another march on campus

April 23, 2024Leave a comment

Here are some sketches drawn around campus last month, all different media, I suppose. Above, that’s the UC Davis water tower as seen from the Arboretum, very close to my office. I drew in brown fountain pen, and there was this little cat on the path. I like this sort of sketch. The redbuds were really glowing then too. I’ve been on this campus eighteen years now, I sometimes look back and think, funny how that happened. That building next to the water tower, the Earth and Physical Sciences Building, wasn’t even there when I first arrived, in fact I was there at the ceremony where they laid the foundation stone, my old manager insisted I come over to witness that. I’m glad I did, but I always regret not sketching the building that was there before, which was knocked down. I do remember sketching the empty space, back in 07 or 08.

There was this one day last month when one of my coworkers announced that there would be llamas on campus, over at the Quad, that people could go and have a look at. This caused great excitement, as it had been a very busy 2024 so far, and everyone needs more llama, less drama. So we all walked over there. I had my llama jokes ready. It was lunchtime so I thought, alpaca lunch. As we got there, it turned out there were no llamas to be found. I guess they hadn’t set their a-llama clock. Disappointed but not despondent, I decided to draw this interesting old tree, and sketched it in pencil before adding some watercolour. I sometimes wish all my sketching looked like this, it felt very free.

This one above was sketched in the UC Davis Silo, on another boring lunchtime. I haven’t drawn the interior of this building from this level for a number of years. I used to come up here all the time, years ago, it feels like something from another time, but it isn’t, it’s just a different end of the same time. I think I would wonder in those days how long we would be in Davis, where we might go next, but we stayed, and I took it upon myself to draw all the changes here over a long period. While it’s not my actual job, it’s kind of become my other job, and I don’t mind that at all.

And finally, a panorama that will remain unfinished. I was cycling across campus one lunchtime when I was hit with the thought of drawing the Chemistry Building, not the side that’s all being built (and which I have drawn a number of times), because the shapes the shadows were making as they hit the inset windows was really quite dramatic, you would have loved it. In the end I said sod it, too much detail, and focused on sketching that wicked blue and cloudy sky, which was pretty spectacular in itself, leaving the Chemistry Building to be nothing more than a big outline left to the imagination. Behind it though is another building called ‘PSEL’, the ‘Physical Science and Engineering Library’, which is not in fact a library any more but has been recently redeveloped to house space for several units, including my own program (in fact I’m on the building committee that manages it); it will see a name change at some point, though I can’t say for sure what that will be. There’s still work being done, and I have drawn the building before, but I’ll do a more proper sketch of it at some point, but I made sure it got into this sketch.

daisy daisy, i’m half crazy

December 2, 2023December 2, 2023Leave a comment

Here’s another from November, I didn’t include this in the last post because there were no autumnal trees in it. It did have a food truck parked at the Silo which I had to sketch, Daisy’s, I think they serve cakes or desserts or flowers or something. I never feel like getting dessert stuff at lunchtime so I’ve never gone to one of the dessert type food trucks. I usually eat Shah’s Halal, chicken over rice (spicy), and that’s a pretty huge meal. I had Jojo’s Hawaiian the other day, and I’m still full from it. Anyway it is December now, and I really need to go and draw some other things, I wish I were in London or somewhere, getting a bit antsy in Davis this Fall. The trees are lovely and all, but I need to go and explore. It’s tough seeing social media all the time, looking at other sketchers around the world drawing all these places I want to go to, and then also seeing loads of posts of cool places in London and thinking, I really need to go and draw that while it’s still there, while it still looks like that. I’m currently feeling like I’m too long between trips back home, even though it’s not really that long since last summer, it’s long enough for me. Made harder the past couple of days with Shane MacGowan passing, listening to old Pogues songs and pining for those stinking streets and the banks of the Thames.

green and brown food truck at the silo

October 16, 2023October 16, 2023Leave a comment

There are more food trucks at the Silo these days now that the quarter is in full swing. I ate lunch, and stood in the shade to draw this one, which I think sold coffee and ice cream or something, I didn’t inspect it too closely despite drawing it for half an hour. I couldn’t really read what it said. Not very investigative of me I suppose, I was in a hurry, I had other things on my mind. I just liked the colours of it. I just wanted to do a quick sketch with that fountain pen, that was fun.

