Dreary January Sunday

January 27, 2024Leave a comment

One of those weekend days when it’s dreary out, and I struggle to leave the house. The only thing to do is go out and draw, but some days I don’t really want to draw any more of Davis, because I’ve done it all before. I had to get outside for a little bit though, or else I’d go mad, but I have to push myself out sometimes. It’s that January feeling. So I walked over to the park, and stood next to the Davis Arts Center, and drew that. It’s undergoing some refurbishments by the look of it. It was cold out, and when I’d drawn all the ink I walked back home to colour it in, and put an old James Bond film on the telly. I never watch James Bond, they all feel the same to me, but I fancied a bit of that silliness so I watched Goldeneye, for a bit of mid-90s action. Didn’t really spur me into much action myself though.

Walker Hall, ten years later

January 25, 2024January 25, 2024Leave a comment

I have been getting the ‘on this day ten years ago I drew this’ bug, because it’s a decade since my worryingly over-productive January 2024 set of drawings around Davis (I mean, January was always my busiest month at work, yet I had the energy to produce a lot of two-page drawings that month). It’s always a good moment to reflect on the changes. This week my then-six-year-old son became a sixteen-year-old son, which scares me to think how fast that’s happened. I’m working in the same department, just in a very different job, but I’m still plugging away with drawing campus on my lunchtimes. I’ve published two books since then, had a successful retrospective sketchbook show, been interviewed by the chancellor of the university, done a lot of travelling, and there’s been a pandemic in the middle. The world has been an ‘Interesting Times’ sort of place in the past decade, give me the decade before that any day. But looking at just one spot and tracking the changes, this view of Walker Hall above, the new modern Graduate Center in the historic refurbished building, is a good example. Regular followers will have seen my sketches of this building as it was slowly turned into the center that we see today, and many of my in-progress sketches are still on display in the lobby there, which is a massive honour (as a former grad coordinator I always maintained good relations with Grad Studies, and it was the previous Dean Jeff Gibeling who gave me the idea to draw the progress of the construction when it was first announced a decade or so ago in a meeting). I think I may have already known the future plans when I drew the panorama below, or maybe that was a little afterwards, but this view was always one I wanted to draw like this, and of all the panoramas I drew in January 2014 this one was my favourite. Now it has captures a moment in time that has passed. I liked the big diagonal shadow against the windows, and trying to convey the large E-shaped building using curvilinear perspective. It was drawn in the old Seawhite of Brighton book I was using then, while the newer one above was drawn in the watercolour Moleskine (side note, in recently comparing older scans to newer ones, I’ve decided I don’t like my current Epson scanner at all, I cannot seem to capture the right amount of clarity no matter how much I mess with the settings, unlike with my older (now long-departed) HP scanner. I’ve rescanned some older drawings recently and they don’t even compare with the older scans, regardless of 300dpi or 72 dpi. It’s subtle when they are small but I really notice it now. Time for a new scanner.) Anyway, this one above might put a final bookend to my Walker Hall series of sketches. It’s been a fun journey, but the building’s finished now and it should look like this for its foreseeable future. You can see them all in this Flickr folder.

January’s gonna January

January 20, 2024Leave a comment

How’s January going for you? Actually no, don’t tell me, Januarys are rarely fun. I mean, ours started in Maui so that was fun, but then you have to come home and get on with January. I like being busy, it helps when there is a lot to do and keep organized with. We’ve so far not had the massive wet and windy storms that we suffered last January, in fact there has been a decent amount of blue sky weather so I was out a lot in the first couple of weeks doing some sketching, all those January shadows. Here are some from downtown; above, the building on the corner of C and 3rd, not far from my optometrist (where I spent a lot of money before Christmas ordering new glasses, my most expensive ones yet because my eyesight is getting so bad, still waiting for those). As I write, it’s just after 3 in the morning, and the rain is coming down outside. We are expecting big storms this weekend, wet and windy, hopefully we don’t get so many trees down like last year. We had planned to go up to the mountains this weekend, but the weather will be bad. So we’ll stay inside watching movies and drinking tea and hot chocolate, I mean there are worse things. I’ve had an issue with one of my teeth that’s made this week pretty annoying; the visit to the dentist will mean more expensive visits to the dentists, so the next few weeks I’ll be anxious about that. Back in London my dad’s been in hospital since Christmas so that’s been a big worry, I just heard he is getting out now thankfully, but I’d still like to try and get over there soon. And globally, well there’s never good news these days is there, it just feels like the world is spinning the wrong way sometimes. Work is picking up; its’ faculty recruitment season, and our campus also launched a new financial system we have spent years preparing for and are now struggling to get to grips with, a classic ‘did it really need changing to something far more complicated?’ moment. At least it keeps us busy. Anyway, we all keep pressing on. I’ve been drawing a lot, but there’s nothing new about that, even if it’s a lot of the same places over and over. Draw your little part of world to make sense of it.

