turn turn, i wish you would

November 6, 20134 Comments

And another bar sketch for you, this one from a few weeks ago at the City Hall Tavern, into which I popped after sketching the Wealth of Nations band. Nice beer. Revolving bicycle wheels on the ceiling. Two and a Half Men was on the TV, for some reason (hence the blank TV screen, I simply cannot reproduce such unparalleled artistic genius on paper). Above the bar, a quote Benjamin Franklin once said to help bars sell more beer (“Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy,” he said apparently, but I suspect he said that about a lot of things). Bars like random beer quotes. That one by George Best about spending most of his money on women and beer (and the rest he just squandered) is often decorated proudly on pub walls, unflinching in its sad irony. I had the ‘Hell or High Watermelon’ beer. Halfway through sketching, the bad TV went quiet (hooray!) and the tables were cleared from the centre of the room (booo!) to make way for some sort of space for people to move around to loud thumping music, so I had to relocate to the bar to draw the details there. As the more well-dressed-for-a-night-out people started coming in, I finished up and called it a day. Another bar sketch done.

Incidentally I still have a few first-run copies of my short self-made bar-zine on my Etsy store, “Davis Bar-By-Bar“. I plan to print more and make further volumes, and if I ever get time, put together a book. Ah, time gentlemen, please.

take me anywhere, i don’t care, i don’t care

November 3, 2013November 3, 20133 Comments

Here are a couple from my second visit to the monthly meet-up of local classic automobile enthusiasts in the parking lot of a shopping mall a couple of blocks from where I live in north Davis. This was the last meet of the year, and I managed to get there with enough daylight left to sketch more than one car this time. The yellow car on top is an actual racecar, which races locally for Team Tinyvette (they have a Facebook page) and races in something called 24 Hours of LeMons (this is a vehicular urban sketchers dream if ever there was). I understand the pun ‘LeMons’ because my son’s a big fan of Cars 2. Anyway the driver of this car is called Mike.

This beauty is an Austin Healey. The owner was very happy to find out that I was British, and talked about the history of Austin Healey and how the guy who made them refused the make any more after the powers that were decided in the 70s to make several safety features (such as shoulder seatbelts) mandatory. I don’t know much about any of that but this is a gorgeous car, classic old British style.

I must visit the California Automobile Museum in Sacramento again some time. I’m itching to sketch more old classic cars…

wealth of nations

November 2, 20134 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I went downtown on a Saturday evening (nursing an injured leg, having pulled my groin playing football) and saw a local band called Wealth of Nations playing in the E Street Plaza. An excuse for some night-time sketching, and to listen to some good music. I had sketched the singer David Hafter before at the Farmer’s Market a couple of years ago, he has a great voice. I had happened across the band earlier in October while passing Armadillo Music and recognised his voice as I was passing by, so popped in to listen and to sketch (see below; the whole band were playing but the drummer was hidden).

laid out on a grid of alphabets and ordinal numbers…

October 27, 20131 Comment

I am a little behind posting this, sorry… A few weeks ago, a new addition to the Davis artistic scenery was unveiled, as local artist/ceramicist/singer/great personality Heidi Bekebrede presented her brand new installation in Central Park, the ‘Davis Song’ mural. You would be forgiven for thinking Davis is a city of murals these days, with so many new walls of art appearing in the past couple of years, well this is one with a difference, and one which is truly all about Davis. For one thing, it is ceramic, made up entirely of tiles created and painted by Heidi, who is well-known locally for her ‘Cuteware’ range.

On Sunday October 6th, the mural was unveiled to a crowd of locals, decorating the rear wall of the new toilet building in the park. This is a perfect location – right by the Farmer’s Market, it will be seen by everyone for years to come. Around the edges of the mural the tiles represent each of the Davis schools; all the kids were delighted to find their own schools on the mural. Heidi has worked for years in schools bringing art and performance to local children, and the Davis song has been learnt by many kids. Oh yes, the song! The mural is based on her song all about Davis, which was originally written in the 1980s but was updated in 2007, as our small city has grown. The lyrics of the song are all over the mural, and Heidi sang the song with the audience, going through each tile representing a different aspect if Davis.

Oh yeah, and I am on it! One of the tiles was of one of the red London buses that grace the Davis streets, and it was based on my drawing of the red bus. My name is on the license plate! What an honour, thank you Heidi!

This colourful mural needs a lot of looking at, and there is a bit of Davis everywhere you look. I just had to come back the next week for a more detailed sketch, below:

You can see the lyrics of the song on the City of Davis website. And here is a link to a video posted on YouTube (by Bev Sykes) of Heidi singing the song at the event.

