On Sunday, the last day of August, I caught the bus to Sacramento and walked around in the breezy sunlight, walking up to midtown, sketching a couple of things as I’ve not done here for a good while now, not since the sketchcrawl in March. Above, powerlines and some buildings and trees (for a change, eh), while below there is an old building I’ve wanted to draw for a while, the one next to the Streets of London pub on J street. Well now I have.
Do you remember Take Hart (and it’s later incarnation, Hart-beat)? Tony Hart was the art guy for a generation; famously named after three body-parts, he could do near anything with corrugated cardboard and poster paint (just as his caretaker Mr Bennett could always be trusted to get his foot stuck in a bucket), though most of us watched it for Morph, the little brown plasticine guy who could phase through tables but nothing else, and of course The Gallery. “Now it’s time for the Gallery.” For those Americans who don’t know, this was where the work of Britain’s young artist boys and girls was displayed to a backdrop of lift music and unpredictable camera-movements. Kids up and down the land who had submitted their work would sit anxiously, hoping their drawing of their cat would bring them a moment of fame. Kids who drew all the time. Kids like me. But not me.
I never submitted anything to the Gallery, because they had one infamous proviso: you will never get it back. “Pictures cannot be returned,” he warned us. So I did not send Tony Hart any of my drawings, preferring to wait until the internet age to start a sketchblog, and forego the music. I wonder what they did with all those drawings? Do they still exist? Does Tony Hart keep them locked in some underground storage facility? One day, they’ll surface; he or his ancestors will go through them and find an original Tracey Emin aged 7 (“this is everyone I ever ate crisps with”) or one by the 8 and three quarters year old Damien Hirst with his earthworm suspended in pritt-stick glue. And they’ll be worth millions.
Oh, the drawing? Sorry, yes it’s Hart Hall, UC Davis, and has nothing to do with the art-loving Tony at all. Drew and painted it today at lunchtime while escaping slowly moving shadows.
This week’s Illustration Friday theme is ‘detach‘. Here then is my entry: a picture of Burnt Oak tube station.
I think the reason is that, each time I go back home, I feel more and more detached from the place I grew up. How much further detached from it will I become; am I even really detached, or is it all just imaginary? This is Burnt Oak station. Second from last stop on the Northern Line. Not a particularly nice place to hang about of an evening, you might say (or daytime either). It’s on Watling Avenue (previously seen here). I’d come out of the station, look up the hill to see if my bus was coming, and if not, I’d walk home (only one bus stop away up Orange Hill). A favourite hang-out for dodgy kids with nothing to do.
And it rains there. It doesn’t rain here.
Was in Santa Rosa this weekend (weather much much cooler there, probably didn’t need to wear shorts); managed to slip away to do some sketchbook filling. This is Stanroy’s music center, it’s been there for a long time (thirty years or more). I remember coming here the first time I ever came to America, in 2002, and getting surprised at how much cheaper guitars were than in the UK.
Thankfully no children accidentally wandering into the picture (unless there was a kid inside having a clarinet lesson or something). I did the shadows darker than I’d meant to (because I normally undervalue them), but they were pretty much like this.
It was very hot again today, and I sketched this in the shade in Central Park, Davis (not the one in New York), looking over to where they hold the farmer’s market. But man, I got pissed off while doing it.
I had just finished the ink part and was working on the watercolour wash, headphones on and listening to pavement; i was getting a little irritated by the rising heat, and starting to get the uncomfortable impression that the bench I’d chosen had been previously slept in by someone very smelly, when a woman approached across the green and called out, “What are you drawing?”
“Eh?” I said as I looked up, thinking that was a pretty rude way of being nosey. “What are you drawing?” she repeated. I always hate that question because it’s usually obvious, I’m drawing what’s right in front of me. “That,” I replied, pointing ahead of me.
“Are you drawing the children?” she then demanded. This wasn’t the usual ‘I’m interested in art’ nosiness. She had apparently come from a group of mothers and babies sat across the park, and was referring to the young kids playing further across the park, about fifty yards from me. “Are you drawing the children?” she repeated. “No,” I replied, showing her my sketchbook (which I didn’t have to do). The only person in the picture was the back of some woman’s head, who’d happened to sit there for a bit while I was drawing, and I’d quickly included because of the great bike: very ‘Davis’.
“So you’re not drawing the children? What are you drawing?” I was a bit stunned, confused why I had to justify this to a complete stranger. “I’m drawing the park. I’m not drawing children, I don’t tend to draw moving things.”
“Are you drawing the play-structure?” she then said. “I’m drawing this” I repeated, showing her the picture. “So you’re not drawing the play structure?” I really didn’t like what she was getting at one little bit. And then she said: “It’s just you are making the mothers a bit nervous.”
And then she walked off, back to her group. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to go up to this group and tell them just how offended I was, that they should think about the implications of what they are saying before making that sort of accusatory confrontation, and that they owe me an apology (because she did not apologize before). I decided there was no point. It did affect the rest of the wash to be honest, I could have done a better job of it. I mean, a sketcher sketching in the park, with his little paint set, who is not even sat anywhere near their children? Plus the fact that I was there first! I was sketching before they even got there! I felt victimized to be honest, and angry. It is one thing to be protective of your children; I have a six month old baby myself, I know. My wife meets with similar groups in this very park. It is something else entirely to go about confronting innocent strangers the way that woman did. The “you can’t be too careful” argument does not fit with this sort of “everyone’s a danger, I don’t care who I offend” attitude. If it was someone taking photos of a group of kids, yes, I’d say that’s justified. But a sketching artist in a park at lunchtime, minding his own business and sitting nowhere near them? If I’d been writing into a notebook, or had nothing there at all, would they have bothered me?