The first weekend of the new year, I popped out on my bike to sketch downtown. I had decided in 2024 I would draw at least once every day; yeah even with my productivity that’s not happening. I draw more than most as it is. Still I went down C Street next to Community Park and sketched the side of Community Church, it looked good in the sun. After that I cycled over to the bit of 3rd Street just over the railroad tracks, in the old east downtown, ‘Trackside Center’, and drew the scene below. I thought they were going to redevelop this whole place, that might still be in the works, talked about for a number of years now. the lovely chocolate shop is still there, but not much else. I like having that signage in the foreground, that’s one of my motifs I guess. I have not drawn a fire hydrant in the foreground for a while. This is because I tend to stand when I sketch a lot more than I did 10 or 12 years ago.

Here’s another, from D Street a few days later, the weather starting to get cooler and cloudier, another ‘2 Hour Parking’ sign in the foreground. I stood outside the Pence, looked up toward Mustard Seed and Cloud Forest Cafe. The house on the right has been many things (I even exhibited some drawings there years ago when it was an artists’ studio) but is now called ‘Wines in Tandem’, that’s what the sign says anyway. Wine is nice, I don’t drink much of it though. My wife’s mother brought a nice bottle for thanksgiving and we had some during dinner, but never finished the bottle; it’s still there in the fridge, because we can never finish a bottle of wine. Never had that problem when I was 22, student parties and so on. I’m a lightweight now with wine. I’m a lightweight with beer too really, but it’s a bit easier on me. I never liked drinking spirits, but I do like a nice cocktail, and we had a few in Maui swimming in the pool. And there in the middle of the sketch is the red phone box, famous in Davis, symbol of my old home country. When my son was very little we would come downtown on the bus (the “real bus” he would call it) and we would pretend that the red phone box was like a rocket ship, and go to Saturn and look around, and then come back to Davis. Those were the days. One of my earliest downtown sketches was of that phone box, back in the summer of 2006, and I’ve drawn it many times since. Lego just came out with a new red phone box set that I am going to have to get, to put on my shelf at work with my other London Lego sets. If only that phone box was a real teleporting ship, I’d use it go go back to London more, I do miss that big annoying wet crowded expensive old city, even in January when I know it’s at its worst. Davis is a nicer place to be in a month like this, no doubt, but the storms are coming in. Every year has a January, the Monday morning of months.

