I weaved through the streets of Antwerp heading for the river Scheldt, to use that brilliant “thou Scheldt not pass” line I had thought of in my previous post. I might use that as a title for this blog post. I headed for Het Steen, the little castle on the banks of the wide river that is the oldest building in Antwerp. It dates from the early 1200s, and means “The Rock” (though “Steen” is a pretty common word for a stone castle in Dutch). There was a castle on this spot right back in the 9th century Carolingian period. It has a decent tourist information office in there now, where I bought some chocolates for my son (little chocolate hands from Antwerp). I had a good spot to sketch from across the busy street, up some stairs, but it was starting to spit so I sketched quickly. You know I love a street sign, so I made sure to include the blue crosswalk sign in the bottom right corner. Some people might think no, you leave those out, takes away from the historic castle, but I say thee nay, give me modern metal street signs and old medieval buildings any day. Back on my 1998 train tour of Europe I became a little bit obsessed with crosswalk signs, because they were a little different in every country. I liked the German ones in particular, wearing the little hat, as do the ones in the Czech Republic which look a bit like spies. I would always get obsessed with things like that.
I tell you what, they can’t get enough of those Flemish giants here in Antwerp. This is a statue of a big lad called Lange Wapper. It’s right outside Het Steen, and shows Lange Wapper doing that Tory-party conference stance and looking down on two smaller people, crotch out, threatening them with his Lange Wapper (I’m so glad he is clothed, unlike Silvius Brabo). Lange Wapper is a Flemish folk tale, about a boy who started out as a bit of parsley and cabbage and then became a bit of a trickster. He apparently saved an old woman who had been thrown into the river Scheldt by a gang, and the old woman gave him the ability to shape-shift, for example turning into a massive giant who could leap between towns. He got into all sorts of antics; he would probably be cancelled now. He is kind of like a bogeyman figure of Antwerp. This statue was put there in the early 1960s.
Not far from here I found another hydrant I needed to draw. This one had a peculiar sticker that said “Love the game, hate the business” and “Against modern football!” on it, which must really make the firemen think. Haha, a fire hydrant talking about sportswashing, the irony. Anyway I drew this down a fairly quiet street. Those few drops of rain I felt over at Het Steen were coming back, we were definitely going to get wet today. It’s good to keep adding new city fire hydrants to my big collection.
This is the Onze Lieve Vrouwe Kathedraal, in the heart of Antwerp. As well as fire hydrants, and crosswalk signs, I am obsessed with drawing cathedrals, though one subject generally takes a lot longer than the other. I drew this one looking upwards from a standing spot, all the benches in that particular square having been taken, and those clouds were pretty ominous. I did about 75% of it and finished the rest later when I was sitting down not craning my neck. The hours of the day were moving along quicker than those clouds, and I wanted to go and sit inside somewhere before getting the train back to Brussels, and have another hearty Belgian beer. I had a place in mind, but it would be a walk to get there. It took a while, but I beat the incoming rainstorm by bare minutes.
After my morning pain-au-chocolat I took a train from Brussels Centrale to Antwerp. It’s been 22 years since I set foot in Antwerp, and even then it was at night, and the one time before that it was a rainy dark grey autumn day. So I’ve never seen Antwerp in actual daylight. It wasn’t very sunny today though, but it was dry and good weather for sketching and exploring. It was a city that always interested me though, full of places to discover, and lots of shops as well. I don’t actually remember the train station being all that interesting, but my Belgium guide book put Antwerp’s Centraal Station as one of the big architectural highlights, and they weren’t wrong. After eating a quick waffle, I sat down on a bench and started drawing the scene below, but decided after about ten minutes that this would be just too much to attempt, I should do this later. In the main interior ticket hall there was a big basketball court set up with TV cameras, filming some famous Belgian basketball players bouncing balls about. Basketball is popular in Belgium; my local Charleroi team Spirou were quite good (and named after one of the local comic book characters). I went outside in the fresh North Sea air and drew the exterior (above). It’s pretty magnificent. Inside the mainline platforms are all on several levels, it feels a bit like a huge deep shopping mall underneath a Victorian exhibition hall. The building was finished in 1905, designed by architect Louis Delacenserie, and is sometimes nicknamed the “spoorwegkathedraal” (“railway cathedral”). I left the outside sketch unfinished as I wanted to move along and get some frites (it was nearly lunchtime already!), and as for the drawing below, I kept the outline I’d already started but ended up doing the rest later on from photos. So many details.
