As I’ve said, I am a bit behind in my posting, though not in my sketching, and it’s another one of those times when I have a backlog of regular day-to-day sketches of Davis to post but not really a lot of stories to tell about them. I am sketching more than ever it seems, as I do when I need to think about something else; yay for anxious and uncertain and turbulent political times, I guess. I’m hiding in my sketchbook. Anyway, as a way to catch up, here are a bunch of sketches from around Davis in April. It’s already past mid-June in the real world, and if April thought things were bad, wait until they get to June. At least Spurs have won a trophy and sacked a manager in that time. Ok, let’s dive in. The building above is on 5th Street, and the bench outside commemorates where young Officer Natalie Corona was tragically shot several years ago, right here. I’ll always think of that awful thing happening when I pass by here. I stood over the street in the shade of a tree to sketch, headphones on. A woman passing by on the other side called over to ask something, I couldn’t hear over the traffic and whatever podcast I was listening to, football or history or something. Turned out she was asking where the train station was. I couldn’t tell why she had to yell it across a busy street and not ask one of the people passing by on that side, but I pointed in the vague direction of where the station is and put my headphones back on.

Here’s another from downtown, this time on the corner of 2nd and D, across from the First National Bank. I don’t know if this was the actual first national bank, seems like a wild claim to me, but I was drawn to the spots of yellow. These are days when I just need to draw something. I get out, eat lunch, have to draw. Helps me focus. I always go on about why I draw. I brew it down to the simple because I like drawing, which is good enough for me and good enough for you. Do I always like what I’m drawing? Probably not, but I like the act of drawing. I am up early right now and going for a run soon. It will probably be slow and not very interesting, running around the same circuit of streets and paths as always, nothing new to see, and not breaking any records or even really pushing myself, but its exercise, and when I do the interesting runs I need to have done the boring ones. It’s all exercising the muscles, practicing pacing myself, seeing what I can do in a certain amount of time and being alright with it. I track my running, but I track my drawing too. I don’t really push myself too hard to do anything out of the ordinary and I probably should, but while I’m thinking about doing that I’ll just go out drawing the world and see what happens. I tend to end up drawing places I’ve drawn many times before, but I’ve been living in this small town for 20 years now so I’m really just tracking the changes. I’m sure Cezanne felt like that as he was sitting under a tree in Aix-en-Provence painting Mont St. Victoire yet again. But I never drew that corner before, so it’s a new place ticked off the list.

Here is another sketch of the newly reimagined G Street, a couple of the big useful yellow chairs that have been placed in random spots on the side of the now pedestrianized road. I have never sat in one of these types of big chair other than for one of those photos where you go “look at me, I’m really small” and pull a face. It was warm out while I sketched this and being mid-April my nose was probably running, but I can’t remember all the details now. I am not really in love with G Street. It may be a while before it figures out what it really is. My favourite place on G Street was a couple of blocks up, the Regal Cinema with the stadium seating, but it has closed now because cinemas are closing. We still have the Regal on F Street which is slightly bigger but I don’t like as much, and we have the Varsity on 2nd which is great for the arthouse and quirky movies, you probably won’t see ‘Quick Angry Car Chase IX’ there (or whatever action films are called), though we have seen some really good films there. But I miss the other cinema on G Street because it was a couple of blocks less to cycle from my house, and one of my favourite restaurants Thai Nakorn was next door, also now closed.

