i feel as though, you ought to know

April 26, 20234 Comments

And a few more from the UC Davis campus. It will be nice when I get back to the sketch-scan-post all in the same day (or at least same couple of days) routine like I used to have years ago, but I always let the scanning build up, especially when I have had some trips. We were in Chicago during Spring Break, and then I was in Berkeley for a conference, but I finally got around to scanning and editing all of my recent sketches this past weekend, no mean feat. Yet I’ve not been sketching every day, perhaps because I didn’t want the to-be-scanned pile to get bigger. Also, not been too inspired by Davis, although I still find things to draw on campus during those lunchtimes. Above, the final page of Sketchbook #45, a place I have drawn many times but it never gets old, Hart Hall. Hart Hall never seems to change. This was about when the allergies were starting to kick up again, as the blooms starting blooming-well blooming.

This was a windy lunchtime in February. What do draw? Well I stood outside the Teaching Learning Complex (which you’ll remember I drew a lot as it was being built) and drew the view towards the Silo area, I like all the triangles of that building. I like this sort of view, I can do different shapes, values and textures, though I always have to make sure I have enough elastic bands to keep my pages down when it’s windy.

Finally, another building I have drawn a lot is Walker Hall, which I sketched throughout its whole reconstruction into the Graduate Center. So many times over the past several years did I stand on this spot looking across toward Shields Library in the background, and this would be a building site, I would be poking my head over a fence with some bins in the foreground and some trucks scattered around. Not any more! Except on this day, as I sketched a Facilities truck came along and decided to park right in front of me, blocking the specific view I was drawing. I couldn’t really see over it, so I just though ah well, and came back the next day to draw the rest. This is a really great part of campus now. I think on our graduate open house it poured down with rain making a tour very difficult, if not impossible, but if I were touring graduate students now I would make sure they came to this place, to see this amazing new facility we have for them. And then there is the great Shields Library, which was the first place I spent much time on this campus, before I was working here (my wife was already an employee) I would come here to read books on medieval language, spend time in the computer lab writing and updating my blog (before it was a sketchblog, when it was just a here-I-am-living-in-America-now blog, the old 20Six one before I switched to this WordPress one). I don’t suppose I thought much in those days that I would still be here now, and sketching these same places, watching them and recording them as they changed. It’s not my actual job, but I feel like it kind of is my job. One day, these places will look different again. Though maybe not Hart Hall, that never seems to change.

E Street between 1st and 2nd

April 20, 2023April 20, 20232 Comments

Sketchbook #45 really took a long time. Or should I say, is taking a long time. Even though I have officially reached the last page now (and started sketchbook #46 last Sunday) I still have a couple of sketches from a recent trip to Chicago that I need to add some finishing touches to before scanning. Sketchbook #45 went from October to April, which is an unusually long time for me to fill a sketchbook, even longer to scan and even longer to post them all. It’ll be done soon, I promise. I try to work in a linear fashion. These sketches were all done in March along the same block of E Street, Davis. I’ve drawn all these things before, of course I have. I don’t think I ever draw a panorama of the particular stretch of E Street, from that angle, but now I have. I stood slightly in the street off the sidewalk, right next to the outdoor seating area of one of the small cafes along that row, and had to actually come back the next day because while sketching, a huge delivery truck parked in front of me blocking the entire view. Below, Orange Court, just across the street, another place I’ve drawn before many times. That’s where my favourite restaurant in Davis, Sophia’s Thai Kitchen, is found. I like their bar too and would go there about once a year (I don’t get out that much) to sketch it and try a ‘Lava Lamp’ cocktail. These are pretty typical Davis drawings for me. Maybe they could have been done by AI, as all the kids say now. You hear so much about AI these days, AI bots sourcing/scouring and stealing/recreating people’s art into something ‘new’, and then there is ChatGPT which has exploded everywhere suddenly, I’m hearing a lot about it in the university setting where I work, both negative and positive (I work with people very involved in machine learning). All that modern stuff these days, our new robot overlords. Differentiating between genuine writing and AI-generated text is getting harder, even though there are programs designed to catch people who use it, even those programs are getting it wrong by flagging up real writing as looking like it was AI-generated. In the past it was easy: if you were a human you would say “yes” or “I dunno”, while a robot would say “affirmative” and “does not compute”. I wonder if anyone would notice the difference between the real me writing and an AI mimicking me. I like to think there are enough things in the way I write and draw that make me recognizably human. An AI would probably include too many fire hydrants and references to football shirts. But then, these things are not the only way we present ourselves, we don’t only live in this global digital universe setting. There’s no AI that can actually show the real sketchbook, with the greasy fingermarks around the edge of the pages, or have a conversation with me where I get over-excited about paints. An AI cannot tell what I was listening to, or the smells in the street, or genuinely recreate that smudge on the paper where my brush slipped because a gust of wind blew my page at the wrong moment. Embrace the real.