drawing the quiet times

September 19, 2023September 18, 2023Leave a comment

Here are a couple of sketches from campus drawn in August. Above, the side entrance to the MU, next to the campus bookstore. Below, the view from the big round table in the Silo, where I was eating lunch. It was too hot out to bother looking for something to sketch, so I drew Peet’s Coffee. I don’t drink coffee, and I don’t go to Peet’s very often (they can’t even spell Pete) because they always take so long and have long lines of coffee people, and it requires several people just to get a pastry, and I don’t even like their pastries that much. It’s the same with all these coffee chains, I never go in them if I can avoid it. I love the chocolate croissants at the MU, so much nicer, but they only have them half the time, and never at all in summer. Summers are long. The Fall quarter begins next week, everyone will be back and it will be a bit chaotic, but it’s always good once things get going again. Still the quieter times are nice.

summer running

August 30, 2023August 30, 2023Leave a comment

Summer is already drawing to a close on the UC Davis campus. Oh sure, we have several weeks yet until Fall classes begin, but I’m ramping up my anxiety levels before the quiet times of summer end, trying to get those summer projects out of the way before the busy work begins. This panorama sketch was drawn a month ago in July; in a month’s time this same scene will be fill of people and bikes. That’s not to say summer is completely empty, we do have a lot of summer sessions classes on campus, so there is activity. Many staff are working remotely, though I am in every day except for the occasional day. This summer I have been working on my fitness, and have been up running in the mornings on most days. In fact August I have run a total of 56 miles already, preparing for the 5k Labor Day Run next Monday, I’m feeling well up for it now. And then I woke up early this morning to see that the AQI was up in the 150-180 Unhealthy level, due to red flag weather and smoke being blown in from fires way to the north. It’s really the first bad smoky sky of the summer for us, it’s that time of year again, and I’m really hoping it does not last. I’m really looking forward to this race, but I also don’t want to derail my running progress. Three years ago when we had that terrible smoke that lasted weeks, months, I had been up to then on my best ever running streak, even though all races were cancelled due to the Pandemic, the global situation made me focus on getting out and running harder than ever, and I was clocking in excellent times I can barely believe now – and then the sky filled with smoke and the air quality monitors said it was far too unhealthy to run, or do soccer practice (I was coaching at the time), so that stopped and I never quite got back to that level (though in late 2021 I did clock my best 5k time in the Davis Turkey Trot). This past month I’ve felt myself building back towards it well, and I’m hoping that by November’s Turkey Trot I can have a go at beating that 2021 score, or even the mythical pace of 2020. I do love running, and was really looking forward to getting out there today, but my lungs man, they’re quite important.

This view here is of the Silo, seen from outside Haring Hall, stood in the shade of a tree. The TLC is back there too, lovely building that is. A few red buses at the Silo terminus. Only a couple of people, very small but they are in there (for all you “but why don’t you draw people?” folks). I’ve not done quite as much outdoor sketching this summer in Davis, it’s been hot, and I’ve not been feeling up to it as much, but I’ve done a bit which I still need to scan.

do something pretty while you can

July 24, 2023July 22, 2023Leave a comment

To finish off the batch of sketching that I did in Davis between my UK visits, here are a bunch of lunchtime drawings from UC Davis of places that all kind of look the same. Some of them are the same place, just different sides of the building. The one above is the Bike Barn; the one below is the other side of it. I’ve drawn all these before, nothing to add really.

