supergrass in san francisco

April 10, 2026Leave a comment

I’d been back from Europe for less than a week and I was off again, this time down to San Francisco to see a performance by the band Supergrass. I had been planning this for ages, and would be staying overnight in the city. I got into Supergrass back in 1995 when I was still just about a teenager, but in all those years I never got to see them play live. They were doing a special tour playing their first album I Should Coco, the mark its 30 year anniversary. Now is the real resurgence of the old 90s Britpop bands, coming back out and playing again; we saw Pulp for the first time in 2024, then they brought out a new album in ’25, but the big news comeback was the massive reunion tour of Oasis (another band I was well into but missed seeing live). I knew there was no chance I’d get to go to that tour, since it sold it out so quickly, and tickets were astronomically overpriced. Supergrass though was such an exciting prospect for me, I loved that youthful optimistic first album, but I was massively into their second album In It For The Money. My friend James in England (fellow Supergrass fan when we were at uni) saw them at the Roundhouse (and was standing next to James McCartney at the show) and had told me how good it was, that they also played a bunch of other classics as well as running through the album. So I was well looking forward to it. Then the night before leaving, I was talking to my wife and she said that, well you know Oasis are playing in Los Angeles this weekend, there are apparently still some tickets. Yeah, but I’m going to San Francisco to see Supergrass, I can’t do both. Why not, she says. We looked, there were still some good seats at the Rose Bowl on Sunday evening. Sure, but where would I stay at this short notice? Flights would cost so much, too days out. As it turned out, I had a Southwest credit from a cancelled trip to Vegas earlier that year (I had planned to fly down meet my friend in Vegas, who was participating in a big poker tournament, but he had to cancel due to illness). My wife was able to find a room at a nice hotel in Pasadena on points, and so I booked the ticker… this was going to be the big 90s Britpop weekend, Supergrass and Oasis, 19 year old me would be freaking out with excitement, and it only took me thirty years and a lot of mileage to finally see them. Sure I was still exhausted after the long summer trip but as they say, here we go.

I took the Amtrak down, sketching the view from the window. I planned to hang about in the city during the day before checking into my (cheap) hotel, and going to the show. I’d be getting up next morning to fly from SFO down to LAX, but as always I try to fit in as much extra sketching as I can, because there’s NEVER ENOUGH SKETCHING is there. I jumped onto the Muni, and headed out to the Inner Sunset area around Irving Street. I like it up there. I drew some of the colourful shops (and then didn’t even colour two of them in). Sketching in the bigger portrait format like this I tend to do larger drawings, and they tend to take a bit longer, and I tend to get bored drawing them. But I enjoyed standing out on this street watching everyone go by and drawing these buildings, I know I have sketched this row before (see how it looked in 2010 when that ‘Easy Breezy’ cafe was a placed called ‘Tutti Frutti’). This place must have a contract that when it becomes something new, it should still have a rhyming name.

I had some lunch in Crepevine on Irving Street, and sketched a couple of people chatting in my little brown book. I just liked the pinks and greens.

Later in the afternoon I went over to the Little Shamrock pub, opposite Golden Gate Park. I have sketched here before; they still have one of my drawings on the wall, which I did back in 2013. It is one of the oldest pubs in the city, established in 1893. I sat on one of the little benches outside and sketched in pencil, but regretted the pencil I was using and wish I’d drawn in pen. It’s this two-page portrait format, it seems like a good idea, then I get bored and impatient with it, the bigger size. Still it’s good to sit and observe. I was being observed by the people at the bar, who would occasionally come out to have a look.

When I was done, I came in for a pint. It’s cash only, I rarely carry cash any more. I do like the interior, there is a lot to draw and usually a good atmosphere, on a Saturday afternoon. I’ve never been in the evening. I sat and sketched this interesting little corner, and then turned and drew the bar area. I used my fountain pen this time. I think I was a little conscious of time, and unwilling to really dive into too many details. I still had to get back to Union Square and check into my hotel, eat something, then head to the Supergrass show.

So I did that. My hotel was the King George, and it was a bit crummy to be honest, the room was pretty grim. I was going to stay in the nice new hotel next to the Warfield, but figured I was not going to be there long enough to need anything nice. In hindsight I wish I had; the couple of blocks or so between the King George and the Warfield were, well very sketchy to say the least, classic Tenderloin. It did not feel very safe walking down there during daylight, and I’d have to come back this way after dark as well. A lot of very dodgy people hanging about, it’s not a great place to be by yourself. I got to the Warfield early; it’s a fantastic venue. I last went there in 2015 when we saw Noel Gallagher, and the acoustics were very impressive, like being inside a gramophone. A lot of famous bands have played here over the years. My seats were good. There were some Italians seated next to me; I was wearing my AS Roma shirt. The opening band were pretty good, I did do a quick pencil sketch of them singing about the A1 road in England (or maybe it was a song about European paper sizes, I don’t know). Then Supergrass came on, and I was 19 again. Well no, if I was 19 I’d have been pogo-ing about down in the crowd and not wearing glasses. They were really good, for being older (they weren’t very old when they first started so we’re about the same age; singer Gaz Coombes is a month younger than me, the drummer Danny Goffey shares my birthday but is two years older, the bassist Mick Quinn – not the former Coventry and Liverpool striker – was born in 1969 so he is ancient). We all look good for our ages I think. Supergrass had a lot of fans in San Francisco, mostly of a similar age to me. They played the whole of the I Should Coco album, including my favourite track from that, Sofa of My Lethargy, which I used to listen to over and over in my old bedroom in Burnt Oak. They stopped and started on a couple of tracks, maybe a bit out of practice, or maybe some of the album tracks are just well difficult to play live, they were really creative with their switching of time signatures and interesting chord sequences. This was live music though, man, and it felt pretty real, hearing these songs I only knew from my old CDs being played in real time. Watching the drummer put in a proper shift. It was great stuff. They played a few other classics, including Richard III, which I rocked out to in 1997, Late In The Day, and Sun Hits The Sky, which definitely had a different element to it as a live track. There were no fancy theatrics, just really good live music. They finished with Pumping On Your Stereo, which was never my favourite of their singles but had a fun video, and was a feelgood way to round off the show. Well enjoyed it.

