On Sunday, the last day of August, I caught the bus to Sacramento and walked around in the breezy sunlight, walking up to midtown, sketching a couple of things as I’ve not done here for a good while now, not since the sketchcrawl in March. Above, powerlines and some buildings and trees (for a change, eh), while below there is an old building I’ve wanted to draw for a while, the one next to the Streets of London pub on J street. Well now I have.
Encore, my illustration friday entry this week: “Memories”, this time with colour. Not much colour, but some colour. I posted the black and white version yesterday. It’s an homage, or even an homage of an homage. I forget now.
Memory is a funny thing. Whole academic programs are set up around the very idea of memory, its uses, its effects on future actions, plus lots of other stuff I don’t quite know (or have forgotten). In the days before literacy, memory was of vital importance, to keep laws, to pass on traditions, plus lots of other things I can’t remember. Our incredible capacity for memory became less well exercised once things began to be written down – we trusted paper for permanence, rather than agreed ideas on what really happened or what the rules really were. We also began, everntaully, to equate language with what is written rather than what is spoken – a huge mistake if you ask me. But anyway back to memory. Do you remember, in the days before we all had cellphones, that you used to remember most of your friends’ phone numbers? You had to, in case you needed to call them. But now you just press their name in your nokia. Memory capacity unexercised. I don’t even remember my own cellphone number now. I don’t have to. So what’s the rest of my brain doing when it’s not being used remembering things like that? I forget.
As for what happened in our lives… it’s funny how quickly things whisper away from your thoughts. People, places, ideas; yet, if we have a small token from them, doesn’t matter how small or insignificant, we have a greater chance of retaining that memory. Photos are one thing, drawings are another. Each of these things above have some sort of meaning to me. I’d be happy to explain.
Do you remember Take Hart (and it’s later incarnation, Hart-beat)? Tony Hart was the art guy for a generation; famously named after three body-parts, he could do near anything with corrugated cardboard and poster paint (just as his caretaker Mr Bennett could always be trusted to get his foot stuck in a bucket), though most of us watched it for Morph, the little brown plasticine guy who could phase through tables but nothing else, and of course The Gallery. “Now it’s time for the Gallery.” For those Americans who don’t know, this was where the work of Britain’s young artist boys and girls was displayed to a backdrop of lift music and unpredictable camera-movements. Kids up and down the land who had submitted their work would sit anxiously, hoping their drawing of their cat would bring them a moment of fame. Kids who drew all the time. Kids like me. But not me.
I never submitted anything to the Gallery, because they had one infamous proviso: you will never get it back. “Pictures cannot be returned,” he warned us. So I did not send Tony Hart any of my drawings, preferring to wait until the internet age to start a sketchblog, and forego the music. I wonder what they did with all those drawings? Do they still exist? Does Tony Hart keep them locked in some underground storage facility? One day, they’ll surface; he or his ancestors will go through them and find an original Tracey Emin aged 7 (“this is everyone I ever ate crisps with”) or one by the 8 and three quarters year old Damien Hirst with his earthworm suspended in pritt-stick glue. And they’ll be worth millions.
Oh, the drawing? Sorry, yes it’s Hart Hall, UC Davis, and has nothing to do with the art-loving Tony at all. Drew and painted it today at lunchtime while escaping slowly moving shadows.
I finished the world-saving sketchbook project back in June, and mailed it off last month in a purple envelope (from paperchase, if you’re wondering), and tomorrow (Fri Aug 22) it will be exhibited with, well not quite 499 others (not all those sent out were finished), but quite a lot of others. The project is run by the arthouse co-op in Atlanta, Georgia (not that Georgia, the other one), and the event will be kicking off at around 7pm eastern time (or 4pm here on the West Coast; that’s midnight to you in London).
And it will be streamed live online at http://www.arthousecoop.com/live/. So Londoners, tune in when you get in from the pub (ok, watch it from the still-open pub on your iPhone, but make sure it doesn’t get nicked by any hoodies or anything), and keep your eyes peeled, maybe you will catch a brief brief glimpse of my little one. Sketchbook, that is.
