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.

the Highgate Pantry

September 3, 20244 Comments

When I got back from London, I was filled with that usual longing for the old place, faced with the long hot Davis summer. I wanted to be back wandering the streets and looking for cool things to draw. So I went back into the photos I took and started drawing some places on 8×10″ watercolour sheets with the intention of framing them and putting them on wall up the stairs. It’s not the same as being there, but then again I get to sit at my table and watch YouTube videos about London and take as long as I want, unperturbed by traffic, weather, an aching back and the need to get home for dinner. Still, give me urban sketching any day, I love to explore the real world. While we were back, we visited our old neighbourhood of Highgate. I didn’t sketch down there (except on that one other day when we visited the Cemetery) but we looked around the place we used to live, up the village and Pond Square, down to Waterlow Park and over the bridge along our old street Hornsey Lane, taking a picture outside the house where we lived before moving to America, before realizing it was actually the house next door, memory not being the most reliable thing in the world. I joked with my son that this is where he would have grown up if we had not moved to California, and it’s probably true, though not in that little flat on Hornsey Lane, and we’d have probably had to move somewhere else that we might not have liked as much as Highgate and Crouch End, and just ended up moving to America anyway. The weather’s better here anyway. I do miss the cute little shops around there. We stopped into this cafe for some pastries, the Highgate Pantry, and I knew I would have to draw it, either something back and standing across the street or like I’ve ended up doing, from a photo with a cup of tea. The pastries were lovely, we ate them while walking through Waterlow Park, as the north London rain kept trying to make its mind up about falling. That whole area, the bricks and leaves, it’s what I loved most about London. I remember on Sundays after having a roast dinner I would sometimes walk up this hill to exercise off the food. I was a lot skinnier then, twenty years ago. Twenty years, where does the time go. I don’t even remember now if the Highgate Pantry was there then, I assume it was, but I would usually get my pastries and cakes from Dunn’s down in Crouch End so probably didn’t come in here much. It definitely wasn’t always pink, but I like it pink, and it looks nice on the wall as I go up the stairs. I have some more of these drawings done after our trip to show, but will post them separately.

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.

KDRT interview – Davisville

August 16, 2024Leave a comment

This week I appeared on the local radio station KDRT interviewed by Bill Buchanan, host of the long time show Davisville. It was a fun conversation, talking about my sketching and the stories behind them, about missing London, about interacting with the community, about recording moments in time.

You can hear the show online at: https://kdrt.org/audio/davisville-aug-12-2024-through-his-prolific-sketches-pete-scully-conversing-davis.

half moon bay

August 10, 2024Leave a comment

The first couple of pages of a new sketchbook. It was another stupendously hot weekend in the central valley of California, hitting the 110s in Davis, so we drove down to Half Moon Bay, on the coast just below San Francisco, where it was about 50 degrees cooler. While we have been to nearby Pacifica a few times back in the soccer tournament days, I’ve never been to Half Moon Bay. It was very foggy, and the cliffs were tall and rugged. The town itself was nice, we stayed at a hotel on the edge, and drove down to the walk along the cliffs nearby, and down to the Pigeon Point lighthouse further down the coast (it was all scaffolded up). Near our hotel, the walk to the seashore was made by a little hike through a spooky tree tunnel, created by the leaning of the fog-washed trees bending away from the ocean winds. It was an unusual place, I took many photos but had to stop and sketch, as best I could. I wandered back to the hotel, and managed to get lost on the way, daydreaming little chord sequences in my head and looking at fog. We never actually went down to the beach itself, we couldn’t find the path, but it was very damp, and those sneaker waves were looking a little bit fierce.