I didn’t enjoy the walk back to the hotel. Market Street after dark was not somewhere to hang about, and there were plenty of spaced-out unpredictable people outside the venue. I took a slight detour away from Mason Street, which was dark and foreboding but was the quickest route to my hotel, and grabbed a chicken burger in Carl’s Jr a block away, though that was a fairly scary experience itself, like I was stuck in a scene from Blade Runner. When I finally got my greasy tasteless food, I left the grotty fast food place and headed towards the hotel. There’s an Irish pub on the way that I remember going to once (with my Mum, when we stayed down here years ago; she actually loved the Tenderloin), Johnny Foley’s, so I popped in to have a post-show beer and sketch. There was a band playing old 60’s numbers, they were really good. I sat at the bar and sketched it, while tourists from China came in and drank pints of Guinness next to me. It was then time to to go to bed, because I had a long day ahead of me on Sunday – Oasis in Pasadena.

back again, late summer

April 3, 2026Leave a comment

When I’m so far behind with posting it feels like I’m telling stories about a time I don’t remember any more. End of summer 2025 seems like such a long time ago, the world just keeps getting further into horrible history. Up is down and right is wrong and who knows where it ends. Still, I go into my sketchbook to try to understand if not the universe or the world, then just the place that is right in front of me. I was pretty tired after that long trip, and eager to get back to routine. September is still very hot in Davis, so I sat in the shade on a bench outside the Varsity Theatre and drew that. I hadn’t come back from my big sketching trip with some sort of new insight into sketching, so this is just the usual say-what-you-see, I have to draw something type of of sketch. Work is still quiet in early September, it’s the tail end of Summer, and Davis isn’t that busy again yet. I did see an interesting car on D Street painted in DHL logos, so I started to draw that, but ended up taking a photo and doing the rest later, as the owner came and drove off. It looked like a large toy car. It reminded me of the story told by Eddie Jordan, the late great Eddie Jordan (he died just last year), former Formula 1 team boss, whose team Jordan Grand Prix used to race in a distinctive yellow livery. In 2002 DHL started sponsoring them, and in those days DHL’s colours were white and red, but Jordan raced in yellow, due to a contract with a previous sponsor, and they didn’t want to change their colours. So DHL instead changed their branding colours to match Jordan, and the famed yellow and red DHL branding you see today is apparently a result of that.

auf wiedersehen, Berlin

March 26, 2026March 26, 2026Leave a comment

I’ll finish up with the remainder of my Berlin sketches and thoughts. I definitely had a lot of thoughts when visiting the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial) in the northern section of the city, close to the Nordbahnhof. before heading up there I walked over to the Hackescher Höfe, which I had visited a couple of days before with Omar. I wanted to visit the art and bookshop there, at the Haus Schwarzenberg, which is covered in graffiti and has a stairwell full of art and posters and stickers (and signs saying not to take photos; I broke that rule). The shop I visited was called ‘Neurotitan’ and was an incredible place, I bought some zines and stickers there, and asked the assistant if they had Detlef Surrey’s book ‘The Wall Revisited’ (I’m pleased to say I held a conversation in German and was totally fine; normally I need a couple of beers before the German comes flooding back). I had heard that this store stocked it, but she said that the last copy had just been sold that day, probably by someone else who had seen his talk in Poznan. I showed her my sketches of that talk, she said that I could probably get in touch with the publisher to get a copy (I did, once I got back to the US, but it took some time and a bit of extra money – thanks a lot, bloody tariffs – to get one sent over to America). I had that book on my mind now especially because I was going up to the Berlin Wall Memorial, which Detlef had talked about at length. I took the S-Bahn out to Nordbahnhof (I realize that sentence implies that I simply got on the S-Bahn, and just went to Nordbahnhof, but leaves out that I got on the wrong train in the wrong direction at least twice, like when you try to fix a scratch but end up smashing up the table, but I did end up at Nordbahnhof in probably more time than it would have taken to walk). The Berlin Wall Memorial is a preserved section of the Wall and the Death Strip, along Bernauer Strasse. It was already early evening when I arrived at Nordbahnhof (sketched below), which during the Cold War was closed down, a ‘Ghost Station’ on the divided S-Bahn system, where West Berlin trains would not stop but passengers would catch a glimpse of a time capsule manned with armed guards. I found the Berlin Wall Memorial chilling. This was not like the East Side Gallery, here was the Wall as it looked, along with rows of metal poles installed like bars you can walk through. One section remains closed off to give an idea of what the Death Strip really looked like. Berlin is a city that dares you not to forget its past. On a metal display in the middle of the grass are the names and faces of every person who was killed trying to escape from the East into West Berlin, 136 in all. The faces as they look out at you, some so young – even children – was frightening. There were blocks occasionally showing where people were shot trying to escape. The Wall was up from 13 August 1961 until 9 November 1989. I didn’t get to see all the areas of the Memorial, nor the documentation center, but I sketched the Wall as the light was fading, then took a tram out to Prenzlauerberg and back to the hotel.

After a late dinner of spaetzle from the hotel restaurant I walked back over to Hackescher Markt. All over Berlin, but especially around here where there had once been a large Jewish population, you find the ‘Stolpersteine‘, or ‘stumbling stones’, which are actually little square brass plaques in the pavement that are slightly raised so that you might trip on them, by design. Each has the names of people who lived there previously, usually Jewish but many Roma, homosexuals, disabled, who were removed or forced to flee by the Nazis, along with the year, how old they were, and their fate (you see ‘Ermordert in Auschwitz’ a lot). This is an initiative by the artist Gunter Demnig started in the 90s, and has now spread to many other cities commemorating victims of the Holocaust. Each of the Stolpersteine is handmade. Berlin makes sure it does not forget. I went back over to Hackesche Höfe and had a beer at the Cinema Cafe, which I sketched in the poor light. It is interesting that a lot of places in Berlin are cash only, where I got so used to using my card everywhere in Poland, same back in California. It wasn’t a busy evening, it was Tuesday, but it was an interesting cafe to sketch, and I used my fountain pen. The outside area of the cafe is in that alley with all the graffiti and would have been an interesting sketch, if I could find somewhere to sit with a good view, which I couldn’t. After this, tired, I went to bed.

On my last morning in Berlin, at the end of my Poland-Germany trip, I was ready to go back to London but had a last sketch or two in me. I had considered adding in a short trip to Denmark onto the end of this adventure, since it was 30 years since my strawberry-picking visit there, but decided a couple more days in London would be better for me. I had also considered taking the overnight train from Berlin to Brussels, a fairly new service, and passing a couple of days in my old Belgian haunts, but I’m glad I didn’t in the end. It was nice to spend some time by myself in Berlin but it’s not 1998 any more. I walked down to the Museum Island (sketching a man fishing in the Spree along the way) and sat next to the Dom, drawing the view of the Museums in pencil.

