sketchcrawl 23, SF: part 2, the mission

July 14, 2009July 14, 2009Leave a comment

After sketching City Hall, I BARTed it down to the Mission District. I love the Mission. It is actually illegal not to have a big burrito when you come here so I had one (it was ok, I’ve had better), and sketched this from the bus stop, at the corner of Valencia and 16th. The lack of sketching stool meant being creative with my seating choices, so the bus-stop was perfect. I always have to figure, when out urban sketching, that the odd street mental might come and start talking to me. As it happened, the random guy who started chatting to me this time (despite my headphones being clearly on) was actually very interesting, and an artist himself, and we had a chat about how drawing was really just a series of lines and choices. He also told me that Paul McCartney owned the rights to the song Happy Birthday to You. I didn’t know that. He probably made it up. I told him that when McCartney plays Beatles songs on tour he changes the lyrics of “When I’m Sixty-Four” to “When I Was Sixty-Four”. Of course, I made that up, but it could be true.

I strolled up 16th looking for another comfy spot to draw, and chose a really uncomfy spot on a narrow corner with negligible shade, in order to draw the Mission Dolores. Well, dolores means pain, and I suffer for my art.

I love drawing those powerlines, it’s one of the best reasons to sketch in the Mission. I don’t know if the One Way sign was put up by the Missionaries but it could be so (I will tell people it was, anyhow). Might make more sense outside a cemetary. Anyway, it was sunny, but windy, and so I held up the sketchbook for the obligatory handheld shot, and moved on towards the Castro. That’s the thing about Sketchcrawl, you just gotta keep moving. Well, I do.

More to come…

sketchcrawl 23, SF: part 1, city hall

July 13, 2009July 13, 20092 Comments

Last Saturday was the day of the 23rd Worldwide Sketchcrawl, so I took the early train down to San Francisco. The sc23, city hall main group was meeting up at the Presidio, but I didn’t fancy going all the way up there; I was yearning for some ‘urban’ to sketch. I started off visiting the excellent Paul Madonna exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library, the five year retrospective of his All Over Coffee strip, which I’ve followed for almost two years now (I came across it while on the Sketchcrawl in Berkeley, and was drawn to because it was a similar style to what I was trying to achieve; it inspired me to do more monochrome stuff). I was surprised, though I don’t know why, at how large the originals were, but that’s only because I tend to draw everything so damn small. Suitably inspired to get out and draw, I sat outside the library and sketched the San Francisco City Hall. The Tenderloin army shuffled by in groups of one, like characters from a Miyazaki film, lost in their own little odour-filled universes. Somewhere across the square was a rabble led by a very vocal Mexican man screaming, literally screaming, into a microphone, to the point where his voice started to fail him, and the microphone started to break. It clearly didn’t stay broken though because he launched into song, backed by a Latin American dance music band, playing a repetitive one-verse, I don’t know, anthem I suppose, which went on and on and on for about six months. My thoughts weren’t with the guy singing, but with the band members, particularly the guitarists. Their wrists must have been super tired. I was wondering whether they took shifts, if perhaps another person came and took over halfway through the song, to give them a break. For all I knew it was a tape loop. When I was done (and I was really pleased with the resulting sketch, by the way), I hopped onto the BART and went down to the Mission. I fancied a burrito.

Above: sketches from the Amtrak train on the way down. It is now obligatory for me to do these sketches whenever I go down to the Bay Area.

More sketchcrawled sketches to come!!!

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.

yard birds

July 8, 2009July 8, 20092 Comments

More from Medford, Oregon. Amid a large reunion of family, on a very hot Independence Day (America is independent, you know, not part of a chain). I sat outside and listened to the sound of the kids playing, and drew under the shade of a big tree and two cars. A nice way to spend an early afternoon. There are lots of interesting things to draw at my wife’s grandma’s house, from the things in the front yard (my son just loved that wooden duck! I liked the little owl), to the birdhouse/doll’s house (um, I forgot to ask which!) sketched below. I did that in the evening while babysitting.