Why do I sketch? I ask myself this all the time. Well not all the time, but every now and then. And I might have a different answer each time if anyone asks. The answer itself may evolve over the years, but the actual reason never does. Do I question myself, question my need to sketch all the time? Yep, absolutely. It’s why I like urban sketching symposia and sketchcrawls and those things, because it’s helpful to meet other people who sketch, learn why they do it, not feel so bad for needing to sketch all the time myself. Sketching does relax me, helps me stop and focus. It can frustrate me too, when I hit those walls of “all my sketches look the same” or “why can’t I make it feel a bit more effortless?” but sometimes when it hits exactly what you want it to and doesn’t take very long, I feel amazing afterwards and feel like I can accomplish anything. I do love drawing; I sometimes feel like I am too obsessed with it, when I get irritable because I’ve not been able to sketch, or if I have three pages left in my sketchbook but really want to fill them with something interesting, and not just of the same buildings near work or stuff around my house, or the living room. One of the reasons I draw is to capture a moment in time. “To remember, in case someday I forget” is how I have put it in the past. So with this in mind, all of these drawings from campus maybe reflect a bit of that. The ones above, look they look like several other sketches I have done of those buildings before. But what if next year they put new signs up, or replace all those flowers with bike racks? This sort of thing’s happened, and my old sketches show the area how it used to look. The one below has part of the under-construction new wing of the Chemistry building in it, already looking slightly different to how I drew it in the sketch in the previous post. It will look different again in six months. The are to the left looked different just a couple of years ago. This was also sketched on the first day of Commencement, the graduation ceremony days, and walking by in the left is a professor in their black professorial robes, you can tell what time of year it is because of that.

I do question myself though, what if I just stopped and told myself I didn’t need to sketch any more? Or not sketch as much, just sketch occasionally and not worry about filling up all these books? Spend more time thinking about other things. I do use the time during sketching to think though. I also listen to podcasts, audiobooks, music. When sketching the building below – K. Esau Science Hall, which I don’t think I’d sketched before – I was listening to the audiobook of Lockwood and Co (just finished that series, it was very good), and I finished this whole sketch in my lunchtime, and that felt pretty good. Besides, I sketch in my spare time so that I can keep my skills up, so whenever I do a drawing for money those skills just roll right back out. My style looks like me, I always try to make improvements or rather move towards how I want the drawings to look, while balancing the fact that this is how my eyes see, my hands draw, and often a drawing is reflection of how I physically and mentally am at any given moment. If I’m uncomfortable when I draw, it comes out. This world is a crazy and overwhelming place, so many issues and terrifying things vying for my attention, politically things seems to be dragging towards horrible again (or the horrible lot would have us believe), and I know there is good in the world, it’s just that I need to go into my sketchbook sometimes to focus my mind on what’s right in front of me.

I dunno. There may come a time when my hands go, or my eyesight packs in (on our way there, lads!), or the supreme court makes it illegal to draw pictures of fire hydrants, or whatever. I have not been active in the social media sketching groups, the Facebook groups and what not, though I post on the Instagram and still occasionally on that Twitter (and I still post all my stuff on Flickr like it’s 2007), I’m not all in with the groups any more. I just write and focus here mostly, like when I started, before Urban Sketchers. I’m less visible these days I guess, and I’m ok with that, I’m just getting on with the act of being a mostly-daily but always obsessed urban sketcher, telling my little stories, written to myself.

Next up, sketches and stories from the June trip back to England, as well as eight days in Scotland. I have more stories to tell. Then there’s a load of drawings from my day out in San Francisco last weekend, avoiding the heat, searching for the last few pints of Anchor Steam in the world. I’ll probably need a rest after wall this, but as it stands I’m still a couple of pages from finishing Sketchbook #47, and I like to finish a sketchbook in good time, so I can’t rest until it’s done. I need to catch up with the scanning though…

some time at UC Davis (summer 2022)

January 29, 2023January 29, 2023Leave a comment

As we catch up from last summer, here are some of the things I drew on campus. There was a lot of work done on the roundabout junction between the Silo, Chemistry and Bainer, so I stood behind the wire and drew the construction machines and the workers putting the street together. The standing stones in the foreground on the right have been there for ages, I’ve drawn them before, I’ve drawn everywhere before. It’s interesting to draw the in-between moments of these places, as they go from looking one way to another.

The next view is very close by, from a different angle, where there’s no work going on, and it hasn’t changed in years. I drew this one pretty fast; it was the difference in the high-summer greens that made me want to put it to paper.