And so, into Antwerp. It was a fairly long old walk from the station to the main city centre where all the shops are. The first time I came here, on a gloomy day at the end of 1999, I was pretty excited by all the big shops, because it was better than what Charleroi had at the time. This time I was most excited to find a really cool art supplies shop, and spent longer in there than I meant to, buying quite a few little things. The woman behind the counter spoke to me only in Dutch, and I did manage a few words myself (I tried to learn Dutch twenty years ago but found it hard to speak because every Dutch speaker would only ever reply to me in English). I didn’t completely understand her, but I did my best. I really should get learning that language again, and it’s not hard to read. The Dutch of Belgium (which is usually called Flemish, or ‘Vlaams’) does sound a bit softer to my ears than the Nederlands of the Netherlands, and I really enjoyed listening to it while I was out and about. I discovered that even the garbage bins speak Dutch. As I put something into a bin, it made a funny sound, like I was feeding it. When I threw something else in, it made another sound, saying something in Dutch. The bins are very peculiar.
On Meir though, it was too noisy to listen to anything. Meir is one of the big shopping streets of Belgium, like the Oxford Street of Antwerp. I did pop down the adjoining street called ‘Wapper’ (they really need to put a Burger King on that street) to have a look at the Rubenshuis museum, where Antwerp’s greatest painter son Rubens used to live. I didn’t go in though, just mooched about the gift shop. I mean I like Rubens I guess, but I also really like drawing fire hydrants and there was one I saw on Meir that I really had to sketch. Meir was just so noisy though. There was some construction going on in a building nearby, the echo of the pneumatic drill bouncing off the buildings. There was a fire alarm in a nearby Primark, and the shop staff all stood outside. People passed by on their phones, dogs barked, and it was one of those moments when I have a bit of audio-sensory overload and can’t fully concentrate. I got through the hydrant quickly (there was a sticker on the hydrant that said ironically “Take Sides – Silence”) and went looking for somewhere a bit calmer.
I headed over to the Grote Markt. That’s where you’ll find the statue of Antwerp’s most famous hero – no not Rubens, no not Romelu Lukaku, no not Toby Alderweireld. This is the statue of Silvius Brabo. Now we enter the realm of mythology and city origin stories that we all love, like Romulus and Remus (Rome), King Lud (London), and He-Man (Manchester). Brabo was a Roman soldier, who cut off the hand of a giant and threw it in the river. The giant in question was a big lad called Druon Antigoon, and he would demand money from people who needed to cross the river Scheldt. (I really hope he would say “Thou Scheldt Not Pass!”) If they didn’t pay up, their hand was chopped off and thrown into the water. I would have thought that made it more difficult to put their hand in their pocket after that but giants might be big but they are not clever. He tried it on with Silvius Brabo. Brabo, who as we can see was stark naked, clearly had, um, balls. He told Druon Antigoon to go and do one, and while he was scratching his head to see if there was a pun on his name, Brabo beat him up. It’s not clear whether he had clothes on before the fight or if they came off during the fight, but in the end Brabo sliced off Antigoon’s hand and slung it into the water. Everyone thought that was hilarious, except Antigoon, who left the story at this point. So the people decided to honour Brabo by calling the region ‘Brabant’ (dubious mythology klaxon #1), and calling the town ‘Antwerpen’ (dubious mythology klaxon #2). Antwerpen means, so the tale goes, ‘hand throw’, from ‘hand-werpen’ in Flemish. Ok, let’s be fair, Antwerp is almost certainly not named after this event (poo-poo on your parade klaxon #1) but it’s a much more fun story than the likely real etymology (something about wharves or mounds on riverbanks, nobody knows for sure) but it’s a fun story and even if it’s not true, we can say it is because who cares.
