Tag: shields library

late July, UC Davis

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July 2024 accordion - UC Davis side Here’s what I did in the second half of July. Or rather, half of what I did. When I was in London I bought a Seawhite of Brighton accordion sketchbook, one that is just under 7″ tall (that’s 17cm, I did buy it in England), and each page is about 3.5″ wide (about 9cm that is), and there were about 16 of those pages/folds, and well, you do the math. I mean, the maths. I have got one of these particular accordion books by Seawhite before, about 12 or 13 years ago, but it was bigger, and I never got past the first drawing. This time I was determined, a series of drawings of UC Davis, with another series of drawings of downtown Davis on the other side. To be honest it wasn’t hugely ambitious, it’s all stuff I have drawn a million times before, right, and the individual drawings aren’t exactly long panoramas themselves (unlike the four very long ones drawn on Hutchison in the 2016 panorama Moleskine). It does look pretty good all stretched out though, it does get a ‘wow’, but the idea was to show the two sides of the Davis we know, or I know. For the UC Davis side, we have six locations all drawn in ink and watercolour: Hart Hall, Shields Library, Heitman (formerly the Hog Barn), Mrak Hall, the Memorial Union, and Turner Wright Hall.

Hart Hall UC Davis 071724  accordion 2024 UCD - Shields Library  accordion 2024 UCD - Hog Barn  accordion 2024 UCD - Mrak Hall  accordion 2024 UCD - Memorial Union  accordion 2024 UCD - Celeste Turner Wright Hall

No stories with these, just the images as they are, UC Davis in the middle of summer. It’s quiet. In a month’s time all the people will start coming back and the quiet days will turn back into busy days, and before you know it the rest of 2024 will whizz past and we’ll all be six months older. I’ve enjoyed the quiet of summer, if not the heat (it’s relatively cooler now though, which is nice), and my daily sketching has slowed a bit since I did this book, and I have not been to many places, nor have I organized any sketchcrawls, that can wait. I drew some London pictures to go on the wall, and also to go into the Pence’s annual art auction. I have (as of last week) started getting into lino block printing, which I’ve not done since some time in the late 80s at school, and it’s fun so far. The biggest creative project I’ve done this summer (even bigger than this accordion book) is the faculty family tree I finally created for our department at UC Davis, which you can read about and look at in this article here. That was a project many years in the conception but which I finally decided to create when the idea hit me on the London Underground. And finally, I’m running again, albeit slowly and more heavily than before, aiming for the 5k on Labor Day and then (gulp) train up for a 10k by November…

Check back for part 2, a whole spread of downtown Davis.

the very hart of campus

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hart hall uc davis 022424

Last weekend we held another meet-up of local sketchers as part of the monthly ‘Let’s Draw Davis’ sketchcrawls, this time in the very heart of the UC Davis campus, meeting up outside the immense Shields Library. I had worried it would be a pretty wet day, but in the end we had lovely sunshine. It was a short sketchcrawl at just two hours, enough for a couple of decent drawings for me; above, Hart Hall, one of my favourite buildings to draw at UC Davis, especially on a bright day like last Saturday. I was terrorised by a squirrel while drawing this (in so much as a squirrel can be a terrorist, it might be a bit of a reach to say that coming up to me occasionally saying “yeah come on then” in squirrel language amounts to terrorism, or just normal squirrel behaviour whenever someone sits next to their favourite tree). We share this campus with the squirrels, and as I know too well we are all competing for our little bit of space. I sympathized with the squirrel to be honest.

shields library uc davis 022424

We had quite a turnout, a lot of students, local sketchers, sketchers from out of town. I drew my second in front of Shields Library, you can see one of Robert Arneson’s Eggheads there. Some sketchers are dotted around. It was a nicely bustling kind of Saturday afternoon on campus, not too busy but not quiet either. At the end we all gathered in a circle outside and did a show-and-tell of our sketches, some really nice diverse styles on show. I was however criticized in front of the whole group by one sketcher from out of town who complained to me that I’d chosen such an “inconvenient” location (“the middle of nowhere” they said) for a sketchcrawl, because it was far from the parking lot they’d parked at. It’s the heart of the campus, the main library, very much “the middle of somewhere”. I was a bit stunned. Oh well. Anyway the next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl will be on March 23rd in the afternoon, this one will be downtown at Mishka’s cafe on 2nd street, easy enough to find. Though I will have just done the Lucky Run 7k race that morning, so I will probably be a little bit shattered, but still sketching.

shields

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Shields Library 092523

Now everyone is back on campus, it’s busy, etc and so on. I miss the summer, all that quiet. In a weird way I miss the pandemic times, when everyone was at home, and campus was eerie and quiet, I would still need to come in fairly regularly so I felt a bit like a guardian, keeping the torches lit until the return of All The People, if that day would ever come again. Actually mostly I was drawing maps of our building, with little diagrams in shared spaces to show that people would be at least six feet apart. The ‘worksite plan’. I had to do a lot of that, but I liked making colourful maps anyway. It was great to finally get people back on campus back then. I’m not saying I prefer it quiet, I do like the bustle of an active campus and having lots of people about our department, but I do appreciate those quiet moments. Here’s one place for some nice quiet, the Shields Library. It’s a massive library, one that I regrettably don’t visit as much as I used to. The first few years I was here I’d often check out books, mostly related to medieval language, but then I just stopped. I’m no longer studying in academia; for a while, before we moved out here, that was my life, long days and evenings in the library researching as best I could (did I really have to read every published article that referenced medieval alliterative poetry? I didn’t really know what I was doing, did I). I liked the quiet, the smell of the books, the space for ideas. One idea I had was ‘move to America’, so I did. I didn’t know what to do with myself when we first arrived in Davis in that November in 2005. Some days I wouldn’t really leave the apartment until late afternoon, and the only place I knew I’d feel at home was this place, Shields Library. I’d be here until it was time to get the bus home for dinner, writing emails home and updating my blog (this was before we got working internet at home), exploring the halls and picking up a pile of books about things like Chaucer or Anglo-Norman language to sit and look through, taking notes that would end up nowhere. I was glad when I finally got a job, but I’d still come here on my lunchtimes to get my head back in shape, before I really started sketching on all my lunches. All these years later, I am still needing that break to get my head back together, and usually that involves a sketchbook more than a book about Caedmon’s Hymn. I enjoyed drawing this. In fact it was sketched one day before my 18th anniversary of moving to the US. I always feel a bit funny around that time, always remember how I felt in those days, a mixture of excited and confused, and in desperate need of Weetabix.

i feel as though, you ought to know

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Hart Hall UC Davis

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.

TLC UCD 022123

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.

Walker Hall and Shields Library UC Davis

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.