Another one drawn on a super hot day while stood in the shade, this is an old campus building called TB-9, which sounds like the name of a protocol droid in the Star Wars universe, but TB stands for ‘temporary building’. I mean, astronomically or geologically it is temporary, as are well all and all our thoughts and fears and politics, but in this case, the building was born in 1958 and is now on the actual National Register of Historic Places, no less. So it’s probably not going anywhere, but it might tempt fate to call it ‘Permanent Building 9’. If you want to know more about this building, check out this article: https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/historical-highlights-uc-davis-department-art-and-tb-9-1958-1976

This next one is primarily about the cacti in front of the Student Community Center, looking out at the Silo area. Another hot day, they all blend into one now. What even happened last August? It feels so long ago already.

A week or so later, while it was a sizzling 102 degrees outside (in the weeks that would follow, 102 would feel like a bit of an ice age), I sat inside the Student Community Center and ate lunch, and drew the lobby area. Among other things this building is home to the UC Davis Cross Cultural Center, and there are colourful murals inside. We hold our annual department holiday party here too.

And finally, the end of September, summer was over and the new Fall quarter had begun. So everyone was back, and we all got busy again, and the Silo area had new blue and yellow sun-shades over the tables. The academic year started. I still have a bunch more sketches from summer to post, from Davis and a few other places, and some from Fall too, but this was the summer on campus. Most of the staff in our department worked remotely except for one day a week, so I was there by myself for a lot of the time, but it’s nice when there are more people about again giving the campus its life, with all the students rushing about and bikes everywhere.

’til you drag your feet to slow the circles down

September 22, 2022September 22, 2022Leave a comment

Still catching up with the summer sketching, here are some UC Davis sketches from in between the two Europe trips. I have actually done more drawing this year than last, although I am forever miles behind on scanning and posting. These first couple were done in June – June! A million years ago – and the first one is Peter A. Rock Hall, formerly Chem 194. As I write in the latter half of September, that roundabout is likely a wild mess of cyclists going round and round until they have the courage to veer off without causing a spaghetti bolognese of bike chains.

This is Latitude, a food place for students on campus. I like the roof, it looks like statistics, maybe of a pandemic, maybe an opinion poll, maybe the results in a Tottenham season (start well, go up, lose to Burnley or someone, start to dip, sack the manager, get a new manager, win against Man City or someone, start to rise, don’t win anything; as every Spurs fan knows, the real trophies are the managers we sacked along the way).

Above is The Silo, you’ve seen me draw this before. When I need to draw something with a pointy hat, we don’t have any wizards or wizard-school castles near here, so I draw the Silo. It used to be covered in greenery, but that has been shaved off to reveal a dull concrete torso. Someone sped past on one of those motorized stand-up scooter things. We never got actual hoverboards here in the future, did we. No, we got those electric scooters, that cut silently up the sidewalks and streets. I would fall on my Aristotle if I rode one of those about. I wasn’t even good on a skateboard. I had a skateboard for a bit when I was a teenager. It probably needed better wheels, better bearings, probably a better board, definitely a better person on top of the board. I just couldn’t make the thing go. I’d see other people, they seemed to just stand on their skateboard, tilt their head slightly and they’d be flying off, moving it telepathically. Never mind all the tricks, like the one where you jump off it and it spins around off a railing, and you land on it again like it was no big deal. If I ever did that, I would expect the win Sports Personality of the Year or something. I really wanted to be a skateboarder too; one day me and my friend Kevin, who also had a skateboard interest and a similar set of skills to me, met up in Harrow or Wealdstone or somewhere and skated a bit at some skate park, falling over, sending my board flying into a group of people before deciding, right, we’ve done that and are shit at it, so let’s go to the actual main skateboarding site in London, that area with all the graffiti on the South Bank in London, near Waterloo Bridge. We went that same day, got the tube down, and when we got there and saw all the kids doing tricks and flips, we basically stopped being skateboarders any more, and went back to just talking about football. Less Tony Hawk, more Tony Hawks (or is it the other way round).