“Hand-throw”, yeah alright. Imagine you are one of all those people Antigoon dismembered, and then they go and name the town “hand-throw”, well it’d be a bit of a slap in the face. More likely it was already called “hand-throw” before Brabo showed up, maybe Antigoon himself named it so people knew what they were getting themselves into. The Grote Markt is a pretty nice square. The statue of Silvius Brabo (after whom the Duchy of Brabant is definitely NOT named; if anything his name comes from that) is in front of the town hall. Around the square are the old guildhall buildings. Antwerp is a historic Flemish merchant port with a rich history. I sat at a little tavern (‘Den Engel’) on the square with a delicious Maredsous beer, wrote some postcards, and drew this. I remember coming here on that damp and gloomy day in 1999; I also remember coming here in early 2000 after a day out in Ostend, and spent much of the evening at a nearby pub where people were singing karaoke. Chatting with locals, I was encouraged to sing too, and I did a version of the Pulp song ‘Help the Aged’, a version in which the words had been replaced with football-themed lyrics, called ‘Help the English’. That version was written by me and my friend Roshan, along with many other popular songs that we had re-clothed in football colours. ‘Help the English’ was probably our favourite, all about how England might need help because they can’t win trophies (no change there then, though the caveat now of course would be that it just means the men’s team). “When did you first realise / You’re never gonna win another World Cup? / Sixty-six, don’t it make you sick / Funny how you’ve won nothing since.” Anyway the Antwerp crowd in the room, well some of them liked it, others were either England fans convinced that Euro 2000 would be their year (spoiler alert, it wasn’t), or people who disliked football and assumed it was just some English hooligan chant, or massive Pulp fans who really wanted to hear the right lyrics. Still, it got a cheer (just one cheer) (and I probably misheard it). There were these two women who walked out, and then came back inside right after I was finished. They actually told me (in that straight-talking Flemish way) that it wasn’t only because I changed the lyrics, or that it was about football, but because I just couldn’t sing at all. I mean, yes, this is true, but ouch. I’m surprised they didn’t throw my hand in the river. Instead, they brought me some sandwiches, for some reason, and I chatted with them all about music until it was time for my train back to Charleroi. The year 2000 was a long long time ago.
I’ve always enjoyed the cafe A La Mort Subite in Brussels. ‘To Sudden Death’. You may have heard of the beer. I’ve sketched here before, and years ago when I had my rainy year in Belgium, this is where I would come sometimes on a weekend to dry off in the early evening, usually after a day of wandering about Brussels, to sit and read a book with a glass of their lovely Gueuze. It hasn’t changed much over the years (except for one important thing – it doesn’t reek of smoke like it did back in 1999). It opened in 1928, and is a proper heritage site. I always liked sitting at the little wobbly table inside by the door, and remember playing chess there years ago. I always make a point of stopping here whenever I visit Belgium, and this time I made sure my hotel was right around the corner. After taking a quick rest in my room, I came out and drew the outside (I was very happy with how this turned out), before coming in for some beer and food. I got myself a lambic blanche (a wheat beer made from ‘lambic’, which I think is something to do with sheep) (took an effort not to order a ‘lambic baaa-r’) and found a spot with a good view to sketch from. My food came quickly, a very eggy omelette full of mushrooms, and the longest slice of bread you ever saw. Seriously it was about three or four regular slices in length. You could have used it as a yoga mat. I took my time, that’s the way at a Belgian cafe, and listened to the French conversations around me. I didn’t hear much Flemish (Dutch); although Brussels as the capital is officially bilingual, with everything in French and Flemish (not to mention every other language you will hear spoken here in this capital of Europe), and despite being landlocked in a sea of Flemish language areas, French is still very much the main language of Brussels. I remember when I was in Belgium it was explained to be roughly 70-80% French speaking, with the remainder being Flemish-speaking (not including the not-insignificant number of languages spoken by the many, many other nationalities living in Brussels of course). Actually, I say I listened, I didn’t really listen very much, I was inside the page of my sketchbook. I had another beer, a peche (a peach beer), and went back out to finish off my big Grand Place drawing.
