from Ireland, Scotland and Wales separate in case they should start fights with each other. There used to be a Windsor Castle for the English too but that closed a long time ago, insert whatever clever comment here. Still, the Dublin Castle is the king of the old pubs around here, and holds a lot of histories.

This is the other of the drawings I have in this year’s Pence Gallery Art Auction, by the way, and bidding starts very soon on those. Get yourself a little bit of north London history for your wall, and next time you’re in NW1, pop by for a pint, and maybe some live music.

Regent Sounds Studio, Denmark Street

September 5, 2024September 9, 2024Leave a comment

Another in the series of London drawings to hang on the wall. This is Regent Sounds Studios on Denmark Street, off Charing Cross Road. I’ve already posted about the state of Denmark Street in a recent post. So I won’t here again. I have drawn this before, a couple of years ago it was, in a panorama that included Wunjo next door. This was the actual place the Rolling Stones recorded their first album in 1964. This is what I love about London, you can just drop things like that. They recorded more music there, and so did many other famous acts. I like the guitars they have in stock, I never bought one from there though. If I had a big house, and a lot more money, I am sure I would be picking up guitars all over the place. My Instagram algorithm certainly things I should be, every other post is advertising this Fender Acoustasonic, that Danelectro 12-string, this Luna classical, that Meteora bass. They really want me to have loads of guitars. I probably need to get better at playing them, but I am ok, I like playing what I play. I can’t sing for Jaffa Cakes, but I don’t care, I grew up in a family where having a singalong in the back yard is totally normal. When we were back in London we took my Mum on one of them double-decker bus Afternoon Tea tours, it was nice, a lot of fun. They mostly played Abba while driving us around, but I had the idea (which I didn’t start doing by the way) that there should be a Cockney Singalong bus tour of London. That would be brilliant. Go round London for an hour or so, cup of tea and a few slices of cake, and everyone sings the old Cockney songs, “Let’s all go down the Straaaand, ‘ave a banana”. Interspersed with a bit of ‘istory of course, black cabbie knowledge really. I know a lot of people who drive the black cabs and they know a lot of the history. Seriously though it would be a good laugh and very popular. I don’t live there no more though, so someone else can have the idea. Even rig up a little piano, an ol’ Joanna. I’d have to play my guitar though, or my ukulele, I never learnt tinkling the ivories beyond what I taught myself on my keyboard as a teenager. Anyway. I wanted to draw this as another slice of London that meant something to me, and in fact I’ve put this one up for sale in the Pence Gallery’s Art Auction which will held be later this month if you are interested in bidding. Visit the Pence Gallery website for more information.

Primrose Hill Books

September 4, 2024September 3, 2024Leave a comment

Here is another drawing from the series I made after getting back from London. That afternoon when I went to Primrose Hill, climbed up the hill to look over the view I had not seen in many years, remembering my days struggling at A-Level Art, then drew the Pembroke Castle and remembered my stag night twenty years ago, well I also had a stroll through Primrose Hill itself, another of those villages within London, the sort of place the American lead might end up in a romantic comedy set in a version of London where people say “fuck” and “wanker” a lot more than we actually do (and we do say those words a lot). I remember coming down here years ago and going to a really nice pub, and my friend pointing out Chris Martin from Coldplay and referring to him as “Travis out of Travis”, and I’ve called him that ever since. The road curves around and there are some nice little shops, as you’d expect in this romantic comedy part of town, and of course there was a nice little bookshop too called Primrose Hill Books. As a small bookshop lover, I was drawn here like a magnet. It’s very small, smaller than the one I worked at in Finchley (the now sadly long-vanished Finchley Books, where I was the book-keeper in the office downstairs before moving to America). I recognized that small independent bookshop smell, very warm and snug, and got flashbacks of trying to pay invoices to Bertrams or Taylor and Francis. A lot of small bookshops, a lot of small shops in general, just never made it in the end, so it’s always nice to see a real bookshop out there. I knew I would have to draw the place, and when I passed by again across the street I started to, but decided to just take some photos instead and draw back in California, as I needed to draw the Pembroke Castle and get off to Hampstead to pick up some photos I had developed at Snappy Snaps (like it was 2003 or something). This one isn’t on the stairs yet, I need another frame. I used a gold pen for the signage, which you can’t tell here but in the flesh it does shine. I am thinking about all the other bookshops in London, and elsewhere, I want to draw. Daunt Books in Marylebone for example, that’s long been on my sketching list. Finchley Books is long gone, of course, having closed in about 2006 or 2007, I can’t remember now, I still think about them.