that old autumnal feeling

December 19, 2024December 19, 2024Leave a comment

This will be part one of two posts showing autumn in Davis. It feels like autumn lasts a very short time in Davis, but it’s actually a good little while and unquestionably the most spectacularly colourful time of the year. I am loathe to call it ‘Fall’ as the Americans do because it’s more like an amazing Rise, admittedly before the actual Fall when leaves get blown off the trees in a dramatic way. I love that part too, after the winds and storms come laying the trees bare, it’s like Christmas morning when the floor is covered in wrapping paper. November though was full of colour. Above is on Russell Blvd, as seen from outside the International Center. It got even more colourful than this a week or so later, this is really the start of the deep reds and yellows. That building is the Cal Aggie Christian Association, I’ve drawn that building before, it stands at a good location at the end of California Avenue so I pass by it every day.

This one was drawn downtown on F Street, at the corer of 2nd Street, and those two gossiping trees were starting to cover the ground in bronze-red leaves. The mural is one I’ve never drawn before, it’s a painting of the Columbus Cafe in San Francisco and was made decades ago by a local artist named Terry Buckendorf, it’s one of the oldest pieces of outdoor art in the downtown. You can learn more about it on DavisWiki. Obviously I wasn’t drawing many details (poor eyesight from across the street) but apparently the people in the cafe were well-known locals from back in the day. I wonder if I’ll ever end up in a mural, standing in the background somewhere hunched over my sketchbook. I don’t think I could ever make a mural, making anything that big would scare the life out of me. There are some really nice murals in Davis though, many with a bit of local history thrown in.

This building above is the Physical and Data Sciences Building” (PDSB), which was formerly the “Physical Sciences and Engineering Library” (PSEL), renamed this past year. In fact I was in that renaming conversation, I won’t say what my bright idea was but we have a new name for it now, I’m still getting used to the acronym. It’s nice inside, a big shared spaced for various units involved in data science, AI, quantum math and physics and all sorts of other related things. I will be finally moving some of our people in there soon too. The trees on the left were turning brown, and I drew this at lunchtime outside the recently finished new wing of the Chemistry building. There’s been a lot of construction in this little junction over the past few years but finally it’s all coming together.

I am trying my best not to remember the fifth of November, but look, that’s done now. Here are people lining up at the polling station in the Veterans Memorial Center, which I sketched on the way home. I had a headache, it only got worse. However the one thing I never forget about the fifth of November, that is the day we moved to Davis back in 2005. Nineteen years in this town. I remember it well, moving into our little flat in south Davis on Cowell Boulevard, walking down to Nugget and picking up a beer to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night, sleeping on an old uncomfortable futon because we hadn’t bought a bed (or a sofa) yet. Waking up at 1am to the sound of the ground rumbling, our first experience of those mile-long freight trains that pass slowly through Davis in the middle of the night; we were relatively close to the train tracks, and it was a sounds I got used to pretty quickly (I still find it funny that even where I am now in north Davis I still feel the ground shaking slightly in the night when they pass through). We are now in our twentieth year in Davis, which I never saw coming back then. You never know what’s coming. Though on this date, I kind of did know what was coming. Still I drew the scene above with that tree turning deep dark purple, before watching maps turn red. Time to keep on sketching.

The scene above is of the building known on campus as the ‘Death Star’. It’s an annoying maze of concrete that is easy to get lost in. This is the entrance of campus, and the Death Star (properly called the Social Sciences and Humanities Building) is home to the Letters and Science Dean’s Office; I drew this as a gift for the outgoing Executive Assistant Dean upon his retirement, to remember the place by. I often have meetings in that building, and I’m ok if they are in the same place, but when they change location I have to give myself an extra ten minutes or so in case I get utterly lost. I have not drawn inside the maze of that building much in the past, but it feels like being in an Escher drawing. Safe to stick outside.

Finally, to end Part One, this bright yellow tree is outside the International Center, in the courtyard next to the space we hired for our annual Peter Hall Statistics Conference. I sketched this as I was looking out of the window from the registration table. I did a lot of sketching those two days, but I’ll post those separately. I can’t say I really understood any of it, but the colours outside were dazzling. Part Two coming soon.

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.

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.

november’s gonna november

November 30, 2023December 2, 2023Leave a comment

Since today’s the last day of November, and tomorrow is December, here’s a bunch of sketches from around Davis this past month showing the colourful trees they have nowadays. You’ve seen them, the trees they have now, with all the colours. It can be very exciting, especially for the person with a paintbox who just has to record it somehow. Above is Oak Street, I cycle down here every day, and now the sun sets so early I cycle up it every evening in the dark, and there are no streetlights (but occasionally piles of leaves in the bike path). This was back on the 19th; today is the last day of November. I heard this morning that Shane MacGowan has died. He was 65. I am really pretty sad about it.