My legs were tired after the big Grand Place sketch. The weather was nice, the big rainstorms from the day before in Lille had not followed me to Belgium, though they were probably not far behind. I imagined myself as being on the run from a big storm, like the little fellows in Time Bandits. I strolled past chocolate shops and friteries, wandered about looking for Mannekin Pis, a famous little statue of a small boy doing a wee, which despite never changing location in all these years I always seem to have trouble finding. I needed a rest now, and after that long session stood drawing in the Grand Place I needed a Belgian beer a little stronger than a lambic blanche. I’d never been into the little tavern Au Bon Vieux Temps before, though I had passed by the narrow alleyway that leads to its door many times. “At the Good Old Times“. It’s opposite another very old bar, A l’Imaige Nostre Dame, which I’d also never once visited. Why I’d never been in those places I don’t know, but I think I was perhaps a bit nervous of them. Something a bit scary about going down those medieval nooks, perhaps I had read too many fantasy adventure stories when I was a kid, and expected to be jumped by vagabonds or goblins. There were no orcs or padfoots in here though. It wasn’t busy – it was a Monday evening – but there were a few people seated at the bar chatting (in French and American). I could have spent hours sketching here; if I ever come back, I may well do. I found a table with a view of the bar and the big colourful stained glass window, and got myself a dark Orval trappist beer. The bartender was friendly, the atmosphere was warm. I drew fast; this felt more like a cool-down exercise after the big Grand Place panorama, but in truth I’d been sketching non-stop for three days straight and had no intention of slowing down now.
It didn’t take long for me to fall asleep. The next day I was going to be back riding on the train tracks again, to explore the port city of Antwerp. Good old times.
I left Lille before lunchtime, flying through Flemish fields on a busy train bound for Brussels. I have this life-long affinity with Belgium. Well I say life-long, I had zero affinity with Belgium until about 1999, when I was sent on a year abroad there by my university. Even then, I wasn’t sure I had much affinity with it, but I lived there and befriended the country and developed a deep appreciation for the place, which is so often overlooked and even mocked by people who have never been there. Belgium is Belgium with all its fun foibles, nobody knows that more than the locals, but it always feels a little bit like home to me, and coming back I never feel out of place. I last visited here in 2019, when I saw a fair bit of the country (Brussels, Ghent, Liege, Bruges, and the long-awaited return to Charleroi, the city where I spent that year abroad). I was coming here for just a few days, staying in Brussels the whole time but with malleable plans to see other places, and unlike in 2019 I’d not made any plans to meet up with Belgian sketchers that I knew, this was just going to be a few well-needed days to myself. After the pandemic cuffed my wanderlust, and after the past couple of years of what felt like endless soccer coaching obligations, a few days to unwind in one of my favourite countries where I don’t have to rush about worrying about seeing certain things or missing important sights, that’s what I needed. After finding my hotel (Hubert, a short walking distance from the Grand Place and the Centrale station and right by one of my favourite cafes, A La Mort Subite) I strolled familiar streets, gobbled down some frites drowned in sauce andalouse, and went to the Grand Place to stand for a couple of hours. I have wanted for years to come back to the Grand Place with my sketchbook and just spend ages drawing. I drew here back in 2019, but I was always on my way somewhere and didn’t really give myself the time. Now, I had the entire afternoon and evening if I wanted, I didn’t have to be anywhere. So I stood and drew. The results are above; click on the image to get a closer look. This is drawn on a double-page spread of a landscape Moleskine sketchbook (as are most of my panoramas) and I initially thought about colouring it in – you can see that there are very small spots of green which I added very early on in the drawing – but after two hours of drawing windows it was obvious that wasn’t happening. In fact after two hours, I had to go and rest for a little bit. So I came back a little later in the early evening, after eating at A La Mort Subite, stood in the same spot and continued for another hour until it was done. A very nice time was had by all (me).
I did quite a lot of sketching in Belgium (of course!) over the next few days, so I will post those all soon, but wanted to put this Grand Place drawing here on its own. Next time I go back, I’ll draw the other side.
A little pause in the travelogue, somewhere between France and Belgium, to come back to California. I drew this in June, the building across the street from where I work. It’s the Earth and Physical Sciences Building, drawn for a colleague from that department who retired at the end of June. There’s the water tower in the background. We are right now in the midst of a long hot summer, I’m not really a fan of hot weather. I actually drew this from a photo (you can usually tell), though I’ve drawn this view a few times from similar angles. This one was from a photo taken in the middle of the street. The building has big rocks outside, all around the edge, because they study geology here (in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department). I sometimes wish I’d been a geologist. Actually I say that, I don’t really, but it is an interesting profession. We didn’t have geology at my school, at least not when I went there. Some of the older boys at the school talked about having taken geology at some point, but it seemed like something long gone in our school curriculum by 1987, and we just did boring old chemistry, physics and biology. I think we did learn about rocks in geography, come to think about it, but I probably thought that was boring too. My son likes geology, and when he was smaller and had to come to my office during summer breaks in years past we’d sometimes talk a little walk around this building to see the big rocks.