Our hotel was located next to a British themed pub called Cameron’s, an older place full of all kinds of British themed stuff that was just begging for a pub sketch. Definitely not named after a useless former Prime Minister who gambled the future of his country on a referendum and lost, and then sodded off. Thankfully there were no pig-themed items about the place. I had a little time before going out for dinner so I got myself a pint of Smithwicks and sat in a little alcove ready made for sketching. At the bar when I ordered my drink, the barman who’d been talking with some of the people at the bar asked me if I was related to another man at the bar, and pointed to someone older, and they were all chuckling. I squinted to see any likeness and said, “oh right, we do resemble each other; in no way whatsoever.” Bit weird. Then again I’m always thinking people look like other people. Only that day I had been wondering if Half Moon Bay was in any way related to the Eastenders character Alfie Moon. Anyway it was nice to have a good pint of Smithwicks (since the Bull and Mouth in Davis doesn’t do that beer any more, unlike its predecessor De Vere’s). It was an interesting place, although all around the pub and the hotel there were British flags which were displayed quite obviously upside down. If you don’t know what way round a British flag should be displayed, well I forgive you I suppose, but the red diagonal on the top left corner should be touching the left edge, ie the flagpole. When you see it painted on the right side of an airplane or a ship it might look upside down but that’s just because the invisible flagpole is on the right and it’s flying against it, and that’s fine. If you see it displayed on a flagpole where the pole is on the left and the bottom red diagonal is touching the pole, then it’s upside down and it means you are a ship in distress, maybe you’ve been captured by pirates or racists or online trolls or something. So imagine my concern when I kept seeing the British flag displayed upside down, I mean we are right by the coast and you never know if there are pirates nearby. Even the logo of the pub showed an upside down British flag. I mean, it’s practically treason. I did want to point this out, but if this is a British themed pub the right thing to do would be to not point this out but to grumble about it to myself privately, in the proper British way, so that’s what I did, I grumbled about it privately for several hours to my family who didn’t really care. Nice beer though, and I’d liked to have spent longer drawing the pub and all the colours (all the flags in view were the correct way round, or maybe I corrected them), but they were setting up for karaoke, and we had to leave for dinner. IMG_1385(2)sm

swensen’s, at hyde and union

August 7, 2024August 6, 2024Leave a comment

This heat though. It’s like being under the boot of a massive invisible giant, whose feet are very very hot. The Central Valley just gets a bit carried away when the temperatures go up. We’re not Phoenix or Vegas or Mercury, but when it’s like this you don’t want to go outside and do anything. Except drive an hour and a half away to a place where temperatures are about 40 degrees or more cooler. Where is this magical place, is there some land of snowy peaks where massive invisible frost giants hold sway? (What is it with all these giants today?) No, it’s in the other direction and it’s called San Francisco, the foggy city between the Bay and the Ocean where Mark Twain famously said “brrrrr”. Interestingly enough, San Francisco does have Giants, and they played at home that day against the Twins, winning 7-1. Nice way to connect my previous metaphors there. We drove down to North Berkeley, jumped on the BART and spent a nice lunchtime around the Embarcadero, before getting a cable car up to Nob Hill. It was so much cooler down there, and we had a fun family day of exploring the city. I was surprised to see you now have to pay to go inside Grace Cathedral, quite a lot as well, so we decided to skip it. I remembered though the two fantastic Christmas concerts I went to more than a decade ago, when I had illustrated the cover of the program. We looked about the Fairmont, we love that hotel (we spent an anniversary there years ago), and decided we’ll definitely do afternoon tea there on a future visit. We then decided to walk down and up hill towards Lombard Street, quite a way but we got our steps in. The cable car going down Hyde was sadly not running that day, but we were exploring. I was happy to find the old Swensen’s Ice cream shop on the corner of Hyde and Union, I had always wanted to draw that, so we rested a while and I sketched it (I added the colour later). This being the last page of my sketchbook, I was glad to have something interesting there. I’m not saying the Varsity and Orange Court Davis are not interesting, but you know, something new. This sketchbook has Davis already, and loads of areas of London, Aix, Nice, Monaco and finally San Francisco. We didn’t get an ice cream (we were actually feeling cold…). After zigzagging down Lombard, and that really steep downward slope after that to North Beach, hard on the knees, to sit in Washington Square and then go and eat pizza, and browse City Lights Books. We covered a bit of ground on this day in the city, as usual, but it was just nice to be out of that Davis heat, for a little while.

the start of another long hot summer

August 5, 2024Leave a comment

I’ve done quite a lot of drawing since I got back from England, despite this awful heatwave we have had. July was perhaps the hottest on record. I did a lot of at-home drawing, not around the house itself (that was so 2020) but more drawings of places in London that I can put on the wall, not in the sketchbook, and I’ll show you those later. I have been getting out to sketch where I can though. Usually when I return from London I’m in a don’t-wanna-draw-Davis type of mood, but I needed to finish the sketchbook as I only had three pages left, so I went downtown and got working on them. The one above, that as you all know is the Varsity Theatre, sketched while stood in the shadier north side of 2nd Street. I liked how the faded red parasols stood out against the shaded cinema. This was the day before July the 4th, which was the day of the UK General Election, when the Tories were booted out after 14 years of misrule, and now everyone’s being nice to each other over there (checks news; oh). It was also in the middle of the Euros football tournament in Germany, where England got to the final and (remembers the game; oh). Still not talking about it. I’m still not talking about the Euro 2020 final either. It was hot, 102 degrees and rising, and it got way hotter the week after, hitting 116 at one point, July had more triple digits than the whole cast of the Simpsons (I had to think about that one, and I still don’t think it’s right) (Simpsons cartoon characters have three fingers) (no I don’t count the thumbs). I like the Varsity, it was the first building in Davis to have air-conditioning, so the stories say. The first film I ever saw in here was An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary by Al Gore about global warming (eighteen years later Al, we are living the dream!) and the most recent film I saw there was the 25th anniversary re-release of The Phantom Menace (love it). I like going to the movies. I also like drawing this building, this is probably my 20th time drawing the Varsity, and I’d draw it again later that month, because I’m nothing if not unoriginal.

