The 27th Worldwide Sketchcrawl continued. Naturally I drew California from Davis (that is, Davis Street). You don’t get hills like that in Davis. You don’t get hills at all in Davis. It does remind me though of the hills I used to slog up in Highgate, though the ones in San Francisco are slightly steeper and a tad more dramatic (but completely lacking in Dick Whittington tales). After quickly sketching the bike first, its owner was kind enough to move it out of the way. You gotta be quick.
From there it was time to explore within the Financial District, around all those lovely big corporate banks and their big tall shiny buildings. It’s not a good time in history to be a big corporate bank. Well, that is, if you value public opinion more than making millions of dollars, which let’s face it, they don’t. So I’ll rephrase that. No, actually I can’t be bothered. As back home in London, many shops and things tend to be closed in the financial areas at weekends; funny that. One German hofbrau that I’ve been to before (and on weekends, I add, though it was closed on this day) is Schroeders, on Front St, an interesting old gaff that has been there forever and just begs to be sketched. I finally did so. The street was smelly though, and stank of wee and beggars and booze and spit, not of dimes or dollars or hedge funds.
More sketchcrawl to come…
main group was meeting up at the Presidio, but I didn’t fancy going all the way up there; I was yearning for some ‘urban’ to sketch. I started off visiting the excellent Paul Madonna exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library, the five year retrospective of his All Over Coffee strip, which I’ve followed for almost two years now (I came across it while on the Sketchcrawl in Berkeley, and was drawn to because it was a similar style to what I was trying to achieve; it inspired me to do more monochrome stuff). I was surprised, though I don’t know why, at how large the originals were, but that’s only because I tend to draw everything so damn small. Suitably inspired to get out and draw, I sat outside the library and sketched the San Francisco City Hall. The Tenderloin army shuffled by in groups of one, like characters from a Miyazaki film, lost in their own little odour-filled universes. Somewhere across the square was a rabble led by a very vocal Mexican man screaming, literally screaming, into a microphone, to the point where his voice started to fail him, and the microphone started to break. It clearly didn’t stay broken though because he launched into song, backed by a Latin American dance music band, playing a repetitive one-verse, I don’t know, anthem I suppose, which went on and on and on for about six months. My thoughts weren’t with the guy singing, but with the band members, particularly the guitarists. Their wrists must have been super tired. I was wondering whether they took shifts, if perhaps another person came and took over halfway through the song, to give them a break. For all I knew it was a tape loop. When I was done (and I was really pleased with the resulting sketch, by the way), I hopped onto the BART and went down to the Mission. I fancied a burrito.
petescully 