It is fun (and quick) to draw in pencil but I don’t really like straight lines much. I do love that sky though, and miss those wispy cloud skies. Before long I was back up in the wispy clouds myself, and sketched the view on my very small plane (see below). It was easy to get the S-Bahn out to the Brandenburg airport, but took a very long time getting through the security line, which seemed to have one line per baggage inspector and the inspector seemed to have to open up every single bag and inspect every single thing. I eventually had to ask them to let me through as I would miss my flight despite being there super early. Word of warning for you in Berlin airport, it can be slow. I flew back into a new airport for me though, London City Airport out past Docklands, a very small and convenient place to end up. I jumped right onto the DLR to Bank, and onto the Northern Line back home to Burnt Oak. Auf Wiedersehen Berlin, it was nice to reconnect after all these years. I would like to get back to Germany again soon, but I’d like to go back to the South and West again, maybe explore the Rhine Valley at last.

west side

March 24, 2026March 22, 2026Leave a comment

For my second full day in Berlin, I had a few things I wanted to do. You can’t do it all; I couldn’t for example go out to Charlottenburg, where I had never been; nor to Neukölln and Tempelhof, which had been recommended to me; nor out to Potsdam, which I had explored in ’98 anyway. Things always take longer when I have my sketchbook anyway, but I spent a bit of time going about on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn. I had a leisurely breakfast in my hotel room, sat looking out of the window and strumming on the uke, then headed out to West Berlin, to the Zoobahnhof, the busy shopping street of Kurfürstendamm, and to the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) at Breitscheidplatz. I was covering old ground; this is one of the first places I visited in 1998 on the day I explored the city on my own. It is the shell of a large bombed out church, with the more modern church structure next to it, a large concrete edifice made up of small windows of stained glass. The older building stands as a monument to the destruction of war, and there is an exhibit of its history inside, along with an iron nail cross from Coventry Cathedral, also destroyed by aerial bombing in the war. The two cathedrals have held a long friendship together. The original church was not that old, having been built by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the last years of the 19th century, opening in 1906. The new church doesn’t look much from the outside, but inside the largely blue windows create a thrilling effect as they surround the space, it reminded me of Liverpool Catholic Cathedral, though this is a Protestant church. I had always thought (probably someone told me when I went there years ago) that the glass was recovered from the original building, but that is not the case, the glass in fact being designed by Gabriel Loire. That makes more sense, I think that when clearing up they probably weren’t saying “collect all those little bits of glass, ja, that might come in handy”. I really enjoyed sitting in the new church and sketching, something about all that blue really calms you down. I also liked the design of the floor, all colourful circles. There is a big golden Christ with a long face flying above the altar; it’s actually made from a bronze alloy metal called tombac and designed by Karl Hemmeter. I sketched in there (below) before sitting outside and sketching the old and new, above.

This is the commercial hub of the city and it feels like it, the Capitalist island in the old Communist sea; I remember that road map of Europe I had when I was a kid, West Germany was fully detailed, but only major cities were shown in the otherwise blank East Germany, except for those three autobahns that went from the West directly into the isolated West Berlin, with little warnings telling motorists they were not allowed to leave the road. According to that old road map, East Germany was a place that geographically didn’t exist. In his talk at the symposium, Detlef Surrey said that you got used to living with the Wall and the fact that there was this other place just over there, but that you mostly didn’t think about them, or maybe were encouraged not to. It was a different time, but I wonder about modern Korea, where you can say the Berlin Wall still exists, how do the people in the South think about those in the North. Germany is all one now, ever since 1990, but I hear many Germans say that it still feels like two, those divisions from decades ago and the years of change afterwards were a lot to expect to just heal. Was Germany ever really one? I always think about the north-south divide (sometimes called the Weißwurstäquator, depending on the type of sausage you might eat in different parts of the country), and the division between mostly Protestant and mostly Catholic regions, but in truth Germany as a federal nation has always been made up of very diverse places with differing histories. It’s a country and a language (all the different varieties) that has intrigued me since I was a kid, it is not a monolithic block. I would like to really explore it in more detail, but as I said, I don’t have time to go everywhere, mostly I’ll just draw the old buildings, and I don’t even eat sausages, well not pork ones. I was thinking of the old East-West as I walked around here though, since it had not changed as much as the other side had since my last visit in the 90s. I walked through the mall to find the toilet, and half expected to see posters of Hasselhoff in record shop windows. While we are talking retro, below is another photo of me in the 90s, posing like Bono with someone else’s sunglasses down in the Zoo station. Check out the little beard thing I had then, that is how you can tell it was the 90s. I took a photo of that sign as I pass through, it hadn’t changed much.

I had planned to take a wander through the Tiergarten. I wasn’t planning to go to the Zoo itself, who has time for that, but I love a massive park. This one is pretty big, and I only covered a small part of it. I started drawings some old lamp-posts, which were from all over the German-speaking world, plus some from other countries, a really interesting display of civic artistry all hidden together in this corner of Berlin. It was well past lunchtime now, and I was feeling hungry so decided to find the S-Bahn station and go back to the hotel for a rest before exploring the East Side. I wish I had been reading a novel set in Berlin, and that time passed a lot more slowly, to sit in the park or on the S-Bahn reading would have been perfect. As it was, I was still reading Agatha Christie’s Lord Edgware Dies (spoiler alert by the way) and it was taking me forever, because I’m a painfully slow reader.

through the heart of Berlin

March 22, 2026Leave a comment

When I’m so behind in posting my sketches it is overwhelming to think of how much catch up there is, but then I remember that I’m looking back on my adventures from last summer, and it’s sometimes good to reflect on them when they are less fresh so you have had the time to digest them. Berlin is a lot to digest all at once, especially if you are mostly digesting by going around drawing it all. Berlin is a city with a lot of stories, and you can’t draw it all, and you can’t absorb it all. All those stories go through your head as you stand and look at them and try to make sense of things. You see how things are in the present day and you see how easily things went from one situation to another situation so quickly in the past and you think, well of course we should look at the past. Right now we are living in other peoples’ past. I remember feeling this very strongly the first time I was in Berlin, back as a scrawny 22 year old student dashing about Europe on night trains, feeling like this was a city coming to the end of the twentieth century where there were a lot of open wounds, but that it was about to become a different city again. Almost three decades later I was back with a more accomplished sketching habit to take a look around, and on this day I left my hotel near Alexanderplatz and walked down towards the MuseumInsel, which I’d explored the evening before with Omar. I sat in the grassy square outside the huge green-copper-domed Cathedral (Berliner Dom), which was peaceful except for the gangs of young women with indeterminate accents approaching people from all angles with clipboards. You see those gangs in many cities, they really want your signature for something or other, and your wallet too when you let them get too close. You have to keep these obvious pickpockets away from you, and I had to tell them to go away several times, eventually telling them to f-off, but I could see them going up to people all around the square. I was feeling pretty relaxed though, and was really happy with my drawing of the Dom with the Fernsehturm in the background. The cathedral itself has a long history going back to the 1400s, and has had several different iterations, but the present building designed by Julius and Otto Raschdorff was inaugurated in 1905. I didn’t go inside. It was a nicely overcast day, perfect for sketching where I’m not bound by looking for shade, and I think this was my favourite building sketch of the trip, drawn in the portrait sized Hahnemuhle, two page spread.