I stood on the corner of Russell and Miller to draw this. Russell and Miller sounds like one of those comedy duos you used to get, one of those ones that were extremely unfunny, but had absolutely no idea how unfunny they were. A bit like Hale and Pace, but even less so. I also sounds a bit like the sort of law firm you have to call if you get bitten by a dog, or if your foot gets run over by an e-scooter. In the foreground is one of those ‘Spin’ bikes, you’ve seen those, those e-bikes they have nowadays. You’ve seen them, you use an app, there’s a bike, it rides a bit faster and you can appear suddenly behind regular bikes on the bike path like “surprise!” before whizzing by saying “see ya later suckers!” and then when you want to stop using it, you can just get off an leave it in the middle of the sidewalk in the way, so someone else can come and have a go. There used to be ‘Jump’ bikes, now there are ‘Spin’ bikes. There are also these ‘Hump’ bikes, looking more like modernized mopeds but completely silent and people ride them on bike paths at twice the speed of a normal bike. They give me the ‘ump.

In the sketch above, I drew with the full intention of adding in the yellowing oranges and browning greens of all the foliage, but didn’t get back to it later, and so I left it up to your imagination. The great thing about this is I can re-use it in April or May, and colour the leaves in a more spring-like green. It’d be like going back to an old song and reworking the bass or adding better lyrics. This was on 4th Street, in the run up to Veterans Day.

So, Shane MacGowan has died. The first record I ever owned that was all mine was The Fairytale of New York, which if memory serves my mum got for me as a present a few weeks before Christmas in about 1987, and which became an instantly beloved classic in our home, and everywhere else too. I still have it. We had a lot of Irish music in our house, a lot of music in general, but we loved the Pogues, and Shane MacGowan sang in an Irish accent, though he was from London, and was absolutely one of a kind. Our world was Irish north-west London, this was us.

This one above was drawn on one of those Saturdays when I needed to get out and sketch, to look for those autumnal leaves, and grab a milkshake before cycling home on my regular acoustic bike. I listened to a podcast talking about George Harrison and the Travelling Wilburys. I loved George, but back when I was in my early teens, the Wilburys were a bit of a joke, a bunch of grandads (in their forties). Back then, I became obsessed with the Pogues. I was obsessed with the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols, but at the end of the 80s I loved the Pogues. I remember buying the Peace and Love album from a record seller at the Irish Music and Dance Festival in Southport (at Pontins, Ainsdale Beach). We would go to every year for a week of listening to Irish greats like Brendan Shine and Philomena Begley, and I’d get to hang out with other Irish immigrant kids from all over the UK, getting pals from Glasgow and Lancashire and Birmingham and all those Irish bits of London. I never got to see the Pogues live. I think my mum did, and I know my cousin had seen them playing in Archway many years ago. I listened to their greatest hits on my cheap portable tape player, travelling all over London on the tube or on the bus; walking down the south bank of the Thames listening to ‘Misty Morning Albert Bridge’; I remember sitting opposite Parliament, I must have been fifteen or sixteen, long before the London Eye ever came along, and drew Big Ben, and was chatting to this homeless guy from Liverpool, and he told me all about his situation, I remember giving him the drawing when I was done, and he was really nice, and I remember thinking a lot about that conversation on the way home. I think about those years when I hear the Pogues, I was an awkward skinny freckly lad with untamed red hair and creative energy fighting to get out, and I played my guitar a lot, badly I might add, and I played mostly Pogues songs because they were easy as fuck, three chords in a few different ways, and lyrics that were picked right off the littered streets where I was living. I used to get this book of Pogues lyrics out from the library. I actually used that book for a study in poetry for one of my English GCSE exams; I don’t think my teacher was impressed with it. But they were presented as poems, and they read like poems. They were illustrated by this guy who would mostly just scribble in biro and it would be brilliant, and I loved that complete looseness, matching the ‘tripping-over-the-kerb and getting up again’ of the lyrics, telling so many stories about the simplest things, a freedom of expression I found so hard to achieve. I could not sing, I still can’t, but Shane MacGowan, his voice, his looks, his whole presentation, it felt like you didn’t have to be ‘good’ at something to be great at it, he was great, the Pogues were great. I played songs with D and G and A a lot, to the point that the frets on my Westone Concord (which is still living at my mum’s house, hiding from view) are to this day completely worn down in the chord shape of D. Three chords is really all you need mate, boom there’s a song. Years later at the end of the 90s, while I was living in Belgium, I actually wrote a song called ‘Misty Morning Waterloo’, a tribute in the title (though actually about those foggy mornings leaving London on the Eurostar to go back to Brussels, I always hated leaving London behind), and that only had two chords in it. If I’d just tried a bit harder, I could have got away with one chord.