I have been looking around the information superhighway lately (remember when it was called that?) to see who else has done this project, and compiled the following admittedly short list of fellow world-savers. Didn’t actually find many, so I was pretty pleased to discover two others based in Davis. Most interesting to see all have interpreted the project uniquely; I think I might be the only one however to advocate using a spider-killing aerosol as a means of saving the world, but each to their own I guess…
Karen Blados (Cleveland, OH)
Blue Bicicletta (Davis, CA)
Pica (Davis, CA)
Planetmithi (Bristol, UK)
This Chicken (Oxford, UK)
Joseph Tomlinson (WA)
JT (Cleveland, OH)
Craig (Cleveland, OH)
Woman of Color (Atlanta, GA)
Kirihargie (Portland, OR)
Metrochic (Scottsdale, AZ)
Needless to say, if you too have done this project and have put the pictures somewhere the world you have saved can see them, then I’d like to add your sketchbook to this list . Hope the show goes well; I hear there may even be a book.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arthousecoop/
http://arthousecoop.blogspot.com/2008/07/mail-time.html
Luke has this great toy (given to him by my cousin) full of lights and shapes and buttons and songs, all in French, and he absolutely LOVES it. “Ainsi font, font, font, les petites marionettes,” it sings as you turn it on. We’re trying to expose him to French early on (we also have a CD of French nursery rhymes and sounds for babies his age), so hopefully one day he’ll be able to teach us what we have long forgotten. I look forward to us one day taking him to the south of France, to where I met his mommy. And we’ll eat poulet-frites. (Funny enough I got a postcard from Menton today).
This week’s Illustration Friday theme is ‘detach‘. Here then is my entry: a picture of Burnt Oak tube station.
I think the reason is that, each time I go back home, I feel more and more detached from the place I grew up. How much further detached from it will I become; am I even really detached, or is it all just imaginary? This is Burnt Oak station. Second from last stop on the Northern Line. Not a particularly nice place to hang about of an evening, you might say (or daytime either). It’s on Watling Avenue (previously seen here). I’d come out of the station, look up the hill to see if my bus was coming, and if not, I’d walk home (only one bus stop away up Orange Hill). A favourite hang-out for dodgy kids with nothing to do.
And it rains there. It doesn’t rain here.
First illustration friday piece i’ve done in a while; theme of ‘sail‘. Now, do I get a Blue Peter badge?
I don’t normally draw boats, or ships (I do draw junk though, ha ha). Like I don’t usually draw cars. I have a problem with them. So I thought I’d give one a go (this one sits docked in San Francisco, at Fisherman’s Wharf). To get past the psychological barrier, I pretended that they were power cables, pylons, telegraph poles, all those street wires I love so much. I’m quite happy with how it came out, and maybe I’ll draw more. Maybe in the future. Perhaps.
It was one of those lunchtimes that merited the purple micron’s reappearance – I don’t use him nearly enough. Everything looks more sunny with the purple. These are random doors on campus (guess where folks!) with no significance at all other than they were there and i had not yet drawn them. There are lots of things here I’ve not yet drawn, but it all looks the same at the end of the day anyway. Don’t ask about the border. There were ants crawling all around me and threatening to get into my paintbox, and I was listening to the lost world of david devant. You should too. Two days to the Olympics folks! One World, One Dream (One-party state…)
But even better: two weeks until the footy, oh man, summer’s long…
I hate the first page of a new sketchbook; never know what to draw, for some reason. So on opening my third watercolour moleskine I just drew what was right in front of me, on my desk. There’s a glass, almost completely empty (or very slightly full, depending on your worldview, ooh link that to bush’s take on the economy). There’s the Beatles crossing Abbey Road (trivia question for you – are they going towards or away from the studios?). There’s Magneto, master of magnetism, rendered (in cruel irony) in plastic. Scissors I bought six years ago in Aix. A couple of microns, plus a copic. The pc screen (watching “south park” online). A Spurs badge – I’ve had this since I was ten, bought at a game at the Lane in ’86 when we beat Man City – it’s known as the “lucky spurs badge”, and is a famous relic (my mate Tel will tell you, should you see him). I wish it would still work, we seem to be selling most of the team. There’s Greedo, having reeked revenge on Han Solo, but with Cyclops behind him about to shoot first (I just had an image of Cyclops shooting Greedo under the table and wow, it was not pretty). And a half-hidden Vader behind him in the shadows. And there’s a couple of post-it notes with stuff about milk supply and stuff on them.
Now that’s out of the way (and you’re thinking I’m a geek, well maybe I am, or just untidy), I can move on with the sketchbook. Back to trees and buildings. It’s a little cooler here in Davis now, and not as smoky.
petescully 