Congratulations Heidi!

the good life

October 18, 2013October 18, 20131 Comment

I’ve been busy…and not updating. Mostly not scanning. There has been some sketching. There’s mostly been drawing cartoon cut-out skeletons for Halloween, and a cardboard Iron Man suit. Don’t ask. Anyway, these are in fact my sketches from the last Davis sketchcrawl in September, starting at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Food and Wine and stuff, in the Good Life Garden. Yes, the Good Life Garden, named (I presume) after the TV show with Felicity Kendall and Richard Briers and Jerry and Margo. This place is pretty amazing, for a good life garden. At UC Davis we have world-class enologists, who presumably are experts in Brian Eno. Seriously, Enology is a real thing, and goes hand to hand here with Viticulture, with I believe is the science behind Jaffa Cakes and Digestives (the correct term is McVitieculture, but over here they drop the “Mc” just like they drop the “O” in Oenology, which as you know is to do with wine and is not to be confused with Onology, the science behind Yoko). Ok now all that has been cleared up, let’s get on with the sketches. At the top, the Good Life Garden, in which I got a little sun but savoured the lovely smells while humming that beloved theme tune. Hey, one thing I never knew is that in America, The Good Life was called “Good Neighbours”. Now I’m sorry but that is too close to another show we all know, and yet another theme tune stuck in my head. Apparently it was renamed due to an earlier unsuccessful show called The Good Life starring JR Ewing, I mean, Larry Hagman. I am trying to imagine Paul Eddington in a ten-gallon Stetson, with his middle-class commuter stiff upper lip, no that doesn’t look right.

This bit is the Beer Lab. That is, the “RMI Teaching and Research Winery and Busch Brewing and Food Science Lab”. Or just “Drink!” for short. This is the real University of Beer.

1956 mercury montclair

September 22, 20136 Comments

The other evening, after dinner, I cycled down to the Marketplace parking lot in north Davis (that cultural hotbed) where there was a meeting of classic automobile enthusiasts. By that I mean that the automobiles were classic, not that the enthusiasts were classic, though they probably were, I don’t know about how to judge an enthusiast’s classic status. The ones I met were very nice. Anyway the sun was already going down and so I didn’t have a great deal of time to choose a car to sketch, but this beauty stood out above all the others. Now some of the cars were spectacular beasts, and some were, to be fair, verging on the old banger. This fine automobile however was bright and shiny and oozing in fifties Americana. Its yellow trimmings reminded me of California sunshine (that, and the fact I was in California and it was sunny, for a few more minutes anyway). So I sketched it, and you can see my reflection in it, and the owner liked it; it was his first car, in his family since 1977, and it is a 1956 Mercury Montclair. Now this says ‘America’ to me, not your beige Toyotas. Three people sat in the front, like in the movies, cruisin’ low and slow, all of that. I do like to sketch a classic automobile. They’re having one more this year, next month, same place. I might get there earlier this time, and sketch some more.

tout le mondavi est une scène

September 12, 2013September 12, 20132 Comments

A lunchtime at UC Davis, ate at a food truck, sketched the Mondavi Center. In the distance, the empty space that will one day be the brand new Jan & Maria Shrem Museum of Art, an exciting project bringing a proper modern art gallery / museum to the UC Davis campus. I’ll try to sketch its progress as its built.

grad study

September 12, 20133 Comments

This is the Grad, or the ‘Davis Graduate’, a long-time bar of these parts. It’s a sports bar with about a million screens to watch all kinds of sports (you can get little portable speakers at the bar tuned into whichever game you’re watching (I was watching Marseille lose to Monaco, but didn’t need the speaker). It’s also a dance hall, though I’ve never actually been in the evening, not my kind of thing. It’s also a place to eat burgers and fries and other similar things. In fact, I hadn’t actually been to the Grad since about 2008, when I came to watch Turkey play the Czech Republic in the Euros. The Grad has never been particularly high on my list of bars to sketch – I’d always remembered it as too awkward a space, too many sports screens, that loudspeaker that announces when someone’s Gradburger is ready, my hands being greasy from eating fries, plus I’d seen Tottenham lose too many matches while there. However I am on a mission to sketch as many Davis bars as possible (for my bar-zine, and maybe a book), so on the Labor Day weekend I came down (I live closer by these days) with the sketchbook, and I honestly have to admit I have been missing out. This was an excellent place to sketch! And I had forgotten they had a pretty large selection of excellent beers on tap. Plus Olympique de Marseille playing on the screen (next to, er, Judge Judy). Oh, this was definitely sketchworthy, and worth coming back to sketch some more. I stuck around for a while and chatted to the bar-staff (cheers Greg for the pint!) and another regular who told me stories about Davis from years back. I’ll probably be telling my own Davis stories in years to come. Various sports happened on screens around me; try to count how many screens are in this sketch alone. Happy with my latest panoramic bar sketch (another one for the zine) and sufficiently full of that very nice Summer Solstice beer, I left, got my Weetabix at Trader Joe’s, and sauntered home.

the little shamrock

September 8, 20137 Comments

After the Zine Fest in San Francisco I crossed over Lincoln Way and sketched a pub opposite Golden Gate Park, The Little Shamrock. I remember seeing this pub once ages ago when we drove past here, because it is pretty old – 119 years old in fact, according to the sign, though the date of founding means it’s probably 120 years by now. A hundred and twenty years ain’t bad! Not bad at all. So it was worth popping in to do some sketching of the interior. I must say that pretty much all of the interior was sketchworthy, a comfortable pub full of character. The people were friendly too, and the beer selection good. To my left were a group of people who from what I heard of their conversation (they were discussing performance art pieces at public galleries) they were curators at SFMOMA and probably somewhere else. Art is all around. I just hacked away at the sketchbook, and enjoyed my beer. I like the Inner Sunset.