As someone who draws every day (not to mention someone who normally avoids adding people to my drawings), I’m pretty upset about this. It’s the sort of thing that makes you not want to draw at all.
It was one of those lunchtimes that merited the purple micron’s reappearance – I don’t use him nearly enough. Everything looks more sunny with the purple. These are random doors on campus (guess where folks!) with no significance at all other than they were there and i had not yet drawn them. There are lots of things here I’ve not yet drawn, but it all looks the same at the end of the day anyway. Don’t ask about the border. There were ants crawling all around me and threatening to get into my paintbox, and I was listening to the lost world of david devant. You should too. Two days to the Olympics folks! One World, One Dream (One-party state…)
But even better: two weeks until the footy, oh man, summer’s long…
SF weekend, part 6: the journey home. Looking at my sketchbook there were some very green UC Davis drawings, followed by some very blue and yellow delta region from the train sketches, followed by some colourful bright blue, yellow, red, green ones from day one in the city. 
Then there were the muted, foggy ones, in browns and greys and dull greens. the journey home saw a slight bit of fog clearing, giving us the colour schemes of above. I never noticed all of this until later.
There’s Coit Tower, and the Bay Bridge, sketched as I waited for the amtrak bus to emeryville (I wonder how many google searches for that bus will now end up here?), plus san pablo bay, and some guy reading on the train. and the business card to the previously mentioned awesome zine shop in the mission I stopped in.
To illustrate those very differently coloured days, here are a couple of photos of my sketchbook:
SF trip, part 5: I got off the bus at the Castro, the city’s gay quarter, and pottered around bookstores and past sidewalk cafes, before placing stool on kerb and drawing, of all things, this rusty truck above. “You drew a car?” my wife exclaimed later when she saw it. It’s true, I do avoid drawing vehicles, but this one was so interesting, and I was inspired by other vehicular drawings I’d seen online. Time was pressing, so I had a (fairly unsatisfying) late lunch at the Bagdad Cafe before walking down 16th and finally back to the Mission. Last (and only) time I’d been was November, and I wanted to go back, if anything for a burrito, but mostly to sketch.
I sat myself on the slopes of Mission Dolores Park, listening to loud latino radio blasted across the fields where local lads played football (not a jumper for a goalpost in site, though), and art students nursed hangovers with beer, being all social and shit. The fog hung low over the city behind, obscuring many of the tall buildings downtown. A guy sat to my left tapped away furiously on his mac book while his dog asked passing strangers to play with him; further back, another group of people looked equally dangerous and uninterested; not far off, a bearded hippy wrote something negative about yoga. And I got my paint set out and sketched on the slope.
I wandered about on Valencia, looking in more bookstores and record boutiques, as well as the odd gallery, before a trip down Mission and into Central America, ending up at last at Needles and Pens to look through their vast array of indie zines (and purchase one or two). By this point I was ridiculously tired, and I had neglected to write down the train time back to Davis, so I forewent the burrito and hopped on the 14 bus.
I did draw the picture below, on a postcard, which I have subsequently mailed to a friend in the UK, who I think would have enjoyed going out sketching in San Francisco. I always do.
SF trip, part 4: After a fairly good sleep, I got up on sunday morning and found the nearest place on Polk that sold enormously sticky custard-filled pastries, and came across a little shop called “You Say Tomato”, which specializes in British (and Irish) foods. And to my delight, they had a can of Lilt!
Yes, Lilt, the pineapple and grapefruit fizzy drink, you can’t get it over here and it’s the perfect sunday morning (when you think you might get a hangover) beverage. They had other stuff, Tizer, Irn-Bru, and I purposely didn’t take too much of a look around in case I was waylaid by loads of cadbury’s chocolates, but I saw a man carrying five or six cans of Heinz Baked Beans: pretty obvious he was British. I found an interesting corner and drew the picture above while drinking my Lilt, carefully removing all of the cars to give the impression that SF has more parking than it really does.
Unlike the day before, Sunday was pretty cool and very foggy, which was a welcome change. I got on the bus and was changing at fillmore, in the bit with all the cute little shops and cafes, when I saw this movie theatre below, and decided to draw that too, in extremely muted sepia tinted colours. And I never did get that hangover.
I spent the weekend in San Francisco, joining the dots, travelling on buses, walking through to my soles and drawing. I noticed that time travels extremely fast when you cannot decide where to go; this was my first SF sketching trip of 2008 and I wanted to make the most of it, while covering some new ground, making discoveries. I discovered that the Nob Hill hotel is staffed by nobs, for one thing. Above: a very famous bridge. This time I walked beneath it and around to the rocky Pacific coastline, what an incredible sight. Below: first drawings of the day, courtesy of the amtrak train. There’s my muni bus transfer, there; a kind driver gave me one that lasted all day. I travelled by bus everywhere in the city for less than a quid. Ever had that in London? Didn’t think so. More to come.
petescully 