The next one I drew was on the morning of July 7, that was a Sunday and Lewis Hamilton had just won the British Grand Prix (what a race! His team-mate George Russell had to retire his car, but at least was able to come back and grab a win at the Belgian Grand Prix a few weeks – oh). This is on E Street (That’s “On E Street”, not “One Street”, it’s not a typo), at Orange Court which I’ve drawn before. Name a place in Davis I haven’t drawn before. It’s less of a mission to draw everything in Davis now and more a joke repeated over and over. Though it was still only mid-morning, boy it was hot. In the end I went to Mishka’s and got a nice cold smoothie (or was it an ice-cold smoothie? One of the two). Still, I was pleased with the sketch. I’ve never eaten at the Dumpling House, but I have eaten at Sophia’s more times than I remember. The long hot summer starts.

morning walks in Burnt Oak

August 2, 2024Leave a comment

And so to the end of my sketches from the recent trip (over a month ago now). I’ve been back in the excruciatingly hot summer of Davis, a record set of July temperatures, and trying to get back into the groove (what’s the difference between being in the groove and in a rut?). The summer is long, and I’ve been wishing to be back in London again. It won’t be long, I hope, but it is nice being there when the sun rises early and sets late, and now there’s finally a new government too after the mid-summer election. England losing the football final was a sour note. Lewis Hamilton winning the British Grand Prix (and British drivers suddenly winning F1 races in general after a long dominance by Max Verstappen) was a nice moment to celebrate. I prefer watching those races early in the morning over here in California anyway, on my couch with a cup of tea. I wasn’t always an early riser, growing up in Burnt Oak I wasn’t anyway. When I travel though I’m usually up first, and I’ll get some time and some nice breakfast with my Mum, those are the times I miss when I have to fly home again. I also like my morning walk around Burnt Oak, where I can see all the things that have changed or stay the same. Here are a couple of sketches from those morning strolls, after we’d returned from France and before we were going back to the US. Above, that is the Annunciation Church on Thirleby Road, though I sketched it from Gervase Road. I always loved this building. This is the main Catholic church for Burnt Oak, and so most of the Catholics I knew would go here, and go to school at St. James’s, or St. Martin’s for the juniors, or at the Annunciation Infant School next door to the church for the very young (my little sister went to those). I’m not a Catholic myself (having been christened at the local C of E church St. Alphage when I was a baby), and I’ve never been religious, so I didn’t have to go to church; I’d get to stay home on Easter when I was a kid and eat my chocolate eggs, but I also had to hoover the floor and dust the shelves, small price for being a heathen. I did go here many times though for one reason or other, weddings, christenings, funerals holy communions. My mum and dad were married here when I was 15 (though I was late, as I went to collect my great aunt). Mostly I spent time here in the community centre, in the Annunciation club upstairs where our local community would drink regularly (we would do the Quiz Night regularly, and my Mum would always win that; we loved a Quiz in those days, and when it was my Mum, my older sister and brother, and me together, we were an unbeatable quiz team in the Irish pubs of our neck of London back in the 90s). I remember watching USA 94 in there, the great moment when Ireland beat Italy and the place erupted. I spent a lot of time in the Annunciation Youth Club as well when I was 16 or 17. My (also non-Catholic) mate Terry and I would go there, hang out with the other kids, play pool, and watch TV; I remember watching the Euro 92 final in there, Denmark beating Germany. It was a good place for local kids, give us something to do, keep them off the streets and out of trouble, not that me and Terry were out getting into trouble, we used to just play football down Montrose, and walk over to Vibratanks the tropical fish shop to look at guppies. The youth club all went on a camping trip to Devon one summer, to the little town of Watchet, looking back at it they were great memories, you don’t think too much about them at the time. I remember telling ghost stories to everyone by the fire on the beach, the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor, the Beast of Exmoor, all those old chestnuts I used to read about. My mate Terry, now in Japan, used to live on Gervase Road so I would be down there all the time. We actually went top school on a different school on Thirleby Road, Goldbeaters, just a short walk from here. As I sketched, being morning there were young kids being walked to school by their mothers just as we had been decades before. I heard quite a few speaking Romanian, Burnt Oak has a big Romanian community now. I thought to myself, I remember the language our parents used to use in the mornings, when we were late for school. All the memories, I spent a good deal of time around here growing up.

