here am i sitting in a tin can

August 17, 2011August 17, 2011Leave a comment

I think I still have some Lisbon sketches (and a few London ones) yet to show you but in the meantime I’ll fast-forward to the air-travel. I sometimes wish that airports would only happen to other people, or that teleportation devices could be invented a bit more quickly. Until that happens, air travel is the only way I’m getting around the planet. So be it.

I must say that I actually enjoyed flying with US Airways. The planes were comfy with lots of leg-room (better than Virgin, BA and United), even on the domestic flight. I had to change planes, sure, but there are worse places to change than Philadelphia airport, and I was able to fly back into near-to-home Sacramento rather than the miles-away San Francisco.

A word of warning to any flying urban sketchers though – occasionally, just occasionally, your micron pen will burst in mid-air leaving a splat of pure black mess all over your page (and all over you if you’re not careful). I left the mess on there, and in fact blew it about a bit to make an interesting shape, and just drew around it (see top drawing). It just adds to the atmosphere after all, though it looks a bit like a Dementor is serving the coffee.

Prior to getting on that flight, I sketched the last page of my London/Lisbon moleskine, a drawing of the plane itself. and what should be in front of it? A day-glo fire hydrant! since they’re unusual to see in England I was happy to have spotted it. I feel a bit like Bill Oddie sometimes, if Bill Oddie liked fire hydrants and had red hair.

I tell you one thing about Heathrow, for some reason Terminal 1 no longer has a football shirt shop. I was looking for ages for that, and had to make do with looking at William & Kate mugs at the Harrods shop, toy underground trains at the Hamley’s shop and what seemed like one of the last chain record stores in Britain, Heathrow’s branch of HMV, where I picked up (appropriately) the Rocky box-set on dvd for like eight quid. Philadelphia airport has Rocky t-shirts and Clubber Lang shot-glasses and stuff, but didn’t have that, so round one to LHR.

I was pretty exhausted by the time of my final flight (the sixth of the trip), listening to a young guy in the aisle opposite talking to an older lady about all the places he’d visited in Europe, before putting my headphones on, turning up the music and trying to chip my way through A Dance with Dragons (spoiler alert, GRR Martin fans, I’m still none the wiser on this series; I think the butler did it, but GRR Martin is yet to introduce the all-important butler character who will be more important than all the characters you’ve followed for five books, and then kill him off just as you start to wonder if reading his chapters was worth it…). Anyway, after all this travelling, all this sketching, it was nice to get off the plane and be back with my family again.

getting to where you should be going

July 29, 20112 Comments

The first few of a good many “travelling” sketches. The first above was sketched on the flight from Sacramento to Philadelphia. I must say US Airways were pretty good. The last time I flew with them (to Vegas in February) the plane was small and couldn’t carry the weight of all its passengers. The ones I took for these longer journeys on the other hand were modern and spacious, and more than capable of carrying a few extra big-macs. When I got to Philadelphia airport, I had more than five hours to occupy myself. There are only so many airport stores to look in and departure lounge seats to draw, so I took the train into downtown Philadelphia, a very grand East Coast city with nice yellow traffic lights and ornage fire hydrants (wait for the next post!).

Finally I left Philly, and got my plane back home across the Atlantic. I didn’t watch any of the offered movies, but I did play a few games of chess against the airplane computer. And beat it almost every time (except for one in which I did all I could to get a stalemate, and I got it – I aint losing to the back of a chair). Sleeping was a little more difficult. It always is. I can fall asleep on a five minute bus ride, and miss my stop, but put on a flight across the Atlantic and I’m like a Bizarro Rip van Winkle.

go tell it on the mountain

July 8, 2011July 8, 2011Leave a comment

Sketches in my little red moleskine (I like to carry a smaller book for these very quick more scribbly sketches now) on the trip up to Oregon last Friday. It’s a long hot journey, and we usually have to stop once or twice. One place we like to get out and stretch our legs is at the Weed Airport (yes, it’s really called Weed, and boy do they make a deal out of their mildly amusing name), beneath the most incredible mountain I’ve ever seen (perhaps even more so than Mont St. Victoire), Mount Shasta. It’s a hundred degrees on the first day of July, so it’s refreshing to see so much snow on the peak. Sketchbooks out. Of course, I now share my paints with my son, so he likes to get his own stamp on my sketchbook now. There is his version of the mountain and the sun and the plane just below there. Beside it, a windsock, you gotta draw the windsock.

leavin’ on a jet plane

January 2, 20115 Comments

Happy New Year! I got back into Davis today, after two and a half weeks in snowy England. I’ve never seen a winter like it in London, but I still managed to do some sketching, though probably less than usual. The scanning and posting will be an ongoing process. Here’s a good place to start: my first and last sketches of the trip, both on BA jumbo jets, drawn in my Moleskine diary.

