Tag: moleskine 10

camping by the river

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thames jubilee campers

As some of you may have been aware, this year is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee – celebrating 60 years on the throne. It’s only the second time in the history of the country that a monarch has reached that milestone, the previous one of course being Queen Victoria. Long live our noble Queens, eh. On Sunday June 3 (59 years and 1 day since the actual coronation) a huge and historic River Pageant was planned, taking the royal party down the Thames followed by a large flotilla of boats. I was going to a street party in my old road so was unable to stand by the Thames in the rain with thousands of others (ah well, next time), so I went down to the river on the Saturday (June 2nd, 59 years since the coronation!) and sketched some of the people who would be braving the elements to see the Queen. This was down by Tate Modern, and the weather, while overcast, was very pleasant. The folks setting up camp had come from all over the UK, and the atmosphere was very happy. I think they were even looking forward to Sunday’s impending rain – nothing like a brolly, a cup of tea, a nice bit of cake and the Queen sailing by, Rule Britannia. Fair play to them. I sketched, and then moved on down the Thames to sketch some more.
sketching the jubilee campers

the clock at the top of burnt oak

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burnt oak broadway

This was sketched on Burnt Oak Broadway, at the top of Watling Avenue, on the corner of Stag Lane. This is another from the part of London where I am from, and this is the iconic building with the clock tower that was originally the Co-Op’s ‘finest grocery store’. That was long gone by the time I came into the world, and it was several things while I was growing up (I recall buying a stylus for my record player in there when it was a department store), I think it’s Peacocks now. Either way, that big clock tower sits at the top of Burnt Oak looking over us all, and it always reminds me of my Nan, who we called Nam, who lived in the flats across the road and spent many days in the Stag pub, directly opposite. Looking at it makes me feel very sad, and very happy.

On the other corner of Stag Lane there is the Nat West bank. This is the branch where I had my first ever bank account. Kids form the 1980s in Britain will remember the Nat West piggies, and I had the whole set of piggy banks, awarded when you saved to a certain level. My dad still has them, though one of them broke falling from a shelf when I was a teenager (yes, I had old piggy banks on my shelf as a teenager, and I used them too).

It was a cloudy day when I sketched this, the first day of June. We were coming to the end of our trip, and I was feeling pretty exhausted. Travelling back home takes it out of you, so it’s nice to unwind and just draw stuff. I haven’t done much drawing since I got back to Davis, hardly any in fact, and stress is getting the better of me, so I think it’s time I took my own advice and made time for it.

an afternoon at the allotments

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dawn's shed

One Monday afternoon while back in London I went to the East Finchley Allotments. My cousins have an impressive allotment there, and invited me along to do some sketching with them, and catch up after so many years. It’s been a while sincedawn's birdhouse I was in East Finchley – I used to pass through on my way to work every day, a million years ago it seems – but I found the place, a large and historic allotment site behind a primary school, surrounded by woods and residences. For those who don’t know, an allotment is kind of like a garden space that you rent and maintain for non-commercial use, a bit like the community gardens you get here in the US. My cousin Dawn (check out her lovely site London Clay Birds), who I had sketchcrawled with a couple of days earlier, met me and showed me around, and we did some more drawing. She built the shed above, in fact, and my other cousin Lester constructed the roof. It was a sketcher’s paradise, and very peaceful too. I drew one of several birdhouses (also Dawn’s creations), in that brown pen I go on about so much. My cousin Claire came along a little later, with their Mum Sue, and we had some lovely catching up. Claire brought her incredible sketchbooks too (check out her site The Quiet Revolution), and then we explored the site a bit more, doing some more drawing.