And on my second last morning in Burnt Oak, I walked down Abbots Road, cutting past the old allotments and over to Deansbrook Road. I stood in the shade of a tree on the corner of Cressingham, looking out over the little parade of shops. There’s still a newsagent there, I got myself a cold fizzy drink. No Lilt any more, that delicious drink has now been replaced by yet another flavour of Fanta. I used to pick my little sister up from school when she went to St. Martin’s juniors in the Meads nearby. I hardly ever come down this part of Deansbrook any more, except for fish and chips. When I was a kid there was a good Chinese shop here that I’d be sent to pick up the takeaways from. My big sister lived nearby so I would also come into the shops on the way there when I’d walk over, usually on the way to babysit her kids. Of course the main attraction of Deansbrook was the Dassani Off License, which I note is still there. They had a video rental store at the rear, and that’s where we’d go on a Saturday night and pick out whatever action film we’d watch with my dad, and get some Munchies. They also had video games you could rent, so I’d get Nintendo or SNES games to play for a few days, when I couldn’t afford to have the actual thing. On the whole though, I’d often avoid this part of Deansbrook growing up, it was always seen as a bit rougher; even if the Watling was probably rougher, it was a bit closer to home, though geographically it really wasn’t; I lived between the two. You get this sort of thing into your head when you’re a kid, it might just be that the kids over this street were more likely to beat you up than the kids over that street, who might know you or your mates more, it’s all a bit random now looking back. Anyway, I finished this sketch but added in the colours later, on the plan back to California.

We flew back next day, into the long Davis summer, fiscal close, triple digits, and scanning the travel sketches, and a huge desire to just go back to London again. A day will come when I can’t go back as much, and I’m always wanting to get as much of it as I can until then, and bring my sketchbook to watch it as it keeps on changing.

Monaco

July 30, 2024July 29, 2024Leave a comment

One of the reasons for coming to the South of France was so we could visit the tiny independent principality of Monaco. We last came here in 2022, but my son had never been and since we are such big fans of Formula 1, this was definitely a must-visit. Plus it’s another visited country off the list. We took the bus from the harbour in Nice, riding along the coast through Villefranche and Beaulieu, although the sky was still cloudy and the sea still grey. The sun started coming out later that day, but the glitziness of Monaco made up for lack of sunshine. I sketched the above after the sun was out, later in the afternoon, and spent a good time standing in the shade by the famous yacht-filled harbour (and what huge yachts!) overlooking where Formula 1 cars whizz by. We had just tried to go to the Monaco automobile museum, to see the Prince’s incredible collection of classic cars – but it was closed. Dammit, I should have checked. We first went to Monte Carlo, and walked down through the big sloping gardens leading down to the Casino. That’s the view below, which I started sketching but finished later (on the plane), as we wanted to get down to look at the all the flash cars. Outside the Casino, we’d never seen quite so many amazing expensive cars, including many Rolls Royces and Bentleys, the place was so full of money, and this was no Las Vegas imitation, this was the real thing.

We enjoyed walking around this part of Monaco, they really do pack a lot in. We walked down behind the Casino to the famous hairpin turn, the one you see on the TV. It’s amazing how narrow the streets where they race are. Monaco’s always a very difficult place to overtake, you can really see why. We sat and watched cars go around the bend, many super cars, and even some classic old 50s style open-wheel race cars.

When the sun came out it got pretty warm, and it gets tiring going up and down all the hills. We took a lot of photos, marveled at more cars, but we ate a less expensive lunch from the local supermarket and admired the boats. One day, one day, I’ll have a yacht, sit in the Monte Carlo harbour with my top hat and my butler, in my guitar-shaped jacuzzi, with a chimp playing a banjo on a skateboard, I dunno that’s what I imagine rich people have. I couldn’t be rich, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. It would probably involve Monaco though, and loads and loads of sketchbooks. My family went back to Nice while I drew the harbour; when I was done I got the train back. The platform at Monaco was enormous, but also absolutely rammed with people. It was like coming out a football stadium, it was so busy. When the train came, people tried to barge on quickly, almost causing an injury to the people getting off the train, to the point where some platform guards (or Monaco police?) actually came and started grabbing people out of the way to let passengers off. When I got on the train I had to stand on the stairs, there was such little room. Not a fun way to leave Monaco! Now I know why people come by yacht…