shipwrecked and pizza

December 27, 2023December 27, 20232 Comments

There is a new tiki bar in Davis. Well it’s been open a few months now, but we’ve not yet been. My wife is a big fan of tiki bars, we recently went to an interesting exhibition in Napa of all the classic tiki bars of northern California, and I got her a Skipper Bob tiki mug for Christmas; we saw that at the museum, from a famous old place in San Francisco that’s no longer there. This new place in Davis is called ‘Shipwrecked’ and is pirate themed, so it’s right up my alley. In the window display there are even big Lego pirates, again its like they’re aiming it at me specifically. If one of the pirates wears a Tottenham shirt I’ll know for sure. But alas we’ve not had a chance to go there yet. Still, just before Christmas I was down at G Street and I decided I needed to sketch the bar from the outside, so I could sketch those Lego pirates. I really wanted to make sure I got the whole scene. This is in the old location of Woodstock’s Pizza; Woodstocks’ (which I’ve drawn before) has not moved far, it’s now at the end of the block on G Street, in the former location of that Thai place, KetMoRee. Shipwrecked is actually in one half of the old Woodstock’s, and as you might be able to tell the other half is still empty, and still has half of the old sign above it. Now I know you’re thinking, “oh right, that’s the real reason you sketched it, because it says ‘Cocks Pizza’, very funny, what are you twelve”, but as I’ve said many times, my job as an urban sketcher is to record places as they change, and compare the changes over many years, because in a few months it may look different again. Sketch the place you live, watch it evolve over time, document your town’s progress. It’s got absolutely nothing at all with the fact it says ‘Cocks Pizza’ above it, that’s just a coincidence. Funny thing though, ‘Woodstock’s’ doesn’t actually have two ‘C’s in it. The font of that first ‘C’ is different to the other letters. Someone actually made the effort of finding another ‘C’, going up there and placing it in front the the word ‘ocks’. And to that I must say, I’ve never been prouder of Davis. I’m being serious there, that is first class. It’s the human ingenuity at work, if that had been left as ‘Ocks Pizza’ people would have maybe sniggered, haha it’d be funny if that said ‘Cocks Pizza’ but not done anything about it, other than take a picture and draw a C on before posting to Facegram or whatever and pretending someone else did it. On campus there is this food place called ‘Cooks’ and I sometimes wish someone would do the right thing and turn that into ‘Cocks’, but you can’t can you, we live in a respectable society, intelligent responsible grown-ups don’t think of such things. But here, someone had to go and find the ‘C’ in a shop or online, get up on a ladder, install it correctly and safely. I’m all for it. So being the good urban sketcher, recorder of the changing town, I had to document it, not because I have a childish sense of humour. But maybe, maybe Cocks Pizza is a real place and this will be opening up in that empty store? I mean in Sacramento there is a place called ‘Willies Burgers’, after all, and we’ve all heard of ‘Dick’s Sporting Goods’. I’ve even been to Nob Hill in San Francisco. There is a ‘Big Dicks Pizzeria’ in Nevada too, but that’s about as far as my Googling of places with ‘dicks’, ‘cocks and ‘willies’ went. Anyway as the last two-page spread of this sketchbook I thought this was a good scene to draw, and I’m really looking forward to going to the tiki bar and seeing all the fun pirate stuff. I’m glad the old Woodstock’s building wasn’t demolished though, as I’m not sure what they would erect in its place.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, folks.

December Day in D Street Davis

December 24, 2023December 24, 2023Leave a comment

As the long busy Fall quarter drew to a close, meetings were cancelled, tasks put off to the new year, everybody was just knackered. It was like the staff of the whole campus really needed a break more than ever. This past week we were still working, most people remotely, but things were definitely finally winding down. I took an early lunch one day and went downtown, and grabbed a sketch on D Street looking out at The Wardrobe. As I write it’s practically Christmas Eve already; still a couple of big presents to wrap, and all the shopping for all the family and friends back in London is long done; I know I don’t really need to, but it’s my way of staying connected with ‘back home’, letting them know I miss them all and still think of them. Christmas is the time to get soppy isn’t it. Now Christmas Eve, the whole day we like to spend at home watching all the old classics we always watch, playing a bit of music, making a big roast dinner, finishing off with It’s A Wonderful Life. It is, when you think about it. It can be a shit world, but life is good. I could probably do with eating a few fewer Christmas choccies and mince pies, but I’ll leave that to the new year when I start getting fit again. Also, the sketchbook is nearly done. A couple of pages left! I’m looking forward to carrying a slightly lighter sketchbook about with me in 2024.

going for gold

December 22, 2023December 20, 2023Leave a comment

The golden autumn keeps on giving. I drew this over a couple of days, starting on my way home from the sketchcrawl, I was heading up B St and passing the Lutheran Church, and I always loved this big old tree, having sketched it at least one other time. It was a huge ball of yellow-orange, like the tree was putting on its festive clothes for the holidays. In other places the trees might already be bare by now but not here, early December is when the leaves are brightest. I remember that from my very first December here. That was a long time ago – 2005. We’re getting ready to celebrate another Californian Christmas. I di miss London at this time of year though, especially when the social media keeps showing me pictures of twinkling lights in Piccadilly and festive windows on Long Acre, but if we were in London squeezed onto a packed tube with other dripping wet grumbling Londoners we’d be wishing we were in California looking at all the bright leaves in the sunshine, I guess.