It was nice on my second and final morning in Lille. The rain had stopped, the sky was bright with patches of cloud, and the sketchers were still everywhere. I walked over to the little patch behind the Treille cathedral, as drawn by pretty much every urban sketcher in this whole Rencontre, and drew the colourful little houses. These narrow little buildings reminded me of the ones I had drawn in Liege a few years ago. As I sat on the little bench, more and more sketchers came and started drawing (there is just one in my picture, there were at least seven or eight just in this view by the time I stopped, but I’d alreayd drawn that bit). I spoke to a couple of them in French, exchanging tips on pens and other art materials. I was going to draw the cathedral itself but the morning was already getting away from me. I had booked a train ticket to Brussels for later that morning.
I did get a couple more quick ones in. This is a Lille fire hydrant, because I have to draw a fire hydrant in each town. I think I have drawn ones like this before in France. You might like to see a Flickr album of my hydrant sketches. Below, a sign I spotted outside one of the ‘estaminets’ (restaurants) nearby, with an example of the local ‘ch’timi’ dialect. It says “Qu’o qu’in minge ichi? Des vraies frites d’ch Nord Chti Miam!!” Now I know you’re thinking “haha, a rude word”. What this actually means is “What can you eat here? Proper fries from the Chti North, yum!” Or something like that. It was time to move on from one place that does great frites to another place that does great frites, Brussels. See you en Belgique.
The sudden storm from the night before turned into a steady shower through the night and all morning in Lille. I don’t mind, I like the rain, and the day before had been very sunny. On rainy days when travelling with a sketchbook you do have to be creative, and open to the fact that maybe you will need to sketch inside a lot more, or just have a different experience. I live in Davis California nowadays, so rain is a proper novelty. That said, I went out for breakfast pastries in the morning, and I just had to try and sketch the bakery. Paul is a chain, but the bakery still looked like a good sketch. However there was very little shelter across the street, so I stood back to the wall holding my sketchbook upright and drew what I could, adding in some colour when I got back to the dry hotel room to eat my pain au chocolat. Oh man, French pastries for breakfast is still my favourite thing to wake up. Although on our second trip to France in July, I could tell my wife was getting a bit bored of them. I particularly like the pain au chocolate aux amandes, the one with almonds in it, it’s delicious. Big fan of an escargot as well (the sticky raisin-filled pastry shaped like a snail’s shell).
As I say, you have to be creative as a sketcher when it rains, and you also have to seize the best spots before they are taken. Here at the back side of the Notre Dame de la Treille cathedral in the middle of Lille I found a shop on Rue de la Monnaie that was not open but still had its awnings out, with a good view down the alleyway leading to the bluish-grey hued church. It was raining steadily but not yet too hard, and generally people weren’t under umbrellas. Another French sketcher came and started sketching underneath the awning too; events like this are nice because there are so many sketchers around and they all say hello to each other, and you get to see other peoples’ styles. Some more passed by, evidently looking for a dry spot. Several French sketchers I had met were seeing Lille for the first time, like me, though I did speak to a local while drawing this as well, he was telling me about how he loves living in Lille. It’s a nice place (and in a great location, so easy to get to London…). Though as with everywhere else in this part of Europe, you get used to the rain. I spent a year in Belgium, I saw my fair share (it rained a lot more there than even in London).