I was going to walk all the way down towards the Brandenburg Gate, but it was a long walk down Unter den Linden and there is an U-Bahn that goes all the way down it now. I love travelling on metro systems in other cities, it’s a whole new level of concentration. Berlin’s system is easy enough, the U-Bahn underground intermingled with the S-Bahn above, but that didn’t stop me getting lost a few times, or getting on a train in the complete wrong direction more than once, taking longer to mess about in stations than it would have taken me to actually walk the short distance. It was easy enough to get from the shiny Unter den Linden station down to the U-Bahn station formerly known as Unter den Linden but now called Brandenburger Tor.

The Brandenburg Gate is for many the most well-known architectural symbol of Berlin, especially of my generation and before who lived in the Cold War era. This was that big ghostly gate, stranded in the no-man’s-land between the Berlin Wall, which we Westerners could only see the back side of. It was on the news a lot when I was a kid. I remember the strange thrill of being able to walk through it when I went in ’98, less than nine years after the Wall fell, while souvenir sellers hawked old Soviet and DDR era army hats and badges. It used to be at the very real and dangerous dividing line between two worlds. I was planning to see more of the old Berlin Wall locations on this trip, inspired by Detlef Surrey’s presentation on his book (which I now have) and the stories he told about his younger life living next to the Wall. The Brandenburger Tor was built in 1791 during the height of the Kingdom of Prussia. Since the Wall fell it has been a symbol of German and European peace and unity. I stood in Pariser Platz, tourists all around taking photos, a man on a platform talking about something or other political, tour guides (‘Tor’ guides?) pointing out the window at the nearby Hotel Adlon where Michael Jackson once dangled his baby (remember that?), and I sketched the gate and the people milling about. I always feel a little awkward sketching columns, I have always felt that life is too short to draw columns, but I just don’t like drawing straight lines. When I was done admiring it all, I walked through the gate and into what used to be called West Berlin.

I had to sketch it again from the other side. I have a photo of me from that trip back in 1998 looking young and skinny, standing with this view in the background. there’s the picture below, along with another of the young me sitting where the Wall once stood (with the sort of look on my face that you see in YouTube thumbnails with clickbait headlines like “Berlin: Was It Bad?”). The view has not changed that much really, though my poor eyesight and short memory led to me write ‘Hotel Adler’ above the Hotel Adlon. There’s the Fernsehturm, finding a way to get into every sketch. Traffic rushed by this busy junction, and the massive Tiergarten park loomed behind me full of trees and joggers. I had thought about getting up in the morning and having a run through the Tiergarten, but decided against it. It’s really big.

So I walked down Ebertstraße towards Potsdamer Platz, following the line of the old Wall, but first I was going to visit somewhere which was both moving and chilling, the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, also known as the Holocaust Memorial. Berlin does not turn its face away from the dark past, and the location of this huge memorial space is significant, nearby the Reichstag, on an area which used to be part of the infamous Death Strip inside the Berlin Wall, and close to where Hitler’s bunker was located. The memorial looks like a filed of smooth grey concrete blocks all lined up in symmetrical rows, appearing to move up and down as the ground level gets deeper and the slabs get taller. It resembles a graveyard, a colourless crop field, a grey grid system city that feels like a labyrinth; the designer Peter Eisenman left it open to interpretation. As you enter the monument the concrete blocks are short, resembling tombs, and children jump from one to the other, though they are not supposed to. The further you walk down each corridor, the taller the blocks get until they tower above you and everything feels…cold. There are people around, but you feel isolated. You might see them pass by ahead or behind, quickly in and out of view (reminding me of that scene in Yellow Submarine), leaving you along again. The rows may be meant to put you in mind of the lines of Jews being led into the camps or onto the transports, and you feel trapped inside this grey world seeing the sky above that can’t be reached. I felt a bit scared in there, not that anything would happen to me, but that the feeling of isolation descended so fast. It is not a labyrinth, every path is a way out, but it was easy to feel suddenly lost. It was sunny when I emerged and I needed a rest. I sketched the Memorial, with the green Tiergarten away to the left, the glass dome of the Reichstag and the solid block of the U.S. Embassy in the background.

It was a longer walk than expected to get to Potsdamer Platz; perhaps I was just tired. The day was already getting away from me, and I hadn’t eaten lunch. The last time I was in Potsdamer Platz it was just a building site, the biggest in Europe, but now it was all big modern buildings and infrastructure. The train station was complicated; you had to go back outside the find the U-Bahn, I decided to go back to the hotel for a rest before I did any more exploring. That was a lot of history for a small area.

Back To Berlin

March 16, 20262 Comments

Ok, a month of not posting (I went to England) but let’s get back to last summer before this summer comes around. After Poland, I spent a few days in Berlin, a city long on my go-to-and-sketch list (a list that includes all of the cities, but some are nearer the top than others, like Berlin). I was last there in 1998, which may as well have been in a different century. Which it turns out it was. I was staying in Mitte, in a hotel not far from Alexanderplatz, a good central location to explore from, but in the heart of the old East Berlin. This was a changed city from the last time I was there, but so am I. I arrived by crowded train from Poznan, which was headed for the Hauptbahnhof (a station that wasn’t even there in 1998) but ended up diverting to a different station at the last minute, confusingly. It was all good in the end. I got to my hotel, and then met up with fellow Urban Sketcher Omar Jaramillo, who has lived in Berlin for many years now. He showed me around on an extensive walking tour of the city centre, giving me all the histories and showing me all the details that I might have missed on my own. That was really great, and a nice introduction to the city before my sketching adventure (plus Omar’s awesome and I’ve been a big fan of his art since the first days of USk). I didn’t sketch him though! The first sketch I did of Berlin was the one above, of the massive Fernsehturm. The iconic TV Tower which can be seen from all over Berlin, a real Ost-Berlin landmark. I didn’t go up this time. I thought about it. I did go up in 1998, and there was a revolving restaurant up there. I love big telecommunications towers. I drew the BT Tower while I was in London as well. In the foreground there is St.Marienkirche. I stood out on Karl-Liebknechtstrasse as it was getting dark and looked up. Birds were circling the steeple. I had to remind them this was not a 1970s art film. When I was done I went to a small restaurant near the hotel and ate some spaetzle (which was not very good) and had a beer (which was also not good). Ah well, can’t win them all.

