Tag: buildings

hart times

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hart hall

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.

pissing down with rain on a boring wednesday

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This week’s Illustration Friday theme is ‘detach‘. Here then is my entry: a picture of Burnt Oak tube station.

burnt oak 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.

sunshine poured like wine

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Was in Santa Rosa this weekend (weather much much cooler there, probably didn’t need to wear shorts); managed to slip away to do some sketchbook filling. This is Stanroy’s music center, it’s been there for a long time (thirty years or more). I remember coming here the first time I ever came to America, in 2002, and getting surprised at how much cheaper guitars were than in the UK.

stanroy's

Thankfully no children accidentally wandering into the picture (unless there was a kid inside having a clarinet lesson or something). I did the shadows darker than I’d meant to (because I normally undervalue them), but they were pretty much like this.

all on a misty morning

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SF trip, part 4: After a fairly good sleep, I got up on sunday morning and found the nearest place on Polk that sold enormously sticky custard-filled pastries, and came across a little shop called “You Say Tomato”, which specializes in British (and Irish) foods. And to my delight, they had a can of Lilt!

drinking pop on larkin

Yes, Lilt, the pineapple and grapefruit fizzy drink, you can’t get it over here and it’s the perfect sunday morning (when you think you might get a hangover) beverage. They had other stuff, Tizer, Irn-Bru, and I purposely didn’t take too much of a look around in case I was waylaid by loads of cadbury’s chocolates, but I saw a man carrying five or six cans of Heinz Baked Beans: pretty obvious he was British. I found an interesting corner and drew the picture above while drinking my Lilt, carefully removing all of the cars to give the impression that SF has more parking than it really does.

Unlike the day before, Sunday was pretty cool and very foggy, which was a welcome change. I got on the bus and was changing at fillmore, in the bit with all the cute little shops and cafes, when I saw this movie theatre below, and decided to draw that too, in extremely muted sepia tinted colours. And I never did get that hangover.  

clay theatre, fillmore street

“i am a lady and i like to do ladies’ things”

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Part 2 of my SF weekend: I wanted to go and draw things in San Francisco that I hadn’t drawn before, and I’d never been to Alamo Square, but had seen it on so many postcards.

painted ladies

I spent a while up there, enjoying the incredible view and finally drawing some of the painted ladies, those big, um, (victorian, edwardian, i don’t know) houses. I’d taken a bus over to Fillmore, stopping by Japantown on the way, and walking down through the historic jazz part of town to get there. As it was my second drawing there I decided to add colour later, so the black and white version is below. Incredible sunshine, but (even with reapplying sunscreen and travelling in shadows as much as possible) I got a bit burnt. Bugger; always seems to happen to me in San Francisco, but never in oven-hot Davis. Took the 22 out to sketch the bridge after this (go back to part 1).

unpainted ladies

These are the unpainted ladies.

just the same as all the rest

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outdoor adventures

It’s summer, there is no thai soup, and that means I sketch more at lunchtimes. Lately of course the weathera part of the bike barn has been too hot and smoky, but now it’s a bit cooler, and so it’s outside to draw all the same stuff I always draw at work. This is the Outdoor Adventures building: seems like I’m drawing something new, but looks the same as all those bike barn drawings i did (see right) – because it’s the other side of the same building. It’s currently Summer Sessions on campus, so there are more students around than you’d expect in a break. It’s a mixture of strangely quiet and too busy.

ripping yarns

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For those of you watching in black and white, Jack the Ripper is the one in grey.

This is the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields, where several of the Ripper’s victims drank (and the rest) before meeting unfortunate endings involving bits of them being mailed to the local bobbies. They never caught the Ripper, but I bet he was a bit of tearaway.
ten bells a-ripping

I love the French name for him, Jacques L’Eventreur. I love all the foreign names for him: Jack lo squartatore (Italian), Viiltäjä-Jack (Finnish), Jack Trbosjek (Croatian), Kuba Rozpruwacz (Polish), Seoc an Reubainnear (Gaelic), Джак Изкормвача (Bulgarian), ג’ק המרטש (Hebrew), Jack Bantha-poodoo (Huttese). Okay, maybe not the last one.

Originally he was known as Jack the Perforator, but the papers didn’t like it. These days, he would probably be called a Tearorist. Oh come on, it’s late, gimme a break here.

outside the temple

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temple church

An ink attack on the page by the Copic pen, fresh from drawing every single line in fleet street, on night two of ‘sleep-training’ (it went very well too). I wanted to draw more bare trees again, but this time with buildings behind them, so I went back to a photo from London back when I lived there, and was studying nearby this place: Temple Church, off Fleet Street, former HQ of the Knight’s Templar, now a busy destination for tourists bugging the priest about the (inappropriately titled) Da Vinci Code, and medieval students looking for William Marshall (guess which of these two groups I fell into).

street of ink

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a fleeting visit

Sleep-training the baby is not fun, especially if the baby stubbornly refuses to sleep. During that process, going in and checking on him every ten minutes (as per the book), I got the Copic pen out last night and drew lots of little lines, that eventually ended up looking a lot like Fleet Street in London (my favourite street); there’s the church of St. Dunstan in the West, there’s the Royal Courts of Justice, there are offices of newspapers past and present (well, not many present any more), there are the clocks I was watching closely.