Next up, I stopped at the interesting-looking Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse. While I didn’t go inside the museum itself (I’m here to sketch outside! Rain be damned!) it was interesting to walk around the courtyard and some of the grounds. There is a big purple ‘cosmic serpent’ sculpture as you go inside – two serpents, actually – but it was just too wet to really draw those. There was a small covered area in front of a corridor facing the courtyard, where about four or five sketchers had installed themselves on various little stools. There wasn’t much room, but I squeezed in out of the way, and held my sketchbook vertically to attempt to draw the clocktower. It looks like the two serpents are waiting for someone to come and let them in, or out. The rain was pouring down by this point. I listened to the other sketchers talking in French, they had some very nice art styles. Behind us there was a corridor leading to the Jardin Médicinale, and I could see someone drawing what looked like a little figure with a pumpkin for a head. The sketcher left, and I drew the corridor with pumpkin man at the end of it. He looked a bit dejected, poor pumpkin head. I walked down to the little garden, and it was full of similar figures with pumpkins and other such vegetables for heads. Very realistic little people they were, with believable poses, doing things like watering the plants, or climbing a ladder – I drew that guy quickly. They are called Minitos, and were made by Jean-François Fourtou. according to the Lille 3000 Utopia site, this project originated in “a tale that the artist recounted to his daughter about little characters who lived underground in their garden, digging labyrinths and growing things in the vegetable garden.” I enjoyed being around them. The rain kept on coming down though and I was getting hungry (though maybe not for pumpkin soup), so I went to look for lunch.
Saturday evening in Lille, I had dinner outside at a little restaurant near the Port de Gand as it got dark, eating a delicious ‘ch’timi galette’. I did keep seeing these things on the menus of all the ‘estaminets’ in the area called ‘Welsh’, which is apparently a local specialty. The descriptions I was given made it sound like they mostly had ham in them so I gave them a miss, as I don’t eat ham, but will look a bit harder for a non-ham one next time. I was out by myself, and I wanted to try some local Nord-Pas-de-Calais beer before heading to bed, and there was this one little place called ‘Bierchope’ that looked inviting. I could tell as soon as I walked in that this would be a sketch, though you don’t see all the bottles behind glass along the wall behind me. This place had a ridiculous selection, specializing in all the beers in that part of France, so I sat next to a group of people all chatting in the northern French dialect, ordered a really nice beer called ‘Beer Choper’ (the label was amazing), and got the sketchbook out. Within minutes, a massive rumble of thunder. Outside, rain started absolutely belting it down. Minutes earlier I had been sat out there at a table with a galette wondering what a Welsh was, but I’m generally lucky when it comes to these things. The downpour was so heavy and sudden, the noise of the rain was almost matched by the panicked patter of feet splashing down the street for cover. Well, I guess I’m in here for the evening. Flashes of lightning raised a few eyebrows as they reflected through the bar. The bartender was very friendly and played great music. All along the stairwell were framed illustrations of other bar and cafe scenes, not too dissimilar in style to the way I like to draw. When I’m relaxed like this and in a good mood, the drawing really comes easy and quickly. I had had a good day of sketching – it’s never enough, I always need more drawings, but this was a good way to round things out. For my second beer, I went to the barman and asked his opinion, what local beer should I drink? Without even asking what I liked, he grabbed a bottle from the fridge, opened it and handed it to me, a beer from a local brewery with a name like ‘Piggy’, I don’t remember exactly. It was ‘coconut flavoured’, he assured me. A bit too much so, for my liking, but I bought it and I drank it. Not sure of the coconut connection to the coal mining towns of the Ch’Ti region but I suppose when it’s stormy outside, it reminds you of being in the stormy tropics, on a beach somewhere. I really liked this place, and this was my favourite sketch from Lille. Had I not been travelling from north London since 7am and wandering about Lille with a sketchbook all day, I might have stayed for another beer recommendation, but my bed was calling, and I had a full day’s sketching and exploring ahead of me the next day. Just before I left Bierchope, the rain completely stopped. Perfect.