That said, I like the drawn mechanical stuff. I have drawn these pipes (below) before, many many years ago, located at the back of the former Uncle Vito’s. It was a day when I needed to sketch, I went out and thought, yes this will do. You can imagine these pipes being part of the robot overlords snaking their way around the world. Who knows. Maybe we are too worried.

another san francisco day – part 2

April 15, 2023April 14, 2023Leave a comment

It was a busy afternoon in North Beach, San Francisco. I had already sketched a lot, but was still going. I sat outside Caffe Trieste, a historic old cafe once frequented by famous beat poets, musicians, actors, artists. Coppola wrote a lot of The Godfather while drinking coffee in here. I’ve sketched outside here before. I have never actually spent any time inside; I don’t drink coffee, and the line was always a bit long for me to figure out what else I might want; another time. I hear they make pastries. The cafe was opened in 1958 by Trieste native Giovanni “Papa” Giotta, who died in 2016; he was known as the “Espresso Pioneer of the West Coast”. I went to the city of Trieste in north-eastern Italy back in 2001, an interesting place, very close to the Slovenian border.

I stood on the corner of Columbus and Broadway, outside the Condor, and looked across to City Lights Books. Behind it to the left, Vesuvio. I’ve sketched this spot a number of times over the years, it never gets old. This area right here might be one of my favourite places on earth. City Lights is pretty famous, though not actually very big, and again has a long history with the beat poets. I must admit I’ve not really read any beat poetry. I’ve heard of all the names and nod knowingly whenever anyone reels them off, but I’ve not actually read any. Maybe I should, perhaps it will mean something, but I always imagined it as someone reading poems while someone else does beatboxing with their hand over their mouth, imagining something like a rap version of Wordsworth, “I wondered lonely as a cloud, yeah”, but it’s probably not that at all. I like poetry, I did well studying it at college, though I’m not sure I could do it myself, and I don’t like poetry enough to actually spend any time with it. I’m like Facebook friends with poetry, I’ll ‘like’ it but pretend to be busy if it wants to meet up for a coffee. Still, I had a look around the poetry room upstairs and nodded thoughtfully at all the titles. There were people sat reading as you’d expect; I thought one of them was Maggie Gyllenhaal sat reading a book by the window, but I never recognize famous people so it probably wasn’t. Although I did see Robin Williams once at the Farmers Market a long time ago (come to think of it, it was my wife who saw him, and I just went “oh yeah! wow.”). I thought I’d better actually look for that Paul Madonna book that was mentioned in the previous post. His first volumes were published by City Lights after all, but I couldn’t find it in here (I think they didn’t publish this one, but likely it was just sold out). I did pick up another book though, “Spirits of San Francisco” written by Gary Kamya, and illustrated by Paul Madonna, and took it across the street to read at one of my favourite bars, Specs. Read about San Francisco stories while sat in a place full of San Francisco stories.

It was however too dark in Specs to read anything. I love Specs. After a day on my feet, this is the place to stop and rest them, with a pint or two of delicious Anchor Steam, the proper San Francisco taste. It’s full name is Specs 12 Adler Museum Cafe, and it was founded by Richard Simmons, nicknamed ‘Specs’ due to the big glasses he wore. I took the seat closest to the window, underneath the orange lamp-shade. Still too dark for my weak eyes to read, it was barely light enough for me to draw (once upon a time, maybe wouldn’t have been an issue) but I was going to draw anyway. I had sketched a lot that day, this was a tired end of the day sketch, and one where I couldn’t really see colours on my page too well so I bathed it in a wash made up of the colours I could see. There is so much to draw in here, and I have done it before. I listened to the conversations of some people sat nearby, one older fellow was a music photographer or journalist telling stories about musicians from over the years, it was interesting. There are always interesting local people in this bar, I remember coming here once and sketching a panorama on one busy evening about a decade ago; the elderly barman that evening (who may have been Specs himself? Probably wasn’t) passed me a free Anchor Steam and told me that this was a place full of artists; away to my right a guy was oil painting on a canvas, behind me at the tables there was an older woman busy scribbling drawings in charcoal and pencil; I was definitely not alone. You never run out of things to look at, and sketch, in Specs. One of my most fun evenings in the city was spent here about thirteen years ago with my friend Simon, visiting from England, where we played a drunken game of chess in there and told silly stories. It’s still my favourite bar in the city, and this was the first time I’d been in since before the pandemic; so glad it’s still there.