I got up and it was Monday. I had two entire full days on my own just to wander the whole of Berlin sketching what I can. I had a rough idea of where I wanted to go, but all the best Berlin stories start with a meeting under the big World Time Clock, Die Weltzeituhr, at Alexanderplatz. I wasn’t meeting anyone but myself on this day, and I was late, so while I waited I sketched. Those yellow streetcars hummed along dodging stray pedestrians, and the base of the Fernsehturm can be seen behind the big arch of Alexanderplatz station. I love this sketch. It was not that early in the morning, and the sky was threatening some light rain, but people were out and about and the city moved around me. I didn’t see any people meeting underneath the clock, unless they were spies, in which case good job lads, I never noticed you. I probably wouldn’t have been a good Cold War spy, I’m too obvious standing there with my sketchbook, or maybe that’s the most genius spy design. Anyway before we start my journey through Berlin, here are some other Berlin things I drew that I though I should share here.

If you have been to Berlin you will recognize these, the Ampelmännchen, which were the old East German street crossing lights that have become a big symbol of Berlin. You can’t move for tourist tack featuring the green Ampelmann in his hat and the red Ampelmann with his arms outstretched. And I couldn’t get enough of it, I bought the lot, even got Ampelmann socks, candies, stickers, one of those plastic reflective things you put on your bike, I loved them. When I did that 1998 trip I took notice of these, and the street-crossing signs, in many of the countries I visited, and drew them in my journal. Seeing these everywhere reminded me of that obsession. I don’t care, I love street furniture. Speaking of which, below is a fire hydrant from Alexanderplatz. Like London these are mostly underground and have to be brought up.

And finally, a sketch of the Fernsehturm that I did the next morning while looking out of my hotel bedroom. I stayed at the Lux on Rosa-Luxemburgstrasse, nice hotel but very slow elevators, especially when I need the loo. It was a lot sunnier that day and I ate breakfast in my room and played my blue ukulele a bit while watching the city. I sketched, and made the decision to add a little paint, golden yellow and turquoise blue, but unfortunately it was on that horrible new Moleskine paper and didn’t have the effect I was after. Still, I had a nice time drawing it. See you in the next post…

Poznań (Part 6) – Saturday morning

February 11, 2026February 14, 2026Leave a comment

Saturday came around fast. I was going to go for a morning run along the river, having been told about some good running paths by one of the volunteers, but it was a little bit rainy and so I went to the hotel gym instead. I had a 5k race the day after getting back to California so thought I’d better keep it up, but I had run a lot in London. I was here to sketch. After breakfast, which by the way at my hotel was really nice, lots of interesting Polish food, I went to the Symposium hub for the morning sessions. they reminded us to submit work for the auction, and also submit a postcard size drawing to win special prizes later, both of which I forgot to make time to do. Oops. When it’s in my sketchbook I can hide it away with my other sketches. Anyway, feeling a little disappointed in myself, I went to the first talk, and I had been waiting for this one. I’ve followed Detlef Surrey for years, the Berlin based illustrator who draws in a quick almost cartoon-like style in pencil and always captures the energy and spirit of the places he is drawing. I feel like I loosed up my own sketching after seeing his, and that helps when sketching scenes like above (and of the other talks) where I have to draw everyone quickly while writing down what he says. Detlef’s presentation was about his book, “Berlin: the Wall Revisited” in which he explores his home city by following the length of the Berlin Wall, or where it used to be located anyway. I was going to Berlin after my trip to Poznan and planned to do just that myself, so it was pretty inspiring. He showed us pictures from when he was younger, and the Wall was still up, and talked about the experiences of living in the divided city. I used to be fascinated with Berlin when I was a kid, when it was still West Berlin and East Berlin, and I remember so vividly watching the news when the Wall came down. Detlef showed us sketches of some sections where parts of the Wall are still up, and where the ‘Death Strip’ was located, where so many people were killed just for trying to go from one side to the other. I did visit that place myself a few days later. Detlef spoke with emotion, and it was a very moving presentation. I did look for his book while in Berlin but kept missing it (at one shop I was told they just ran out, because people who had been at the Symposium were coming to buy it). I ended up ordering it from the publisher after returning to America, and that took a while, due to tariffs and other issues where postal services would not ship to the US, and it ended up costing me more than the prices of the book to finally get it, but it was worth it as it’s a great read. While in Poznan though Detlef did give me a really cool little Urban Sketchers Berlin booklet, which I think was from an Urban Sketchers meetup the year before, full of sketchwalks and bits about different areas of Berlin, and I carried that around with me every day there, and it showed me where to go for the Berlin Wall Monument. Anyway, more on that in a later post. It was time to dash off to the first Sketchwalk of the day.

A large group walked over towards ‘Fredry’ for the Sketchwalk. It wasn’t raining now and in fact was quite bright and sunny. I chatted with Liz Steel for the first time in ages, it was really nice to catch up and hear about all her work and travels, she is so prolific. Once we all got over to Fredry I stood next to an interesting little kiosk next to an old red brick building and sketched that in pencil. I liked sketching a bit looser like that and I liked the outcome. That sketch above is one of my favourites from Poznan, I can’t explain why but it said what I wanted it to. I did have to get into a bit of shade on a bench under a small tree to finish it, I can’t stand in the sun for too long. I went back across the street to sketch some of the sketchers, see below. The two on the top are (left) Xana Jasmin, sketched during the morning talk; this was the first time I’d met her in person but had spoken to her online a few years ago when she invited me on behalf of Urban Sketchers Jacksonville to give a short talk and demo to their group over Zoom, which was fun. That was in the Pandemic times still. On the right is Gabriela Romagna who I think is from Austria, and who I had met a couple of evenings before at the Drink and Draw.

Above on the left is my old urban sketching friend Omar Jaramillo, another Correspondent from the earliest days of USk who I first met in Lisbon in 2011. He lives in Berlin, I think he was in Italy back in those days. He was sat with a Polish sketcher who I think was called Mateusz, I didn’t speak to him but I think I remember him from the Manchester Symposium, I didn’t recognize him so wasn’t sure at first. On the right is Alexandra who is from Berlin, I’d sketched her at the opening ceremony and drew here wearing her new hat which had mushrooms all over it. That was actually from the evening Sketchwalk but is on the same spread of my small brown paper sketchbook. As you can see I stamped the pages with the official stamps of the Symposium and of USk Poznań.

I went into this little courtyard where an art and craft market was being set up. There were some great printmakers there; I totally got a bunch of printmaking stuff the years before and totally stopped doing any of it, the lino printing and such, and felt like it’s something I really need to work on again. (Six months later, still not done any of it). I was feeling a bit peckish so went into this cafe, called Nowe Lokum Stonewall, and got a massive slice of cake and a beer, and sketched the bar area. I wanted to draw all the LGBTQ+ flags up on the wall, and I really liked all the rainbow colours above the bar. I drew with my fountain pen in brown ink which was ok on that awful Moleskine paper; I made the mistake of stamping it with the Symposium stamp, which as you can see did not come out smoothly. This place was cool, and it was nice to hang out and sketch an interior after all the street sketching. It did start to look a bit like it might rain, but didn’t. Still I had more to go and sketch before the final meetup.