I arrived in Lille by Eurostar and was immediately overcome with a pretty happy feeling, the one I always used to get when arriving in a foreign country. I had all the time in the world. I was in Lille to attend the Urban Sketchers France Rencontre Nationale, a huge gathering of sketchers from all over France and neighbouring countries, just to sketch everything, not a bunch of workshops like the Symposium, it’s just all about sketching and gathering. I last went to one in 2015 in Strasbourg, one of my favourite cities: https://petescully.com/tag/usk-rencontre-nationale-2015/, and have always wanted to come back to France and sketch again. I usually know a lot of the people that come to these ones, and I have to work on French; this time I didn’t really tell many of my francophone sketching friends I’d be coming, mostly because I wasn’t 100% sure myself that I would make it. After the past three years, along with the family events happening in London (the day before was my dad’s birthday), I had low expectations of this trip actually happening, so I didn’t want to go making plans. So it was really funny when I first arrived in Lille just after lunchtime on the Saturday and was looking for my hotel, when I bumped into sketching friends Fabien DeNoel (from Belgium) and Vincent Desplanche (from southern France), drawing a complicated building across the street. That was a nice surprise! Fabien told me that Gerard Michel (his uncle and one of the urban sketchers I’ve known since the very start, I stayed at his house a few years ago before the Amsterdam Symposium) was sketching in the main square, but I could not find him. My hotel was very close to the square, which is pretty big, and so after putting my things away I went outside and drew the scene above, from right across the street. That is a very similar view to the one I did in my Virtual Tour de France last year (a virtual sketching project I am still working on, very slowly – I have had two real visits to France since starting the virtual one). The huge Beffroi of the Chamber of Commerce is impressive. Lille is an impressive place, and I can’t believe I’d never visited before, given how close it is to London. The station where the Eurostar stops was only a short walk away from the centre-ville, and the city had a nice buzz about it, a ‘first weekend in June’ kind of feel. I could see sketchers dotted about all over the place, I didn’t see many other faces I recognized yet, but I could walk past Godzilla and not notice. I passed through the Place du Theatre past the opera – there was a big musical performance happening outside. There was a pretty lavish looking building opposite – the Vieille Bourse – that I passed through, there was a courtyard in the middle with booksellers and a bunch of sketchers, and on the other side was the Grand Place du General de Gaulle, a big busy square. There were people with sketchbooks everywhere. I found a shaded spot under a tree directly facing the Bourse, and took to sketching all those windows. Other sketchers I spoke to in the following couple of days had also been sketching all those windows, so many windows. Every window counts! But they really do seem to multiply as you start drawing. As I was sketching, the Grand Place became more and more colourful, as this was the weekend of Lille Pride. They came through at just the right moment, a way to break up the monotony of drawing so many windows.
It’s hard to draw so many people moving past but I gave it a go! It was a very musical and entertaining parade, so colourful (using the waterbrush you have to be quick doing the colour changes) but thnakfully some people did stop for a bit so I was able to sketch them for longer. There is one sketcher on the edge of the picture, she was stood to my left, I think she was from Paris. My favourite sign was the one that read “Mieux Vaut 1 Paire de Mères qu’un Père de Merde” (“Better to have one pair of mothers than one shit father”; the pun works better in French). There was also one guy I sketched who kind of reminded me of Timmy Mallet. I wanted to draw the large elephant that was passing by as well (not a real elephant, just a massive painted model) but it went by so fast all I could get was a brief sketch of it from behind. Once the parade had all passed through, I got back to sketching the windows of the Bourse. I do enjoy drawing parades and marches, because it’s an intense quick piece of work and you have no idea how it will go, or what is most important to draw bigger or smaller, so all you can do is draw reactively and see how it ends up, and however it ends up, that is the experience. That said, I’d not been around so many people in a while – well, at least two days, since the Jubilee, a different crowd with more blues and reds and royalism – so my crowd panic was in there, and at those times I need to be drawing something to stay relaxed. The colours and music and festive atmosphere helped though.
It was a pretty warm afternoon, and so I wandered off for a cold drink, and found one of very few places that sold Pepsi Max, and sat outside to draw the view below, looking towards the thin tower of the Hotel de Ville. I like the distinct style of the towers on buildings in the far north of France, it reminds me of passing by places like Calais on the coach when I was young, along with the unusual water towers dotted around the countryside. I used to say I would love to write a book about those water-towers, and draw them all, but actually when I think about it, no I wouldn’t, I’d rather do something else with my time. I do like this particualr tower in Lille though, it’s comically thin, like a belfry that’s been on a diet. I enjoy drawing these streets, and if you look closely, some of the buildings look like the French flag.