Speaking of artists, back to Paul Madonna: I ordered that third All Over Coffee volume (“You Know Exactly”) online and have been enjoying going through all three volumes a lot. Here is a book review of it on KQED. I learned shortly afterwards that he had been in a really bad accident towards the end of 2022, when a driver going the wrong way collided with his vehicle in San Francisco and left the scene, leaving him severely hospitalized and lucky to be alive. I met Paul and his wife Joen in 2016 at the grand opening of the Manetti Shrem gallery in Davis, but I’ve been inspired by his work ever since seeing that first volume in a shop window in Berkeley in 2007 while on a sketchcrawl (when I was drawing a lot with purple pen, if I recall), and immediately getting excited about the linework and detail, as well as the subject, which was every corner of San Francisco (but erasing the people and cars, as I’d been doing). I still love his work, as it has developed over the years, and it reminds me to keep trying to look at the same places again in different ways. So it was a shock to hear of his awful accident which has prevented him from working, though there was an update in the past couple of weeks that he has finally been able to go back to the studio. There is a Gofundme fundraising page set up by the San Francisco Public Library to help Paul during his recovery. I really hope that he has a full recovery soon, and can continue to share his inspiring art with the world.

little red house

April 13, 2023April 11, 2023Leave a comment

I was walking through old North Davis on the way home when the shadow of this chimney across this little red house on 6th caught my eye and I had to draw it. I have that book about all the old houses in Old North Davis by John Lofland, but it’s in a different room right now and I can’t be bothered to go and look this one up. I do like red wooden houses. They remind me that I’m in America; I wouldn’t see red wooden houses in London, but I would see them in the things I associated with America when I was a kid, which was namely Richard Scarry books, and the A-Team, and I don’t really associate them with the A-Team (unless it’s an old barn that B.A., Face and co have been locked up in, along with a bunch of tractors, and they somehow build a tank and burst their way out, remember they used to do that? We would always play that part of the show on the playground at school). It also kind of reminds me of Denmark; back when I spent a summer in the Danish countryside picking red strawberries, there were many little wooden houses, long and low, many had thatched roofs, some of them must have been red. They would always have the Dannebrog flying from a pole, that’s the Danish flag. But no the main reason it makes me think of Denmark is every time I look at this sketch from the corner of my eye, it the red couple with the pinstripes puts me in mind of the great 1986 Danish kit made by Hummel that was worn at the Mexico 86 World Cup. Always a football kit reference with me. I’ve drawn a lot of the Old North neighbourhood over the years (those are the blocks after 5th Street, up to about 7th or 8th, in between about B and G). It’s a nice little area to stroll. This was on the weekend after my birthday, I must have gone downtown for a milkshake or something.

but things don’t really change

April 12, 2023April 11, 20231 Comment

Here’s one from downtown, the Yeti Restaurant. I sometimes get their chicken biryani, it’s quite nice. It’s on the E Street Plaza. It was my birthday week, and perhaps to fight off the thoughts of getting older, I needed to furiously draw in my sketchbook. So I drew this, but I didn’t eat biryani for lunch. I might have had it for dinner, I can’t remember now.

On my birthday, I went just eats of this spot to where the plaza (‘plaza’, haha; it’s a parking lot) meets F Street, so I looked over to Blaze Pizza. My family like Blaze, and sure it is nice, but it’s a bit thin for me. That’s where Tower Records used to be when I first moved here, then it was Dimple Records, then I stopped buying CDs and records and now music is just, oh whenever, look for it, stream it. Explaining to young people now that a record was not something you bought to be retro, music was actually something you had to look for. That One Way sign looks like it is pointing backwards, but we all know that life is a One Way street and there’s only forwards. So, I had to accept that another year had passed and my age counter clicked again, no point fighting it.