christmas time at the farmers market

December 21, 2023December 20, 2023Leave a comment

A couple of weekends ago we held our latest Let’s Draw Davis meet of 2024, a small group in Central Park sketching at the Farmer’s Market. It had been a cold week and I was expecting a chilly morning, but the sun was out and the autumn colours were massive, and it was a really nice morning to be out with a sketchbook. I decided I’d sketch with my brown-ink fountain pen, it really creates a nice tone with the fall colours. There were a lot of people and stalls to draw; the flat earth people weren’t out this time, having probably fallen off the edge of the world. There was a banjo player making some nice tunes. As I sketched a young couple came up and tried to give me a flyer to some party with their church; no thank you, I said, but they were really insistent. I tried to politely make it clear I’m a little busy. They complemented my drawing but said “God gave you that gift”. I’m like, mate no, thousands and thousands of hours of practice gave me this gift, anyway see ya later, have a Merry Christmas. Still they held out the flyer, and then asked “Have you ever heard of Jesus?” I couldn’t help myself and said “No, never heard of him, who’s that?” As they started to actually tell me, and question me on how I celebrate Christmas, I had to say look mate you might try someone else, I’m not interested and obviously busy, and they finally left me to my sketch. Really not got a lot of time for religious converters, and don’t really have to explain why. One of the other sketchers later said they’d also been approached by the same insistent group, and instead had a long philosophical debate with them, and they eventually left him alone. At least it wasn’t the flat earth lot.

I drew more people about the market, I was going to colour them in but ended up leaving them as is, I like that brown ink. I wrote the colours next to them too, people were really out in lots of colourful clothing on this colourful Fall morning. Christmas is just around the corner. While I’ve no interest going to anyone’s Jesus party, I do absolutely love the Christmas carols at this time of year. One of my favourite festive moments since coming over here was attending the annual Christmas Concert at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, which I did on a couple of occasions about a decade ago, having illustrated the program and poster for the event. There is nothing like a cathedral for the incredible acoustics of a Christmas concert. (Also, did you know that ‘Away in a Manger’ has a different tune in America than it does in Britain? We learned that song every year in junior school for our nativity play, so it is strange hearing it with a different tune, a bit like hearing Yellow Submarine with the tune of a David Bowie song) (which I have done at karaoke by the way, replacing the lyrics of Modern Love with those of Yellow Submarine, which really worked; I remember as I was going up a woman said to me “I really love this song!” and I said, “Yeah, you’re gonna hate this version”, but actually it really worked. I had this theory years ago that you could shoehorn the words of Yellow Submarine into any song. You can even do it with ‘Away in a Manger’ – try it! Fun Christmas party game). Anyway I love a Christmas Carol. You don’t get carollers coming round to your door any more, at least we never have here. I used to do it as a kid, me and a few other kids on our street would go round knocking on the doors in the Orange Hill area of Burnt Oak singing basically two songs, “Jingle Bells” and “We WISH you a Merry Christmas”. And occasionally Away In A Manger if they wanted an encore. We would get some money each, 10p, 20p, 50p if you were lucky, but woe betide those who gave away a full quid because word would get around and every carol-singing kid from Deansbrook to Stag Lane would descend upon your doorstep singing the exact same rushed verse of “We WISSHHH you a Merry Christmas” and hold out their hands. Ah fun times.

Well there was a group of singers in the park this day giving a performance of festive songs (though it was much more the church hymns than your Jingle Bells), but they were really good and I enjoyed listening to the singing as I sketched, with the fall colours behind. Nobody tried to give me a flyer either. Still I was up against the clock as the sketchcrawl was ending soon and we always meet to look at each others’ sketchbooks and share sketching tips. That Lamy Safari fountain pen with the brown ink is good for the quick sketchy movements of drawing people. These singers mostly wore black or dark clothes so it really stood out against the autumnal trees. Catching this season while I can.

The Arboretum in December

December 19, 2023Leave a comment

Back in October I sketched this view of the Arboretum (which is where that big old Japanese Zelkova tree used to stand before it started splitting in two, and was eventually removed; I drew that too). Back in October it was starting to turn autumnal; that red and green tree was still yellow, that orange tree and yellow tree were still green. At the start of this month I sketched it again to show the colourful changes. Of course none of this makes sense if you are watching this in black and white, like the BBC audience on Boxing Day in 1967 attempting to make sense of Magical Mystery Tour. In the past couple of days we have had a lot of rain and a bit of wind, and it probably looks a bit less leafy now, I should go and check. December is moving along fast, we keep opening those windows on the advent calendars, the Christmas chocolate actually keeps multiplying despite my best efforts to eliminate the threat by eating it all, and I am halfway through my six mince pies. We haven’t started on the panettone yet. 2023 is wrapping up its presence, 2024 is on the horizon and I’m not looking forward to that. I have a bad feeling about it. I think we should just skip 2024 and maybe 2025 too, and go right on to 2026 and watch the World Cup. Enough of that sense of foreboding, I’ll just keep on recording the changing of the seasons in the sketchbook, and try to keep a little optimism. The Stillman and Birn Alpha sketchbook itself is nearly over, just a couple of pages left, which I will complete by Christmas, or Boxing Day maybe, which they don’t even have over here. Getting to the end of a sketchbook is a great motivator to keep on drawing. I have done a lot more urban sketching this year than usual, way more than in 2022, and I can’t imagine 2024 will have as much but we will see. The Urban Sketching Symposium is in Argentina in 2024, but I won’t go because it’s in October, no good for me. I’m going to organize more sketchcrawls. Explore more. Take more sketching risks. Or not worry and keep drawing.