I looked up where the early evening pre-dinner meeting of sketchers was going to be, and I walked over there but most of the people had left. I did see another sketcher who recognized me from one of the London sketchcrawls a few years ago, and a few other faces I wasn’t sure if I remembered. I didn’t have a ticket to the main dinner event and planned to meet up with my French sketching amis the next evening, so I just went back to the hotel, and rested my legs before heading out for dinner. The sky was grey by this point – rain was coming in – but the early summer evening light meant i had to grab one last outside sketch, so I drew the distinctive dome of the Hotel Carlton. I would have liked to have stayed here, but I saved a few Euros and stayed at the Ibis instead. The sunset was not so dramatic, but the light had a dramatic effect on me so I interpreted it like this – it may have been shades of sunlit grey but this is how it felt. There’s a lot you can do with a grey sky. I only needed the outline and a column of details down the middle and the sketch was done, this is all you need for the mind to fill in the rest, but this also makes the main focus stand out. I was quite proud of this sketch. The day being done, I went off to find some food.
So anyway, the Queen had yet another Jubilee, this time for being Queen for 70 years, which is a record for an English monarch. British monarch too I think. It’s a long time. I think that is to do with modern medicine, but then Victoria was around for ages and she lived in the Victorian age. Elizabeth I also went on for what seemed like ages, and that was in the Elizabethan age, which was probably disgusting. In terms of the all-time world monarch list, Queen Liz Two is actually second only to Louis XIV, the French ‘Sun King’, who is one of only two monarchs on that list to get a song on the Beatles album Abbey Road (the Queen was the other, making an unnamed appearance in Her Majesty). She recently overtook Rama IX of Thailand and Johan II of Liechtenstein (both kings in the 70 year club), though the latter uses the same theme song as our Queen Bess. In two years Elizabeth II will take the crown from Louis Quatorze, assuming she is still with us and we haven’t started the Short Reign Of Charles III yet. Then again, there is another king who was king for 82 years, Sobhuza II of Swaziland, who was king of the country when they became independent from British rule in 1968, so I guess the records are like, well before that date doesn’t count. Well they do count, and Lillibet is going to have to stick around cutting ribbons and watching horses run fast for another 12 years to beat his record. Nevertheless, there was a lot of celebration for Her Majesty’s Platinum album, 70 Greatest Hits. It’s a little strange to think that she was the Queen when the Beatles were still at school. She was the Queen when England won the World Cup. She was the Queen the last time Wales played at a World Cup. She was the Queen when the M1 motorway opened. She was the Queen when the band Queen was formed (will they have to change their name to King when she dies?) The Platinum Jubilee celebrations were scheduled to take place while I was back in London (no, I didn’t go back there for that), though I was leaving for France in the middle of it. My mum loves all that, and she decorated the house in union flags, the most in our street. There was no street party this time, unlike for the Diamond Jubilee in 2012 (and the Silver Jubilee in 1977, though I was only a baby), but not the Golden Jubilee in 2002. It’s like we alternate when we have them. Maybe we will have one for the 75th Jubilee, which is confusingly also called the Diamond Jubilee, or the 80th, which is disappointingly called the Oak Jubilee. Imagine that, the Oak Jubilee.
On the Thursday that the celebrations were to begin in London and elsewhere, I went with my mum down into central London to watch the flyover and walk about in the crowds. We went to Trafalgar Square to await the Red Arrows and all the other planes from the RAF (I do love seeing the planes, I must admit, I’m a sucker for a Spitfire). It was busy alright. We were outside Charing Cross Station, and I sketched the crowds a bit (above), while my mum went into the little Sainsbury’s to see if she could get some wine and a sandwich. That was not an easy prospect, the place was packed. So I said I would go in there for her, and I braved the squashed throng, and while there were no sandwiches left, I did get her a bottle of prosecco and the last plastic cups in the shop. I needed some time to recover after that, I don’t like crowds in small places, so we sat on the step and drank the wine, and eventually the planes flew over and everyone got excited. You couldn’t get anywhere near the Mall. We walked down to the Ship and Shovell pub to use the loos, and then just wandered about towards St. James, up Pall Mall and down Piccadilly. There were people from all over the country, all over the world actually, maybe the universe for all I know. It was a historic occasion, but I was glad to not be around for even more crowds and pageantry, and TV shows about the Queen, and so I went to France to do some sketching.
petescully 