And seventeen and a half years after I got here I am still in Davis, drawing the same buildings downtown, the original intention being to fill my sketchbook with the place I was living at the time, and to show those at home what it looked like. Many places have changed in that time. This place on the corner of 3rd and D has not changed much, even that big sign has been there for so many years, and I sketched it a fair few times. I drew it on the day after my birthday, officially know as “isn’t your birthday around now? Happy birthday for whenever it was” day. Time keeps rolling by.

turtle recall

April 12, 2023April 11, 2023Leave a comment

This is the Turtle House on 2nd Street, Davis. I’ve drawn it before, and passed by it a million times, and it looks like another student house. It’s quite well known in town though as a place for events, bands will play there, bands have lived there I think, I don’t know; there’s a whole page on DavisWiki about the place. Reading that it feels a little bit outside my experience. They have an Instagram page too. Not having been a student here, and having only really worked with grad students and faculty during my time in Davis, there’s this whole undergrad student culture that exists in Davis that I know literally nothing about, and don’t really relate to much. Been a long time since I was a student, and that was in England. So I just draw pictures. It’s an interesting looking building for sure. The turtle is there, hanging above the porch.

another view of university house

April 11, 2023Leave a comment

Another building I have drawn before. University House, UC Davis, first day of February 2023. I’ve drawn it a few times over the years, from slightly different angles, but usually, curiously, in the winter, February or March. Below, sketches from 2017 and 2013. The first time I drew it, this was where SISS was housed (they handle the international scholars, visas and so on, for the university), but they have since moved over to the big International Center that was built a few years back.

University House was built in 1907/1908 as the house of the farm director when the campus first opened as University Farm, an agricultural research offshoot of UC Berkeley. It’s one of the oldest buildings on campus.

stump

April 7, 2023Leave a comment

Did I post this one already? With time moving along so quickly I cannot remember. January seemed to go on forever, and now suddenly it’s April. This is the stump of one of the trees that blew down in the massive storms that opened 2023. I sketched it, needing to sketch at lunchtime as I do, listening to a podcast about the Beatles as I do, documenting. The very next day, even the stump was gone. Goodbye big old tree. Gone to the great big forest in the sky, as they say. This was on Mrak Lawn, that green are in front of Mrak Hall, shaded with trees (well, fewer than before) and a nice place to walk through. As I sketched a couple of people said “hello Pete” and I replied although I don’t think I actually recognized them. When I’m in sketching world it takes a minute for me to remember people. This was a nice sunny day, not rainy and windy as so many days have been. This is a very unusual year for Davis, it’s never this wet. We were inviting in faculty candidates from all over the country, and I always use the pleasant weather compared to say Michigan or Washington at this time of year as a pulling point as to why Davis is a great place to live. It was a bit harder this year with so much fun weather. One thing I like about January on campus, you can always tell if someone is there for a job interview, because they are the ones walking around in pristine suits with well brushed hair, unlike the rest of us who are casual Californians. Anyway, it is now April, we’re still getting rain, but the sunshine is coming. It always does.

ruhstaller, dixon

April 6, 2023April 5, 2023Leave a comment

In late January, on a rare dry day, my wife and I went to a 50th birthday party for a friend we know in Davis (Jenna), who my wife actually went to school with (they were on the cheerleading team; there’s a bit of Americana for you, we didn’t have those at my school in London). it was at the Ruhstaller brewery in Dixon, near Davis, an interesting location that was definitely getting sketched. There were a lot of people there in the covered but large and airy barn, so I went outside and drew the building against the setting sun. The party was fun, the beer was nice, and it was a good evening. The only thing was that they had these wood fires for warmth, but inside; when stood next to or near one, you immediately smelled of wood fire. All our clothes reeked of it when we got home, it reminded me of nights out in Camden in the old days before the smoking ban. The wood smoke seemed to get into our pores, so I had to have a good shower that night and thoroughly wash all my clothes. That wood smoke would put me off going there again to be honest. But it was a popular place and the beer tasted very nice, and the party was enjoyable.