So yeah, I’m very sad about today’s news, and I’m going to spend the next few days thinking about Shane MacGowan, listening to the Pogues, thinking about London, listening to ‘London You’re A Lady’ (which is probably my favourite Pogues song, an absolute belter of a poem and always makes me sad thinking of my old home town). But it wasn’t the only news of one of my late 80s London heroes dying. Terry Venables, ‘El Tel’, one of my favourite Spurs managers, died last week too, and we all loved him. November 2023, you took a toll. The sketch above was drawn on campus, in the middle of the month, those colourful trees were just begging for someone to sketch them. It’s December tomorrow, and then this godforsaken year is nearly over, and then there’s another godforsaken year coming right up. I’ll keep on scribbling. Below, last one in the set of November’s trees, another escape downtown catching the colours at the corner of 3rd and D. November is done with now.

eighteen years later

November 6, 2023November 6, 2023Leave a comment

Yesterday, November 5th, marked eighteen years since we moved to Davis. I had never even heard of Davis until a few weeks before. I knew quite a few people with last name of Davis (actually mostly Davies), but when our plane landed from London in the fall of 2005 I was unaware of the college town in the central valley of California that would come to define this latter part of my life. I didn’t really have an idea in mind of what life over here would look like when we emigrated, find a place to live, find a place to work, turn thirty and get busy living in America until we got bored and moved somewhere else. I remember the first visit to Davis; my wife had a job interview here at the university, so I tagged along and waited downtown while she did that. I liked the downtown; there were several bookstores, including the Avid Reader (where I eventually got my first job in the US) and the now-gone Bogey’s Books, which was where Bizarro World Comics is now located (they used to be on 5th Street), and they had a good language section. There was also the Soccer and Lifestyle football shirt shop, which to me was a massive bonus, and the guy who still runs it was the first person in Davis I ever spoke to. I remember asking if they got the Spurs shirts in, but he said that Kappa are really bad at distributing in the States. (Spurs are made by Nike now and they always have our new shirts in stock). I wasn’t sure about the landscape around Davis, this huge hot, flat valley that reminded me of Tatooine, and it was a fair ride from Santa Rosa where we had been staying with my wife’s family, the idea of moving to America being that we’d be closer to them. When she accepted the job, we came back one more time to look around at apartments, using the DavisWiki site to look for apartment complexes, and we ate at Sudwerk back when they still had genuinely decent German style food (we ate there again a few weeks ago in the newly reopened restaurant part; their food is pretty bland now, though the beer is still nice). And then on November 5th, remember remember, we moved into our new apartment in south Davis. I just recall walking down to Nugget and getting a bottle of London Pride beer, which was a nice find, to celebrate our new home and also celebrate Guy Fawkes Night, which is (obviously) not a thing over here, but was always one of the big days/nights when I was growing up. Bonfire Night. It sounds strange explaining it to people over here. I remember hearing on the news here back in that first year that November 5th was ‘Britain’s Fourth of July’, which made me laugh. I would tell people, no it’s America’s May the 11th, which took some explaining. Those first few months were an adjustment, living in Davis. Those first few eighteen years have been an adjustment.

So on this day, eighteen years later, I cycled downtown just to get out of the house for a bit (being stuck in the ‘I am bored but don’t want to actually go anywhere’ rut, and the ‘there’s nothing to do in Davis’ rut), and stopped in Central Park to draw that caterpillar sculpture I think I’ve never sketched. It’s very autumnal right now, and we had a little bit of light rain, Fall is here. I was listening to something about the Beatles. ‘Now and Then’ has been stuck in my head since Thursday, growing on me more and more. I can’t stop playing it on my guitar.