Finally, this is Cruess Hall, which had those bright pink blooms on the trees outside in early July. Cruess is where the Design Department live, and that’s where I had my 2016 show at the UC Davis Design Museum, ‘Conversations With The City’, a ten-year retrospective of my sketchbooks. That was six years ago this Fall. I have drawn quite a bit since then. If I just look at the past six years, on campus and outside, I’ve probably drawn more than in the previous ten years. I think I was quite happy with my drawings around the years 2014-2016 though, that was a good period of sketching for me. I’m still sketching, trying to get better, hopefully a better sketcher than I was a skateboarder.

you know the place where nothing is real

August 4, 2022August 4, 2022Leave a comment

As I play catch-up on my sketch posts, I may as well do one of those where I just post a bunch of the drawings I did on campus in Spring all at once, so here they are. It’s probably a lazy way to do it, but it saves you from reading through all the stories I feel the need to write to go along with them (but you can skip by the stories anyway, I’m not actually very interesting). Above, that’s the Silo, which long term readers will recognize as I have drawn it before, like a million times.

This next one, that was the Tri-Co-Ops, which I have drawn before but not as much as the Silo, so it still feels new. I’ve never drawn it with that spiky arched structure in front of it though. I suppose the structure isn’t actually spiky, it’s the plants behind it that make it look spiky. It’s made of metal and yeah, it looks interesting.

This is the UC Davis Coffee House, or CoHo as it’s more commonly known. This was one of those days where I just needed to sketch something but didn’t know what. I get a lot of those on campus. After all these years I’m often a bit uninspired for new things to draw. Sometimes I draw the same things in different ways, but if it’s something that requires a lot of thought like a ridiculous perspective, often I’m like, I need to eat, there’s not much lunchtime left, don’t want to do something that makes me think too hard. I was listening to a football podcast while drawing this.

Another from April, this is along California Avenue, I cycle along here every day. They were doing some construction work, so I had to draw that because I can’t help myself. It looks different now already. There’s always some construction going on. Be nice if they constructed us a new building, we’re running out of space (us and the rest of this growing campus). I liked the people walking by eyes glued down at phones. The mind needs constant engagement, I get it.

Finally, this is the Water Tower, drawn down by the Earth and Physical Sciences building. I was leading a lunchtime sketchcrawl event for the Sustainability Office (we’ve done that for a few years now, close to Earth Day), and I did have a couple of other quick sketches to go with this but this was the main one. Thanks for joining me on this brief campus outing. More sketches still to come…

teaching and learning

October 24, 2021Leave a comment

The students are back!

Everyone else is too. Campus feels full again. I think I said this already in a previous post. Well I repeat myself a lot, but each time I say it slightly differently until over time it is a completely different sentence.

For example this time I am using the ‘return’ button a lot more.

Ok that is enough of that.

This, as you know full well, is the UC Davis Silo, with the ongoing construction of the Teaching and Learning Complex behind it. The very-nearly-finished ongoing construction, I should say. It’s looking more like the finished article now. The TLC. I’m glad there will be both teaching and learning going on, it’s handy when they both happen. Sometimes there is teaching but no learning, and sometimes there is learning but no teaching. The University of Life is not a fully accredited degree-awarding institution as far as I am aware, but Life is the best teacher. Unless you learn very little, or learn the wrong things. People did used to say that though, back in the day, you’d say “I’m studying at uni,” and they’d go, “I go to the University of Life, me”, and I just wasn’t sure what to make of that, being fairly sure I was also alive. I mean it’s better than the University of Death, which sounds pretty shit, like a really crap heavy metal club. And I liked crap heavy metal clubs when I was at uni, I went to a lot of them, even though I couldn’t do the long hair and the whole look. My hair just grew upwards. But even I’d turn my nose up at the University of Death. But the University of Life, it sounds like something you get invited to by leaflets through your letterbox. I think it was a rival to the School of Hard Knocks, which I assumed was a place that has very heavily soundproofed doors. And they would say, “ah you’re book-smart, but I’m street-smart”. Yet I would spend considerably more time walking the streets than actually reading my books, you have no idea the lengths I would go to to avoid doing the reading in my French literature classes, or those undramatic books on dramatic theory in my Drama classes, I’d be walking all over the streets of east London. I couldn’t afford the bus fare.

So anyway, I stood beneath a tree and drew this panorama over a couple of lunchtimes. The tower of the Silo, which used to be covered in green foliage, is now bare and concrete-coloured. People passed by, some would sit and look at their laptops on the grass, most were on their way to either doing some teaching or some learning or let’s face it, a little bit of both. You never stop learning. The game is the best teacher.