I could have sketched a number of pretty scenes in that area, and nearly drew the courtyard of the Imperial Castle / Cultural Center, or the dramatic tall concrete monument in Plac Adama Mickiewicza that many others drew, but instead I sat in a small park and drew this, the Katyń Monument, or Pomnik Katyński. Looking at it closely, it gave me the horrors. Reading a bit more about what it was a monument to, an awful series of mass executions in 1940 known as the Katyń Massacre, that gave me even more horrors. A lot of truly terrible atrocities happened in World War Two, and this was really horrible, 22,000 Polish officers were murdered by the Soviets on the orders of Stalin. After sketching, I had to just sit on a bench and think for a while. I couldn’t look at it for long. Soon it was time to meet up with the rest of the sketchers at the end on the steps of the Grand Theatre. That was when the skies opened up, and an enormous rainstorm, accompanied by a bit of thunder and lightning, exploded above us. We all huddled under the columns laughing and exchanging stickers and art cards, there was a large group from South Korea whose sketches were amazing (followed them all on Instagram and very much appreciated all the stickers, which I put in my new Urban Sketchers passport that I got at the Hub), and we all waited for the rain to stop before heading off for lunch back at the mall. My mood lifted a bit when I saw the football score, Spurs were beating Manchester City and that always puts me into a good mood. I could tell that 2025-2026 would be a really great season for Tottenham. (Narrator’s Voice, speaking in February after another defeat left us in 16th place – “it wasn’t”). Check back soon for Part 7…

Poznań (Part 5) – Friday evening

February 9, 2026February 14, 2026Leave a comment

Long post, I am lumping the afternoon and evening sketches all together, and starting at the end. Above is the Ratusz, the historic town hall, in the main square of Poznań on Friday night, sketched after all the other sketching and meetings, before heading back to the hotel. I was walking back and looked up and just knew I had this one more sketch in me, another pencil at night looking up type sketch, and this time on the nicer Hahnemuhle paper (so none of that bobbling paper I got on the Moleskine). It’s a big, striking and very well-lit building, shining in the night time as much as in daylight. It was busy out in the Poznań city centre, lots of people around the main square and lots of young people enjoying the cafes and bars. I still wasn’t that familiar yet with the old town and got a little bit lost while walking back to the hotel, ending up in some less well-lit quieter streets, though I didn’t feel unsafe. The last time I’d been in Poland in 1998 a group of skinheads in Krakow had ambushed me on my way back to the hostel, failing to steal my watch they instead stole my glasses and ran off. I did get them back (it was a long night, but I was determined, I needed my eyesight); I’ve not forgotten that, and brought a spare pair of glasses with me on this trip, just in case. A little bit about the Ratusz, this building dates from the 1550s, replacing an earlier town hall from the 12th century, and is now a museum. Its most famous feature are the two mechanical goats that come out at midday. The tower (and goats) were destroyed in 1675 by lightning, when a time traveller from 1985 attempted successfully to drive his car back to the late 20th century. There was a hurricane that damaged the tower in 1725, and the building sustained a lot of damage in World War II during the Battle of Poznan, and was rebuilt in the 1950s. I really liked all the green metal dragon gargoyle features around the building. That was a feature I noticed on the Armoury in Gdansk. I saw many dragon features around Gdansk, it may be a popular symbol in Poland.

Speaking of popular symbols, this is ‘Pan Peryskop‘, a very unusual sculpture located in Plac Bernardyński. The logo of the Symposium featured a cartoon version of this, and I soon discovered that those same cartoons and variants were spray-painted on walls all over Poznan. (Poznan, by the way, what a city for interesting graffiti, I loved it). It turns out the cartoon figure came first, created by a mysterious street artist called Noriaki. There is an article on Urban Sketchers about it: https://urbansketchers.org/2025/08/17/from-street-art-to-symposium-star-mr-periscope-welcomes-you-to-poznan/ Whether the man I had met the evening before around the Drink and Draw, who told me he was the creator and gave me a load of really cool stickers of Pan Peryskop for free which I placed on my sketchbook (seriously, people were envying my shiny Pan Peryskop stickers), was really the artist himself I’ll never know, but let’s just say yes he was, because he told me he was and I love free stickers. I read somewhere that Noriaki is sometimes called ‘the Polish Banksy’. I saw many other sketchers had drawn the sculpture so I went to look for it, a short walk from my hotel. It reminded me of No-Face from Spirited Away, but with a curved mirror. The sculpture is actually called ‘Selfie Watcher’. There were a few sketchers dotted around, and I drew a couple of them below sat on a wall, Julia from Ukraine, and Laeti from Berlin (but who I think is French).

I stopped to draw a hydrant (see the end of the post) while walking back into the old city centre, where I would be joining the early evening Sketchwalk, which would be around the, at the, it was somewhere in the old town. I need to look up the location, I cannot remember any of those long street names. Skwer Roman Wilhelmiego. I picked a big brick building and drew the top of it. The sky looked like a blue white and grey camouflage shirt. You can really see that bobbly paper. Having drawn a lot of towers and spires in Gdansk I needed to up my quota here, but only managed two of them. I sat and listened to a couple of sketchers from opposite sides of the world have a conversation about, I don’t know, food or roads or whatever. I’m not a good listener, I forget things easily. I saw some graffiti that said “Warning! Artists in the Area” That was right. I saw more Pan Peryskops around, and several cartoon pigs, there were a lot of those about, I liked them. As we all sat or stood about sketching, volunteers in orange hi-viz vests walked about slowly looking down sternly, as if they were inspecting the sketches. I started to imagine them as prison guards, the Urban Sketchers Police, checking to see that everyone is following the Manifesto. “What’s that, a ruler? Guards!” As with every silly idea I have, I found it hard to get that image out of my head, so when they weren’t looking, I made a run for it.

I went a couple of blocks away and stood right in the middle of Stary Rynek, the main square, which wasn’t part of the Sketchwalk route but I’m an urban sketching rebel. Plus I couldn’t find the next location on the map. I wanted to draw one of the rows of colourful old buildings in the main square; see below. I only had 30 minutes before the official end of the Sketchwalk, and I didn’t want to be late, I’m not that much of a rebel. So I went FAST. It may be one of the fastest most detailed sketches I did that day. I didn’t colour it in, except the sky which was pure theatre. I umped into some sketchers I knew, but I was on a mission and once the sketchbook was out I was in the ZONE. I didn’t even notice Rita Sabler took a picture of me sitting on the cobbles when I was adding my paint, oblivious to the man looking over my shoulder looking utterly perplexed or amazed at my sketch. Or maybe he was just thinking “why is he holding his pen like that?” or “wait are those Jurassic Park socks?” (which they totally are by the way).