And I go back to thinking myself about Now and Then. 2005 was a different world, the last year of my twenties, the last year of my life in London, in Europe, with my ever-expanding family back home. When I think about how that was eighteen years ago I can’t help but think about where I was eighteen years before that. The answer was the first year at Edgware Secondary School, I was a lot smaller, everyone else was a lot taller. I had left my primary school Goldbeaters a few months before, and Edgware was a big new world, school uniforms, bigger playgrounds, getting the tube from Burnt Oak and walking up Green Lane, all those different teachers, some nice, some scary, some bored. It was not long after Tottenham had lost to Coventry in the FA Cup Final, the only one I ever went to, I’m still not really over that. Most of my friends from Goldbeaters went to Mill Hill County High, but I made friends at Edgware, including one who I knew from Goldbeaters but we didn’t hang out together until Edgware, that’s my friend Terry who I’m still friends with but haven’t seen in years, because he moved to Asia at the end of 2006 (he’s now in Japan). We both moved out thousands of miles from Burnt Oak, never to return. So eighteen years before my move to America I was 11; you can’t compare the difference between 11 and 29 with the difference between 29 and 47, but there’s a lot of life in between. I was obsessed with drawing and Tottenham when I was 11, and I still am now. Next year it will be nineteen years, and so I’ll be comparing nineteen years before that, when I was 10; in 2025 it will be twenty years, and so on. Eventually it will be fully half my life. You might say in reality it already has been. Well I’m still here now, and now and then I think of the old world.

go forth and see

March 3, 2023March 3, 2023Leave a comment

I am going to get the last few of these Fall sketches posted before Spring starts. This was the view downtown at 4th and C in late November. This building has shown up in quite a few of my sketchbooks over the years. Same old, same old, the world keeps on turning. Spring is coming. This past week though, Winter returned and California had loads of snow. Not here in Davis, too low down, but we could see it on the hills nearby up Lake Berryessa, a very unusual sight. The snow is heavy in the Sierra Nevadas now; Truckee is one of the snowiest parts of the US outside Alaska anyway, but there was a lot of it this week. Even southern California saw loads of snow in places you wouldn’t normally get it, like in the mountains around L.A. We had a bit of rain in Davis, and it was cold, but no snow. It’s sunny today. Spring is coming.

autumn in davis

December 28, 2020December 28, 20201 Comment

Post #2 about all the autumnal colours that painted Davis streets in late November to early December. It was like a fall extravaganza. Above is the corner of B and Ovejas in north Davis, the streets over here were looking ridiculously autumnal, like you get in an American rom-com set in the suburbs. A lot of Davis looks a bit like that, I guess. I don’t really watch American suburban rom-coms. I’m not even sure what rom-com stands for, probably some futuristic tech from the 80s.

This was downtown, corner of 3rd and D, when the trees on 3rd turned red with rage. Things were still a bit open here, with Cafe Bernardos and other places having their outside seating for the COVID age, but I don;t know what it’s like since we went into a stricter purple tier, they told all the restaurants to be take-out only for the time being. At this time though there were a lot of people still about, enjoying the Fall colours, just before Thanskgiving. We had a Zoom Thanksgiving with family, played Scattergories. Same with Christmas, except for the Scattergories, we just opened presents.

Above is International House, corner of Russell and College Park. It was a warm day when I sketched this, with the sun on the back of my head (kept my hood up). International House does lots of things for the international community here in Davis, including organizing the International Festival every year to promote cultural awareness and global appreciation. I’m well into that. It looked lovely on this day. The adjoining street College Park looked gorgeous too. This is one of the most stunning streets in Davis in my opinion (it’s more of a big ring than one street) with amazing houses, including the UCD Chancellor’s residence. I’d love to draw most of these houses, I do feel a bit self-conscious sitting outside one though, so have never sketched them. I did do the drawing below though, but this was mostly done at home. I did a very quick sketch outline from a spot in the road next to a pile of leaves, but then drew the rest from a photo with the fountain pen and the watercolours. Caught the feel of the street I think.

The one below I drew and painted standing right there, a street near my house right on the north Davis Green Belt. The houses here are nice too, if not quite as grand as College Park, still very pretty. I love living near the Green Belt, but in November it was more the orange red yellow and brown belt. This one didn’t take too long, just under an hour, a lunch break while working from home.

And the one below was down on D Street, in Old North Davis in the block off of 5th, near downtown. The trees were mostly brownish orange, I didn’t draw or colour everything because I was getting a bit stiff from standing, the light was starting to go, I thought I might finish later but I never did, this was enough. This was pretty much the last of my autumn sketches for 2020, a little period of excited energy that has now faded away with the leaves. I’ve not sketched much in December at all, in the run up to Christmas, as the stay-at-home orders got tighter and the days got much shorter, and I just didn’t want to leave the house at lunchtime. Maybe I will today. I still have a bunch of different coloured autumn leaves I collected while cycling around town which I intended on drawing, like some sort of botanical artist (I am in awe of botanical artists and really should try more of that myself), but they might all be too crunchy and dry now. I took a lot of photos of colourful autumn Davis too, but it’s the sketches that make me really feel the season. Now it’s winter, which in Davis means, well not exactly American rom-com suburbia, which would be snow. No, for us it’s just colder than Fall, with fewer leaves on the trees so you can see the buildings clearly (great for sketching shadows!), with more bright skies than overcast ones, a bit of rain but not like back in England, just enough to close the soccer fields. I should like to do a book about Davis (ha, been saying that for ten years), but maybe one where I go through the months of Davis, and show what the town looks like in different seasons. “The Year in Davis”. I don’t know. I also want to do one just of panoramic drawings of Davis streets. I have ideas but then never finish them off, I just like to keep drawing. Better get back to it then.

