have i got moos for you

August 7, 2009August 7, 20092 Comments

They call us Cowtown. I don’t know who ‘they’ are, and I’m only presuming they mean cows of the bovine nature, but it is apparently a nickname for Davis. Yet in all the time I’ve been drawing here, I have never once drawn a cow. Until now.

These cows live in a field not far from where I work. I suppose they are research cows. I am told that some cows here have special windows in their stomachs so you can see what is going on. Again, no jokes about the windows having beef curtains, please. Anyway, I didn’t see any belly-windows. I imagine it would be a pane anyhow. I have been meaning to draw the cows for quite some time, but have avoided it because there’s never anywhere to site (remedied by bringing a chair this time), and there’s no shade so it’s always too hot and sunny (so I wore a hat and put on sunscreen). I didn’t mind the smell, though I don’t eat red meat, but the additional insect activity annoyed me, predictably. So a half-hour sit-down later, and I had drawn the cows. they kept moving about. Some tried to get on top of other cows (not like acrobats, though that would be fun to draw), and there was a lot of mooing, though they were kind of rubbish moos, more like squeals. I like a good proper moo, myself. something like Bully the dart-playing bull used to do on Jim Bowen’s Bullseye. Let’s have a look at what you could have won. Moooo….

see you on the other side

July 31, 2009July 31, 2009Leave a comment

Having just drawn Mrak from the other side of Putah Creek, and noted over the past few years its vanishing appearance, I chose to draw from the front side (or it may be the back; like Buckingham Palace, the front is really the back and vice versa).

And naturally, I have drawn it before, and therefore you get to see how the view is slowly vanishing even on this side, as a forest grows at its very toes. Well, not exactly, more that the last time I drew it was late Fall or early Winter (whichever it is called here), and the trees did not have many leaves. But it illustrates the recurring theme. That drawing was way back at the start of Moleskine #2; I am now more than halfway through Moleskine #4.

the slowly vanishing mrak hall

July 27, 2009July 27, 2009Leave a comment

I’ve drawn this view three summers in a row now. Each year, the creek has been a green pea soup, the tree on the left has been an orangey brown, and the weather has been a hot hundred degrees. Well, near enough. It was certainly over a hundred today.

Mrak Hall, the university powerhouse, stays ever the same in the background. In 2007, however, there were two grassy hillocks, with two of Robert Arneson’s Eggheads on them. Probably the highest ground in Davis? They were razed to the ground, for the new law school extension. When I drew it again in 2008, the hillocks were gone, replaced with some wire-fencing, a load of mud and a construction truck. Now in 2009, the shell of the law school is now there, King Hall, blocking the view. I’m glad I drew it. I’ll draw it again next year, with the finished law school, if they finish it.

out to lunch

July 26, 20091 Comment

A couple of sketches, a week apart, both lunchtime scenes from the Silo at UC Davis. I’ve sketched there once or twice before. I don’t know who the couple are. I drew this a couple of years ago with a caption about how overheard conversations are not very interesting. However, I did overhear one conversation, two young students talking, one girl impressing the other girl with her knowledge of ancient Greek tales, particularly the fall of Troy. The other had not seen the film, she said. Well the first went into minute detail about the events of the war, right up to the Trojan horse (which was the point of the conversation, as she was explaining the meaning behind the phrase), which according to her was filled with Trojans, not Greeks, Trojans who were invading Troy. I smiled. It made a change from all the talk of budget cuts and furloughs.

anti-antiques

July 23, 2009July 23, 20092 Comments

That’s an antiques shop across the road there, on D Street in Davis. I don’t really do antiques; I’m sure they’re very nice, but I was put off them as a kid when forced to trawl through enormous car-boot sales and watch Antiques Roadshow on those long grey Sundays (that was presented by another Scully, though unrelated). Give me another fifteen or twenty years, I say, then I might be interested. Still, I’m sure there’s a lot of cool stuff to draw in there. But going into such a store and whipping out the moleskine isn’t my thing. There’s never enough space, people always want to look at the thing you’re standing right in front of, and I’m so shy I could never ever ask the shopkeeper if it were ok; no, it’s easier to just sit across the road and sketch from a safe distance.