i turned my face away, and dreamed about you

December 16, 2023Leave a comment

After a busy week, and after we’d just had our annual Holiday Party at work (my belly filled up with hot chocolate), I popped downtown to have a festive pint in honour of the dearly departed Shane MacGowan, as it was his funeral that day in Dublin. I never drink Guinness, but I felt I should have some Guinness to mark his memory (MacGowan being famously fussy about what he drank), and I don’t like whisky. I went to the Bull’n’Mouth, the bar that was formerly De Vere’s Irish Pub. It’s not Irish any more, but the bar itself is, having been brought over from Ireland in 2011. I found that spot I like in the corner and wrote out some Christmas cards to friends in England before sketching the bar. There were quite a few people out that night; one of my work colleagues who’d been at the party was performing a brief gig with his band and his red Rickenbacker in the plaza across the street, I had just missed it. One of the professors from work, who’d also just been at the party, was having dinner in Bull’n’Mouth with his family and a group of students from his summer course in Cork, it was nice to bump into them. My wife and son were out at an orchestra concert at the High School, so I had a couple of slow beers and got on with the sketch. I overheard a man nearby at the bar ask a woman how to spell “fascist” which was an interesting chat-up line, I probably heard out of context. I was thinking of Shane MacGowan’s funeral, and caught some of it on YouTube. Singing and dancing and music and a priest holding up a box of Barry’s Tea, that’s a great funeral. I loved Shane MacGowan. When a famous person dies and they’ve meant a lot to you, even if only at certain times in your life, it can definitely touch you, and with MacGowan it was that whole thing of being London Irish in the late 80s, all the music and people and that was like our voice right there. And not just London Irish of course, the Pogues weren’t just from London, but all over Britain where Irish people had come and settled. It wasn’t always that great in the 80s for Irish communities in England, but voices like Shane MacGowan’s definitely made it ok to be who we were, at least that’s how I felt when I was a 13 year old listening to this hundred-mile-an-hour band with folk instruments and a drunken frontman from London with missing teeth and a Tipperary-twisted singing voice singing songs about my London, Soho and White City and being down by the Thames. So I have definitely been feeling sad about his death, and he was unapologetic about who he was, and his huge flaws, and I always admired that. His funeral showed how much he was really loved, and the impact he had. Would that any of us get a send-off like that. Slainte, Shane!

daisy daisy, i’m half crazy

December 2, 2023December 2, 2023Leave a comment

Here’s another from November, I didn’t include this in the last post because there were no autumnal trees in it. It did have a food truck parked at the Silo which I had to sketch, Daisy’s, I think they serve cakes or desserts or flowers or something. I never feel like getting dessert stuff at lunchtime so I’ve never gone to one of the dessert type food trucks. I usually eat Shah’s Halal, chicken over rice (spicy), and that’s a pretty huge meal. I had Jojo’s Hawaiian the other day, and I’m still full from it. Anyway it is December now, and I really need to go and draw some other things, I wish I were in London or somewhere, getting a bit antsy in Davis this Fall. The trees are lovely and all, but I need to go and explore. It’s tough seeing social media all the time, looking at other sketchers around the world drawing all these places I want to go to, and then also seeing loads of posts of cool places in London and thinking, I really need to go and draw that while it’s still there, while it still looks like that. I’m currently feeling like I’m too long between trips back home, even though it’s not really that long since last summer, it’s long enough for me. Made harder the past couple of days with Shane MacGowan passing, listening to old Pogues songs and pining for those stinking streets and the banks of the Thames.