it’s a wonder fall life

December 28, 2020December 28, 2020Leave a comment

Last month the leaves in this town just exploded in all sorts of colours. When I say all sorts I don’t mean blue or white or mauve, but most of the other colours in the spectrum were represented there somewhere. My paint box was jumping up and down for me to get outside and put some of this into my watercolour Moleskine. Happy to do so. It was a short period when I couldn’t wait to get outside. Right now, on the Sunday after Christmas, I don’t want to leave the house, or get dressed, but that’s normal. We’re still working from home, though on vacation this week (officially it’s curtailment), but I still have to go to campus every so often to do stuff at the office, and get to take free weekly COVID tests now too. So coming onto campus I took the time to catch some of the colours there. Above is the view of Celeste Turner Wright Hall (drawn it before) which is one of the most gloriously autumnal spots on campus. You can see Robert Arneson’s Eggheads there still arguing beneath the leaves, like Bert and Ernie. These colours bring me a lot of joy. Without sounding like some sort of uplifting Netflix show host (something I have never been mistaken for), it’s good to focus on things that bring you joy. For me, interesting chord changes in songs, the smell of a French bakery, the sun setting over a city as seen from a train, Tottenham beating Arsenal, but nothing quites matches the joy brought by bright colours of autumnal leaves.

I drew the above fairly quickly while stood on a narrow bridge in the Arboretum. There was no way I could really catch all the sensations of the colourful leaves, but also quite a few people were crossing the bridge and stopping to take photos. I stayed as socially distanced and masked up as possible. A lot of people were having photo sessions in the yellow gingko trees nearby, as they were dumping their leaves. I bet that gives the trees a lot of joy, the feeling of dumping their leaves at the end of a busy year. I know how that feels. I wonder if the trees know about our pandemic this year? Actually, no I don’t wonder that. I know scientists have discovered that trees do feel and communicate, in their own tree-like fashion, but they probably don’t check the internet or read the papers (probably a sore subject too, paper), and probably haven’t noticed all the masks or social distancing any more than I’ve noticed what the mayflies did this year. They didn’t have to read retweets of all of Trump’s endless rage tweets. They’ve never used Zoom. They also didn’t have to watch that ‘Imagine’ video. But they do get to that point in the year when they are like, right here goes, here’s all the colours, there’s all the leaves, see you in the spring dudes. I like trees, they do their thing. That said I also like things like wooden chairs and guitars and paper, so the trees probably don’t like me back.

Above and below, the fiery trees around the Silo. They really blazed a bright reddish orange for a bit, before throwing off the leaves in a tantrum, all at once. When I drew the scene below it was rainy, a rare occasion here, but I stood under a tree and drew what I could, adding the rest in when I got inside. I’m glad for rain, after the year we had. For a lot of trees, the blazes have not been metaphorical. This years fires have been awful, we lost a lot of trees in California and beyond, some very ancient. The trees had their own really bloody rubbish 2020. But when they make it this far, beating the fire season, and bursting into displays of colour as an expression of boundless life, it’s like they are sticking a huge two branches up at the deadly seasonal fires; they made it to the end of the year, long may they make it beyond. Drawing these colours brings me joy, no doubt, and I’ll post the other ones I did in the next post. Just before Christmas the UC Davis Staff Assembly sent out a message to all staff thanking them for their efforts with remote work this past year, and included a link to some of my campus views to have a look at, in case (like me) they might be missing campus. And I am missing campus. I can go whenever I want, it’s only ten minutes bike ride down Oak Street for me, but it’s not the same. So much is closed, so few people are around, the campus atmosphere just isn’t there right now. But it will come back. I can’t see it happening that quickly, and even when it does it will inevitably be gradual for a lot of people, something I’m very sensitive to, but we will come back, things will return. That’s something that will definitely bring some joy.

petescully

postcards of the hanging

Tag: fall