every sketchbook needs a race car

April 5, 20232 Comments

On one of those many ridiculously rainy days in January we went down to the California Automobile Museum to look at the old cars. I only ended up drawing one of them this time, and of course it had to be a race car. The 1988 March, driven by Steve Saleen in the 1989 IndyCar world series, was a cool little vehicle I just had to sketch. What I really want to do is sketch a Formula One car. I am more than a little bit obsessed with Formula One, and have been into it since I was a kid, my dad would watch it, back in the days of Mansell, Prost, and of course Senna. I’ll never forget the weekend Senna died at Imola, because I was watching the Qualifying the day before when Roland Ratzenberger died, and it was pretty shocking. I couldn’t believe the Sunday race went ahead, but when the greatest driver himself then died also? I still feel shocked and stunned by it. I still followed Formula One through the 90s with Hakkinen, Hill, Villeneuve and the other great Schumacher, everyone’s favourite loveable villain, who after a glittering world-beating career on the track ended up suffering terrible injuries in a skiing accident and has not been in public since. He was a classic racer, extremely annoying and easy to dislike early on, but by his later career you couldn’t help but be in awe. Then there was Alonso, who somehow is back and has three podiums out of three this season already, and along came Lewis Hamilton, a real British superstar right from his rookie season. When he won his first title with McLaren in his second season, on that final race in Brazil, I was watching on a terrible feed with no sound on my TV in California, and while I was delighted for Lewis, I was very sad for Felipe Massa who thought he’d done enough to win it, but it wasn’t to be. Lewis of course won loads more with Mercedes, and though at the time it felt like a gamble to switch teams to the Mercs, it really paid off. In between though we had the Vettel dominance with Red Bull, when my son was very little and that cocky young’un Seb was his first sporting hero (followed by Luka Modric and Gareth Bale), and the 2012 season I remember as being one of the greatest. Back then he loved his toy cars and we would draw these huge race tracks on poster board, one for each F1 Grand Prix, and play with the cars on them. Then the years of Lewis becoming all powerful, and even though some years it felt easy for Mercedes (that’s the nature of the sport, a great driver needs a great car, it felt like that with Schumacher and Ferrari, it feels like that now with the Red Bull and Max, even when Hakkinen was winning that McLaren felt unstoppable) there were some high drama years and I watched as avidly as ever, and I’m a big big fan of Lewis, and I hope he still has another good challenge in him. I am still feeling gutted and angry about how the 2021 season ended, when he’d done so much to come back and lead the title, only to be stitched up by the FIA on the last couple of laps of that race. That had been an amazing and dramatic season, the Max v Lewis, Horner v Toto, Red Bull v Mercedes season. And then the cars changed, Mercedes created a dud, and Red Bull got it completely right, and with Max Verstappen steaming away at the front they look like they will be unstoppable for a few years. Our nickname for Max is ‘Waluigi’, he reminds us of that Mario Kart character. (Side note, I love Mario Kart, and it was my F1 obsession that led me to buy the original Super Mario Kart not long after it came out, as it was the greatest racing game, and me and my brother will still play the original version all these years later). I’m not particularly a fan of Max, I don’t like his character much, but I do have admiration for him as an unbelievably determined racer, and the lad’s got talent. He may well be another Schumacher, if this Red Bull keeps developing. I’ve not even mentioned Jenson Button, who was one of my favourite racers, and the season he unbelievably won the title in a Braun, that white car with the neon yellow bits on it that looked amazing, in a year that felt like Formula One was turning upside down a little bit during the global economic downturn (remember that), that was still one of my favourite seasons of all time. Now, a lot more people over here are getting into F1, thanks to the popularity of Drive to Survive, which has for me at least brought the less well-known racing battles into greater light, the midfield drama that we often overlook when focused solely on the podium places. Formula One has always been a soap opera for me, and unlike football, where I only really love Tottenham, mostly indifferent to everything else (though I’ll sometimes watch Serie A) except for the kits which I’m obsessed with, and of course the World Cup, which is enjoyable except when watching England when it’s agony, or Ireland when it’s 1994. I don’t support a particular team, or even a particular driver, I just like the sport and the characters and the drama, and I just want good racing, although I have always loved Lewis. Here’s my sketch after he won that first title back in 2008, right before Obama won the presidency. I’ve not watched a lot of IndyCar, to be honest, whenever I do it’s really just to watch the few former F1 drivers taking part (like when Alonso was involved for a bit), but that’s usually a lot of fun as well.