the delta breeze cometh

July 20, 20093 Comments

After six days of 100-plus weather, it finally felt a bit cooler tonight (though it was mid-90s today). I cycled down to the edge of Davis, to that spot by the levee I sketched a couple of Mondays back (it’s always when the Bachelorette is on TV that I head down here). That sketch is here. The sunset, if you’re wondering, is in the other direction, this mass of colour in the sky is likely from the terrible hazy air we have here in the Valley, it just hangs there above Sacramento, especially in heatwaves. The Delta Breeze is in tonight though, cooling everything down.
There’s my bike again. It’s standing up now, because I had a kickstand added to it. In the distance, West Sacramento. I heard on the news yesterday that a mountain lion had been spotted in West Sac. The mountains are behind that haze in the distance; perhaps it is just lost. I kept my eyes open.

boring conversation anyway

July 10, 2009July 11, 20093 Comments

Do people even use phoneboxes any more? I barely even use my cellphone. I have a pay-as-you-go plan, which is not like the one I have on my still-active English phone (which still has the plan set up years ago on one-2-one, even has that logo on the screen!). No the one I have here means that you spend $25 to top it up fro three months. If you don’t add more money by the end of the three months, not only can you not use the phone but you lose whatever money you have left (and since I never use it, that’s usually most of it). If you renenw, it doesn’t just add three months onto whenever your three months is up, it just goes three months from whenever you topped up, so essentially you lose days, unless you renew right on the last day. Confused? I am. I have never liked mobile phones here. It’s just incredible to me that you get charged for receiving a call. That’s why I never give people my number, because I’ll never pick up if I don’t recognise it (for a while I was getting a lot of marketing calls, especially around the time of the election).

Speaking of cold calls, I hate those ones that have that pre-recorded message, “this is your final notification to renew your car insurance”, or some such, when yesterday and the day before and the day before that were the final norifications, and tomorrow too, all from companies I’ve never done business with. I hate the robots. At least with real people calling I can antagonize them a bit (sometimes I talk reeeeallllyyy reeeeeaaaallllyyyyy slowly), but even then my heart’s not in it, and I feel sorry for them. After all, everyone’s gotta work. I had to do it, once, for about a week and a half, many many years ago. It was not fun, and the guy running the show (I think he was called ‘Boyd’ or something) fancied himself as a bit of a hardnose, so I left to get a job as a male dinner-lady at a posh school. I remember one time, I made the marketing call, and ended up chatting to an old guy on the phone for about half an hour about his work (writing travel brochures), literature, travel, I forget now. Either way I didn’t sell him whatever it was they were selling. It cheered me up though. I sometimes wonder if those cold callers wouldn’t also fancy a nice long chinwag, a chat about the footy, or the state of modern television, just to ease the drudgery of their work. But if they do, I wish they’d stop calling me right in the middle of Jeopardy.

down by the levee

July 6, 20094 Comments

I fancied cycling tonight, before the Sun went down, so I went down to the very edge of town, to the levee, a spot I’d never actually been to before, though it’s right near where I live. You can see all the way to Sacramento, across the flat Yolo landscape. Not in this drawing, but it is there. The moon (also unseen) hung low and pink, in the east. Some interesting birds hopped about nearby. All very peaceful. The sun started to vanish so I cycled home.

Sepia micron 05.

as june becomes july

July 1, 20092 Comments

Optometrists (opticians in the old tongue). They are always filled with hundreds of glasses you can’t imagine anybody wearing, let alone yourself. I bought a pair of glasses from here once, though I usually get mine from a different place in Davis. On that occasion, my one had no styles I liked, so I went here, and found one that I thought might suit me, a different theme for me. I called them the ‘half-Svens’ because they were kind of half like the Sven Goran Eriksson rimless style (they had half a rim). Normally I prefer the Fabio Capello style of specs. Anyway ultimately I decided I didn’t like them. They didn’t quite fit right; I did get them adjusted, at least slightly, but still no. So I went back to my old place and found they’d just started doing some great Fabio Capello type glasses. (For those who don’t know, I’m not talking about great fashion designers, I’m talking about foreign England football managers, who happen to wear trendy glasses). I didn’t really like this optometrist anyway. They weren’t enormously helpful, and were a bit disinterested, not even calling me to let me know they were ready after they said they would, whereas the service in the other place is much better. (Jeez this isn’t a consumer blog). However, they operate in a bloody cool looking building, very sketchable, and so I drew this today at lunchtime, on the first day of July. The second half of the year has arrived.

it’s not easy being green

June 28, 20092 Comments

A couple of months ago I mentioned the story of the Davis Toad Tunnel, and promised to draw the little toady post office they built to evade the snakes. It’s down by the human post office, on Pole Line Road. Toad Hollow, it’s called.