On to more a familiar street for me, E Street, and Bizarro World Comics next to Chipotle. I stood in the little alley next to the Bull’n’Mouth (formerly De Vere’s; I feel I have to keep saying that in the same way we would say “X, formerly Twitter” but it’s not really a comparable comparison at all, and I don’t say “Bizarro World, formerly Bogey’s Books”, but that’s because Bizarro World used to be on 5th Street and moved here after Bogey’s went bye-bye). Anyway, that’s where I stood. I have bought comics from them over the years, though not recently since I’m not reading as many now. I have never rented movies from them, but if that’s still a thing, good on them. We were talking about that last night, how when I first moved to Davis we would rent movies and shows on DVD or even Video from Blockbuster (which was where Panera is now; I stopped calling it “Panera, formerly Blockbuster” right away because Panera sells big sandwiches that you don’t have to return nor rewind). Then Netflix came along and it was brilliant, getting our DVDs in the mail from our wishlist, mailing them back when we want, getting another, and you don’t even have to rewind DVDs, this is the future. Blockbuster went the way of MySpace (but we didn’t throw away our Blockbuster cards, did we? No we still hold on to them just in case, don’t we). Then Netflix was like, you don’t need DVDs, you can just stream stuff! Wow, mind blown. And they had all the movies, and all new shows they would make themselves and binge all at once, and we finally had broadband internet capable of handling that, what a time to be alive. Then bit by bit other streaming services came along, and Netflix seemed not to have quite as many movies you wanted to watch, but that’s ok because this other one had so many, and then this other had, and then this other one, and now there are so many different streaming services which you have to pay for, and none of them seem to have the movies you want to watch now so you still end up having to look for it on Amazon Prime (which you pay for) and then pay a rental fee to rent that movie so you can watch it that night. Just like when we’d go down the video store, except instead of watching trailers for other movies at the start of the video, you get to watch a couple of minutes of the same tedious adverts. What a time to be alive, eh.

And further down E Street, another building I have sketched before a few times. I like the triangle bits, they remind me of Darth Vader’s mouth. They also remind me of those houses you see a lot in north west London, in the rows of suburbia that spread for miles, leafy Middlesex (I mean, “north-west Greater London, formerly called Middlesex”). If I ever leave Davis I’ll probably miss drawing this building. If I ever leave Davis I will probably get the urge to come back to draw whatever new buildings get built. I get that with London, the need to come back and record what’s still there and what is new. This gets me back to the whole ‘why I draw’ thing again. I draw to record the changes, so I can look back over two or three drawings I have done of the same place years apart and saw, oh yeah, looks a bit different. I have drawn many hundreds of drawings of Davis, thousands really (let’s say millions) and so I have this record of two decades in this place, scenes of my everyday life. Nothing special, not an unusual life, not an unusual town, just a place like any other. Things happen, most of the time they don’t. Things change slowly, sometimes a bit more quickly. That’s one of the reasons I draw. Mostly though it’s just a side-effect, I draw because I have to. Even when I try to take a break from it, I can’t really. I will still scribble on my notepad, or draw cartoons on my iPad, or design football shirts on the back of scrap bits of paper or envelopes lying on my desk.

That same evening, I popped into the aforementioned Bull’n’Mouth pub (formerly De Vere’s) and sketched the colourful bar area. “Is It Beer You’re Looking For?” it reads, above a large selection of not-beers. I did have a couple of beers; I find it harder these days to actually finish a beer, most of the ones now are way too hoppy, or make my stomach feel funny, or I just don’t like the taste. I drink a beer slowly when I sketch anyway. It’s a nice pub still, I probably liked it more as De Vere’s but that’s because of the Irish theme, which they don’t do any more. I used to like having a pint of Smithwicks here, but they don’t serve it now. Other than that, it still looks mostly the same. I like their cosy little library area.

And finally, on the last day of April we find ourselves once again at the comic shop next door, Bizarro World as seen from across the street. A building with a tree in front of it, the typical Davis sketch. I wander about in my spare moments, looking for something new to draw, but I’m so predictable. A building with a tree in front is like comfort food for a suburban urban sketcher. Now I am thinking forward, it’s already June but it will soon be July, and then August, and then I will be in Poland for the 2025 Urban Sketching Symposium, held in the city of Poznań, my first Symposium since 2019. I’m actually feeling nervous, not scared exactly, but apprehensive. The Symposia are so big now, I worry about feeling lost. I do know some people who are going, but it’s been a long time and I feel a bit outside of everything these days, the whole urban sketching community, like I’m a little bit from a previous world. I’ve become very shy since the pandemic, the thought of being lost among all those sketchers… I get overwhelmed and just wander off on my own. I’m sure it will be ok. When I’m around a whole world of people also sketching, I remember that it’s not just me, I’m not alone in my sketching obsession. And so instead of worrying, I’ll just keep sketching. That was April, another April in the bag.