I went to the final meeting spot of the Sketchwalk, which was uphill by the castle, the Zamek Królewski w Poznaniu, the Royal Castle of Poznań. I saw a few friends there, and sketched one of the volunteers (who signed it as Patyczak when I saw him again next day and was quite a funny guy) just before his call for the final photo, “Everybody here now!” We took our photos and most people went off to the drink and Draw; I was hoping to see Joe Bean in the main square so headed back down that way, thinking I’d join the others later. I never made it, too far to walk after the busy day, so after I bumped into a group of sketchers I knew I sat and had a drink in the main square, sketched them and looked through some incredible sketchbooks. I chatted with Sybille Lienhardt from Germany who had taken Peter Rush’s workshop, he is from Australia and he draws on the back of cereal boxes, these amazing big drawings. It’s something I should like to try. I also looked through her sketchbooks, wow! Her colours really jumped out. Detlef Surrey was there too but left early, he had to practice for his talk about his Berlin Wall book the next morning. I met for the first time Anne-Rose Oosterbaan, whose work I have followed for years and was amazed to finally meet, and see her incredible sketches in person (plus she knew of me!). I’ve seen so much of her work online that it doesn’t look real in person, and she was so productive on this trip. Also there was Peter Dutka who I had met in Manchester years before, I think he didn’t remember my name but called me Captain America (I wore the Cap hoodie in Manchester), I sketched him. His sketchbooks too were well impressive. Then there was the great Hungarian urban sketcher Örs Lévay whose sketches I have admired for years but I’d never met in person, lovely bloke. I sketched him in his hat. Also there was a sketcher from Hamburg whose work I have definitely seen but didn’t really know, Nicola Maier-Reimer, and I tell you what looking through her sketchbooks was a highlight of the trip, I’d never seen so many amazing sketches, particular her very comic style of sketching people, and her love of cars as well, there were so many stories everywhere on her pages. I sketched her too. Eventually it was getting late, there was another busy day tomorrow, so I went back to the hotel (but stopped to sketch the Ratusz, as you saw at the start of the post).

for some reason I’m putting these last two at the end of the post, they just seem to go together. One is a very old metal water pump I sketched on the Sketchwalk, how could I resist that. When I see metal pipes coming out of the ground I have to draw them. It’s like, these foreign cities know my algorithm, they know how to slow me down, make an ornate metal pipe appear every so often, and I’ll never get to my destination. I draw them fast though. The other is a red hydrant from Austria that I sketched on another street with a name I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce. And that was Friday, there was one day left of the Symposium, and that will be about three more posts, maybe a fourth. It’s only taken me six months to say what I did in Poland, and then there’s Berlin, and a few more days in London. Not to mention the rest of 2025. I’ll never catch up.

Poznań (Part 4) – Friday morning

February 7, 2026February 14, 2026Leave a comment

Friday morning at the Poznań Symposium, I was up at a good time and ready for a day of sketching. I had no workshops or demos to attend, but was planning to join two of the organized Sketchwalks in different parts of the city. I realized that I had not as yet been to the Old Town, just seen other peoples’ sketches of it posted online already. This morning though I’d be heading out with the group to Cathedral Island. Before that, I headed to the Symposium Hub at the Novotel Hotel for one of the morning presentations, and this one was by my friend Rita Sabler (who I also first met at Portland in 2010), who is an urban sketcher, journalist, musician and story teller, and gave a really moving talk called “The Power of Drawing in Telling Difficult Stories”. She travels all over, and so was presenting some of the stories she had documented on various assignments. I have sketched one of Rita’s talks before, back in 2016 in Manchester, and she is a really good presenter and empathetic teller of stories. “Drawing opens doors that would otherwise remain shut.” I drew another woman with pink (or maybe purple) hair listening to the talk (below) but didn’t catch her name. After Rita’s talk (there we are in the photo below, I’m wearing my Cameroon football shirt), I headed out to the meeting point for the Sketchwalk.

The sketch next to Pink-purple-hair by the way is London sketcher Lis Watkins, in the green jacket, who I’ve met a few times on our London sketchcrawls, I’m a big fan of her work. She was sketching over at Cathedral Island with so many of us. As a big crowd, we all got into the Poznań electric tram, and I chatted with some sketchers from Scandinavia. “This is the Symposium right here” I said, as we all squeezed in and tried to read each others name tags, “more than the sketching, it’s about all cramming into a tram and seeing where we end up.” It reminded me of the streetcars in Portland, or the buses in Manchester, or squeezing into that elevator in Amsterdam, sketchers off on an outing. We arrived at Ostrów Tumski, ‘Cathedral Island’, which is an island between branches of the river Warta, and is where the city of Poznań originated. The cathedral itself is one of the oldest in Poland. I’m a sucker for a cathedral, but it’s really nice to see one that looks so different from the big Gothic cathedrals of western Europe. I found a shaded spot in a garden by the river, chatting with Elizabeth Alley who told me a lot more stories about her Arctic adventure, and drew the view below. The bridge was red by the way but I never ended up colouring it in. I got to a point and was like, I’m done. This being on the portrait size paper, double spread, they always take a bit longer and I was really only interested in the cathedral. Looking at everyone else’s sketches though it did start to feel like I was deliberately not colouring in the obvious big red bridge, like a contrarian, but I really didn’t want to distract from the cathedral and that north-central-east European sky.

I went over the river and sat a bit closer to the Cathedral. I drew in pencil because I thought I might not spend as long faffing out with my pen, probably correct. I love those green oxidized roofs. It was peaceful over there, quiet. There were sketchers everywhere, quietly getting on with it. We all get it, we all know what it’s “for”. We all get it. It’s one of the things I love about symposiums, I don’t have to explain or feel like I need to justify why I need to stop and just bloody draw the world around me. I felt quite chilled at the end of this sketchwalk.

When we were all done sketching, we gathered in front of the Cathedral and did the obligatory and inevitable “Throw-Down”. People bloody love the Throw-Down don’t they. They all put their sketchbooks down on the ground, where people’s feet go, and all stand around the books like mourners at a grave, looking down at all the sketches from a distance of 5-6 feet which is totally how you look at art, no idea whose is whose. Like when I go to a museum, I always prefer it when they put all the paintings on the floor and make you look down at them. As you may know I don’t do the Throw-Down on my sketchcrawls, I prefer a show-and-tell, or maybe if we absolutely have to lay them out, then somewhere a bit higher up like a bench or a table. I don’t like leaving my sketchbook lying down on the pavement anyway. I did it once in France and a bike ran over it.

I met Kalina again who was wearing a Thor t-shirt, and also met with Mohan Banerji, a sketcher and actor who lives in Berkshire who I first met in Manchester 2016, it was really nice to see him again. I got the tram back to the city centre with him and a sketcher from Australia, Stuart Jenkinson (I sketched them both) and we had lunch at that place in the mall (where I had lunch every day, it was nice and there were always sketchers about). So far I was really enjoying Poznań, though I had still not sketched in the old town. I managed to finally do that in the evening, but had a brief rest at the hotel first to strum my ukulele and put my feet up.