Some of the allotments really are rambling patches of loveliness, with a lot of hard work and devotion involved. I’m always impressed at the dedication people have to gardening; being essentially living things, gardens are not something you can just ignore. Dawn writes the newsletter for the East Finchley Allotments, and showed me the impressive map she is working on, hand-drawn of course. I like drawing old things like sheds, so we got some more sketching in. The one below drew me in largely because of the French signs in the window.

east finchley shed
It was a hot day, and after stopping to sketch the quick scene below (the sloping grounds of the allotments leading up to a primary school which looks a lot like the one I went to, but isn’t), we all sat in the shade of the allotment and caught up. Dawn gave me a bag of wonderful hand-made goodies, including some of the beautiful London Clay Birds (check them out on her Folksy and Etsy stores). It was a very nice afternoon, I hope to have more of them.
east finchley allotments

white hart lane

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tottenham high road
White Hart Lane Stadium, on Tottenham High Road, home of the mighty Spurs. Well, we could be a bit mightier, but still we’re pretty mighty. We ‘might’ have come third, etc, we ‘might’ have gotten into the Champions League, Harry ‘might’ have committed to staying about four months ago rather than let uncertainty about England affect our previously epic season, etc. It’s all water under the Stamford Bridge now (by the way we did finish above  Chelsea, though of course Arsenal pipped us in the end). Ah well! New season, new manager, new kit, new dawn at White Hart Lane. New stadium too, in a few years time, or so the plan goes. I hadn’t been up there in a good while, to the Lane, so on tis one day when a day trip to Brighton was aborted due to very bad traffic, my friend drove me over to Tottenham to look around the Spurs shop (I picked up a nice retro 1981 Cup Final top), and gave me a bit of time to sketch the stadium. There’s no truly great angle to draw it from the outside, so I chose a spot which I think sums up this block. Many of the older buildings which were there the last time I visited have been knocked down, in preparation for the possible new ground, to be built directly north of the current ground which Spurs have occupied since 1899. My older brother, an ever-present at the Lane for several years as a boy himself, took me to games when I was a kid, back in the days of Hoddle, Ossie, Falco, Clemence, the Allens. Whatever happens with this club, I will always have that. The thrill of approaching the stadium after a long walk up the High Road from Seven Sisters, and entering the ground which was smaller then but seemed massive with the packed terraced crowds, reading the matchday programme while bigger men around me sang, swore, shouted and clapped, as real-life football sticker heroes ran around the perfect turf; now that was football.

I didn’t have a great deal of time to sketch, so I drew the stadium and the outline work of the rest, and finished off the detailing and colour later on. I had to make sure there was a lamp-post – legend has it that the grammar school boys who founded the club as Hotspur FC in 1882 would meet beneath a lamp-post (and shortly after that they sacked their first manager, changed the lightbulb and ushered in a new dawn, the first of many).

observing the olympic village

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olympic village, london
We really wanted to see the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, East London, and here it is! As close as we are able to get to it anyway. The Olympic Village is not quite ready, and the public cannot access it, but you can get a great view from the new, massive shiny Westfield mall, opened as part of the Olympic regeneration project, and pretty much the only way into the Village from the station. Stratford is completely unrecognizable to me now. I used to come over here occasionally when I was at university in nearby Mile End to visit friends, and the idea of the Olympics, the actual Olympics, coming to Stratford back in those days was a laughable idea. Well it has happened! But of course they have had to remove a lot of Stratford to make it happen. From what I saw, I was impressed. Even the train from Camden Road, now part of the modernized ‘London Overground’ system, was a much improved pleasure. I got this quick sketch in from the viewing area inside the Olympics giftstore on the top floor of John Lewis; that tall red metal thing is a bit odd, its as if Wembley Stadium has had an argument with Magneto or something. It’s an imressive site, the Olympc village, though the stadium is not quite the eye-catcher that the Bird’s Nest was, and as for those other big expensive-looking modern buildings, I cannot recall what the signs said they were to be used for, clay-pigeon shooting or roller-skating or something. Still it’s exciting isn’t it! All the Londoners I spoke to seemed less than excited, sick of it already, too much money, blah blah blah. I can understand. The Olympics is a couple of weeks of sports you would never watch otherwise but it is such an honour you need to flatten decades old businesses to make it happen. I don’t like the corporate sponsor nonsense, how in the Olympics area you can’t use your Mastercard because Visa is the sponsor, I hate all that nonsense, making it more difficult for people. It will I believe ultimately be good for London – the city had its best face on, and I was impressed at the overall vibrancy in the city, being the Olympic and Jubilee year. I am happy for East London too. I for one was hugely proud of my city when it was selected (July 6, 2005), and then of course we had to deal with the terrible events on the day after. It may be a bit crazy when it’s on – security will be unbelievable, media rabble-rousing even more so, but despite the price-hikes it will be a great time to be in London, to show it off to the world.