It was a fun weekend. Lots of nice people. Oregon is cool, different from California; you can’t pump your own gas there, for example, and there’s no sales tax. I was also away from the internet, and the news, for several days. Apart from the events at Wimbledon (poor Murray! and then poor Roddick!), I had no idea about the outside world, and that was nice. I totally missed that Palin woman’s resignation (she seems to think there’s no big deal, resigning as governor of a state midway through the first term, ah people do it all the time – um, no they don’t, not if they wish to remain credible) (hang on, did I say ‘remain’ credible? Palin?). I also missed Michael Owen’s apparent transfer to Manchester United, which could turn out to be the deal of the summer. (Or it could of course turn out that the boy Owen really has lost it, as his Newcastle form suggested, and that Sir Alex will just be putting lipstick on a pig… er…)

oregon trail

July 7, 2009July 7, 2009Leave a comment

We spent the long Independence Day weekend in Medford, Oregon, attending a large family reunion. I’ve been once before – it’s a long old journey through the northern reaches of California, up the valley and through the mountains, and Medford really does feel a world away from Davis. The heat came with us though, regularly hitting the low 100s. Right on the rural edge of town, horses, chickens, rabbits, and the sound of roosters crowing. I perched in the shade outside my wife’s grandma’s house, and drew my wife’s uncle’s Corvette, which had travelled even further than we had (in considerably more style), but stopped while adding the colours, just as a truckload of cousins-in-law pulled up. I think the ‘missing’ colours actually give the sketch a bit more strength; it is so easy to overdo it.

I did manage a drawing on the drive up too. I sat in the backseat for a little while to feed and generally entertain my 17-month old son, but he fell asleep, so I attempted some in-car sketching, which is pretty hard. You can just about see the mountainous forests whizzing by there.

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.

rail of a time

July 3, 2009July 1, 20093 Comments

Halfway there! 15 of 30. It feels like a journey, a train of thought, one with lots of stations and the bogs are blocked. If this series was the Northern Line, I’d be at Golders Green, about to enter the tunnel below Hampstead, on my way to the pub in Camden Town.

I like travelling by train, and alone, so I can read, or draw, and have my headphones on, and look out of the window. Except if I do need to go to the toilet I worry about leaving my stuff. And if I take it with me, I worry about someone nicking my seat, you know you get those people who seem to spend the entire train journey shuffling up and down the corridors, never actually sitting down anywhere. Then you get those people who don’t sit next to the window, but put their bags there, so nobody will ask to sit there. The ticket inspector inspects your ticket, and places that little magic piece of card above your seat, which magically compells you to sit there forever until your stop, so that if a smelly or noisy person sits nearby, you can’t move, because the inspector will think you’re a new person. Then there’s those compartments above the seat for your bags, which are always just too small for your bag, and you just know you’ll leave it up there and forget (I have done this). Then there’s the ones that cross borders several times in the night, all the stopping and starting, the inspector wakes you up to check tickets, then the passport man comes in to look at passports, then after an hour sat on the border you roll across, having finally gotten back to sleep, only for another passport controller to come in and check you are who you’re supposed to be, along with another ticket inspector an hour or so later, and then the whole thing is repeated a few hours of non-sleep later as you cross into a new country. Then the hordes of people sleeping on the floor in the aisles, plus the lads from the Hungarian hostels coming on board to wake you up and attempt to get your business. Then you have those stories of gangs of thieves who enter trains at night, and gas those little compartments where everyone is sleeping so they won’t wake up, ransacking their bags for cameras and money, and vanish into the night. Then there’s those Agatha Christie murders. I’ll tell you one thing though, if you are getting those night trains, get on board early and get the window seat so you have something to lean against. Better still, get a reservation at the station and insist on the window, that way if someone is sat there already, you can make them move, waving your reservation at them. I had to do this once. After too many night trains where I was the one sat in the middle, unable to doze off, I didn’t care.

Fifteen more entries to go!

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.

in the shadow of the sun

June 30, 2009June 30, 20093 Comments

We have had 100-plus degree heat in Davis for a few days now. It was 110 on Sunday. It’s that time of year. I hear there’s been a heatwave back in England? I dared to go outside at lunch, and drew the shade of a big tree.

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.