Poznań Symposium – (Part 1) – Arrival

February 4, 2026February 14, 2026Leave a comment

And so, finally to post my many sketches from the 2025 Urban Sketchers International Symposium in Poznań, Poland. I arrived by train from Gdańsk, a ride of about three hours across the Polish countryside, and I could tell Poznań was a much bigger city. My walk from the train station to the hotel took about twenty minutes, and I nearly got run over once, but it missed. I got quite lost walking from the hotel to the symposium hub, which was in the conference area of the Novotel Hotel, near a big (and very nice) mall, but I arrived in time to check in and get suddenly lost and overwhelmed among the hundreds of people. It was my first Symposium since 2019, that’s six years, and I didn’t see any familiar faces at first. I picked up my goodie bag (there were so many goodies this year), mooched around the Art Market, and eventually bumped into a few sketchers I met at previous Symposiums and chatted for a bit while looking at all the art materials in our goodie bags. (I still have stuff from Portland 2010 in my art cupboard!) I find myself extremely shy these days when in a big crowd, and nervous about meeting people I don’t know every well in case I don’t remember them, or them me, but we’re all sketchers and all a bit like that I think. I did see a few sketchers who I’ve followed online but hadn’t met yet, but was a little shy to go and say hello. So I went outside to start sketching, because that’s what we are here for isn’t it, before the big evening reception that would kick the whole thing off. I sat on the steps outside the hotel and drew this scene above, which lots of solo sketchers were also sat about drawing. It was a busy road looking over at an old brewery building that had been converted into a mall and entertainment area, and this would be the starting point for most of the workshops and sketchwalks. I had a Workshop Pass where I’d take just one workshop (with Fred Lynch, big fan), and just sketch free on the other days. The sky was interesting, the paper in my sketchbook however still horrible, and this was shown up when I pressed the Symposium stamp on the paper, it looks like a brass rubbing with a crayon. Still as I sketched I did see people I knew occasionally and got up to greet and hug, it’s been a really long time. I saw Liz Steel from Australia and Paul Wang from Singapore, both of whom I’ve known since the start of Urban Sketchers, and so we got our now traditional photo of the three of us, which we’ve done since Lisbon 2011.

I started sketching in my small brown sketchbook which I was reserving for the quick people sketches I knew I would do a lot of on the trip. I often keep a small ‘people’ book at the Symposiums. This is my opportunity to draw as many people as possible, and I’ve remembered sketchers years later just because I drew them. I’ve been drawn many times myself, I look very funny when I sketch. Below are Delphine Devoilles, who I didn’t know but is from Clermont-Ferrand (I’ve met a few sketchers from there), and Reham Ali from Egypt, whose work I’d seen before. They got to be my first sketched people of Poznań!

After this, I took a break at the hotel (first of all getting extremely lost in the underground car park of the mall; ‘flight of the navigator’ strikes again) before heading back over to the hub for the Opening Reception. That was a lot of fun, there was food and drink, and I got to see many familiar faces from past Symposiums. I wandered and sketched people, and the current Urban Sketchers leadership as well as the organizing team from Poznan opened the massive event. I was lucky to get a ticket. When registration opened, it was the middle of the night over here in California, and I was out of town with friends visiting from England, so my wife got online and was able to get me registered when it opened at 3am our time. Tickets sold almost immediately. I knew a lot of people who could not go, and many came to Poznan anyway to join in with the activities open to the public. This event was for registrants only, and it was revealed that of the 500 people who registered, more than half were first-time Symposium attendees. Only a handful of us were there at the first one in Portland (but we got together on the last day for a special photo). I drew Ronaldo Kurita, from Brazil, speaking to the crowd. My first few people sketches were a bit shy and fast, but I got into the swing of it eventually. I drew the tall German sketcher Stefan Günther who I had never met before, this was a good trip for meeting new sketching pals, though I was still shy to say hello to people I did recognize but had not met yet.

There were a few women dressed in traditional looking dresses with massive (and heavy looking) floral headwear; these were the ‘Bambers‘ and are from Poznań. Well, as they explained, the Bambers were actually originally from Germany, from the city of Bamberg, but had moved to Poznań centuries before. In the early 18th century, this part of Poland experienced a terrible loss of population die to war and plague; in Poznań, the population had gone from 12,000 to 3,000. The Polish King Augustus The Strong (definitely a pro wrestler) invited families to settle in Poland, as long as they were Catholic (and especially if you wore massive hats made of flowers), and many families from Bamberg settled in Poznań and became known as ‘Bambers’. I think one went on to host the TV quiz show University Challenge many years later but I may be mistaken. The Bambers became very ‘Polonised’ (a new word I have learned, which means ‘assimilated into being Polish’ and has nothing to do with bees or indeed flowers, but I can see where you might make the connection). They are a very important part of Poznan’s identity and culture, and another reminder that every area in this big country has so many stories we might not know unless we go there.

I went around sketching some more people; above are Alexandra Rudneva (‘Barsketcher’) from Germany, who I had met briefly in Porto (she was in my sketchbook though I don’t think we spoke at that time), and Sybille Lienhardt, also from Germany, who I had met in Amsterdam and have followed her work since. I always enjoy meeting the German sketchers, there were a lot more at this Symposium being geographically so much closer, and I finally got to meet Detlef Surrey, the Berlin-based illustrator whose work I’ve been a fan of for years. I sketched him below. Also above are a couple of sketchers I’ve known for many years, Daniel Green (who I had already seen briefly in Gdansk) from Minnesota, and Elizabeth Alley, from Memphis, who I first met in Portland in 2010, another Symposium Original. It was really nice to catch up with them; I did sketch Elizabeth’s talk about her adventures in the Arctic which was so fascinating, I’ll post that later.

Above, Detlef Surrey (as I mentioned), he also gave a fantastic talk about his book which was all about sketching where the Berlin Wall was (I’ll post that later), and a local Polish sketcher Katarzyna Kostera (Kasia), who was volunteering at the event. There were so many volunteers, and they kept the Symposium running so well. Kasia noticed I was busy sketching and didn’t have a drink so offered to go and get me a beer with my drink token, which was a really nice thing to do, so I sketched her with her beer. The beer was very good, and the food was nice too, but the opening reception was soon over and I wandered home to bed, a long roundabout walk since I still had not found the shortcuts. I did however see this incredible fire hydrant on the way, and stood to draw that, and a German sketcher who had been at the reception stopped and talked for a while while I drew, but I didn’t catch their name. I felt pretty tired by the time I got home, and it was a busy schedule next day. Check back at some point for part 2…