I’ll be in Davis, watching it on the telly.

notre dame, the beautiful

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Notre Dame de Paris
Oooh, you don’t get scenes like this in Davis.

This is the Cathedrale de Notre Dame, on the banks of the Seine in Paris. As if this magnificent building needed an introduction! At the end of a warm day full of sightseeing and playgrounds and puppets, we went to see Notre Dame in the late afternoon sunshine. Ever since I was a kid it was one of my favourite buildings; I visited there when I was about 12 or 13 with school and loved all the ancient cold stone and gargoyles and colourful rose windows. The grey pollution has all been scrubbed off now, and it glows in the golden early evening light. After some time playing in the sandpit next to the cathedral, my son went home for a pre-dinner nap with my wife while I stayed on to draw by the Seine. I stood next to those guys who draw all the portraits for the tourists (they seem to speak so many languages fluently) and drew this remarkable view. I think I have wanted to draw this for so many years now, so I savoured every moment.

après-midi in the luxembourg gardens

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Palais de Luxembourg, Paris
After a morning of Parisian sightseeing (principally the Eiffel Tower), we had lunch at Quick* and visited the Luxembourg Gardens. I had never been there before, but heard they were pretty, and they are. They are also a great place for kids – in addition to the puppet theatre (which I’ll write about in the next post), there was a large pond on which little wooden boats could be sailed, plus an absolutely enormous kids playground. You had to pay to go in there, but really it is massive, so while my wife took my son there to play among the Parisian children, I took twenty-five minutes to go and sketch the impressive Palais de Luxembourg. The Sun was shining so I found a nice shaded spot and sketched away, finishing the colour later. I really like Paris, it’s a sketching paradise. I really don’t know how you could live there and not sketch everything every day.

*Quick…my favourite French (well, it’s Belgian actually) fast food place. So nice to taste their ‘Long Chicken’ again after all these years.
Sketching in the Jardins Luxembourg

under the sea to paris

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Eurostar to Paris

We went to Paris!! It had been a very long time, for me at least; France 98 I think was the last time, except when passing through en route to somewhere more southerly. We took the Eurostar from St.Pancras; my four-year-old son had been looking forward to this for a long time, the TGV Eurostar that goes under the sea all the way to Paris. He was so excited he had the hiccups. “This is the first time I’ve been to Paris with the hiccups!” he said. When we sat down however his window seat didn’t actually have a window; thankfully the kind French lady in the seat behind offered to swap seats, so he got his wish. We really had to go back to France this year; it’s ten years since my wife and I first Rue Daubentonmet in Aix, and we have been away too long.I sketched the above drawing in my Miquelrius ‘Lapin’ sketchbook, in dark blue micron and watercolour. I have taken the Eurostar many times to Brussels, but only once before to Paris. It’s quicker now, and St.Pancras is a beautiful station, but I do miss the old Waterloo departure, seeing the Thames as you rumble out of London.

We got to Paris, and packed onto the RER and the Metro to our apartment down in the 5th arrondissement. We rented an apartment in the Latin Quarter rather than stay at a hotel, and I must say it was an excellent decision, though we were only there two nights. This part of Paris is completely unknown to me, and I just loved it straight away; it’s nice south of the river! There was a bakery on the corner of the street, opposite the Metro, and a small supermarket around the corner, which was like heaven – so many familiar everyday things from ten years ago: my favourite French cereals, all the different Oranginas, all the different cheeses. It’s the miscellaneous details I like. The area had lots of shops, and I particularly love French bookshops (except that I can never work out the prices of things due to their card-shop-esque coding system). I picked up for my son a story book about the Eiffel Tower running away to see the world.

I had to draw the view from the apartment at night, and got a large bottle of Leffe Ruby (which was a lot fruitier than I expected it to be, and bubblier – it fizzed all over the place, so I only had less than one glass) and some cheese. It’s nice to be in Paris. Must go back more regularly!

More Paris sketches to come…