Here’s the thing: I hate flying. Not in a BA Baracas “fool aint gettin me in no plane sucker” way. I hate airports, the ever-decreasing baggage allowances, packing suitcases, Heathrow, overhead lockers, the toilets, the engine noise, the fact it takes me two days to get over the ear-popping thing and I hate that sleeping on a plane is practically impossible. Flying is not my favourite thing, but it’s a necessary necessity. Carbon footprint my bottom.

Below is the sketch I did while waiting to leave London yesterday, New Year’s Eve. You can sense the dread.

And so it is a new year. In fact today is 1-1-11, which must be significant. New Year’s Resolutions? I have no idea about that, but I had three doughnuts for breakfast. Perfect jetlag cure. Art goals? Just keep on going, keep on drawing everything around me.

2010 was an interesting year for sure, and very full on art-wise. Some interesting projects, some interesting travels and of course the Portland Urban Sketching Symposium in the middle of it all, spurring the creativity of the rest of the year. We held a couple of great sketchcrawls in Davis in the Fall, and a third ‘Let’s Draw Davis’ crawl will take place on January 22 to coincide with the worldwide sketchcrawl. There are more fun things happening soon as well so I’ll keep you posted.

But for now I’ll just say happy new year, I hope 2011 is filled with fun and if you haven’t yet taken up sketching as a way to record your world, why not do so now? It’s so much fun!

an afternoon around pacific grove

August 20, 2010August 20, 20102 Comments

While people who nap take naps, the people who sketch go out and sketch. It’s my way of napping, and for someone who likes drawing big old houses, Pacific Grove is like a dream. There were so many to choose from, and such little time, that I settled on this big green hotel, the Centrela. The ocean fog was descending a little and making the world feel damp, but that’s partly what I came there for, from the hot dry Sacramento Valley. When I was finished sketching this, I spoke to a man who was from South Harrow. Small world, huh. Not that I’m from Harrow of course, no no I’m from Burnt Oak, but you know, London/Middlesex connection.

I have a thing about fire hydrants, as you know. So I took the time to sketch some. I like the little one with the red top. I understand that the colours on top of the fire hydrants have something to do with water pressure? That’s what I heard, and I’m not going to let the ability to just look it up quickly on Google distract me from finding out if it’s true or not. I think of them as little characters, with little Smurf hats, guarding the street corners like gargoyles.

And here is a mermaid. You didn’t know mermaids existed, did you. Well, this is proof, isn’t it (not that it would stand up in court). She was lolling outside a boutique on Lighthouse Avenue, covered in seashells and beads. I wanted to ask if there existed types of mermaids with the fish bit on top and the legs on the bottom (I think I saw that in Red Dwarf once).

a cute little house

August 18, 2010August 17, 20104 Comments

We took a few days family time away in a cute little house in Monterey – Pacific Grove, to be precise, down on the California coast. After the non-stop sketchathon of Portland it was just what I needed – not that I stopped sketching, of course.

It really was a cute little house, but just right for us. the beach was a shortish walk away, and playing on the sand was so relaxing. Having spent so much time around architects, I took a slightly more technical apprach to building sandcastles, and constructed irrigation channels beside them so that the incoming tide would just wash around them like a moat. Yeah, that didn’t last long; King Canute I am not. I hadn’t built sandcastles in years.

This cute little house did have a strict ‘no sand’ policy, though – even though they charge quite hefty cleaning fees per stay, they still wanted to see no evidence of beach activity whatsoever. Perhaps it clogs up their vacuum cleaners. Yet I couldn’t exactly strip off outside. I was quite paranoid having to tiptoe to the bathroom with sand in the toes and sand on my clothes. I can never clean it off at the beach itself. I always make the same mistake of using the sea to wash off the sand. That never works, folks.

fly away, pete

August 4, 2010August 9, 20188 Comments

It’s going to take me some time to add all the pictures and tell all the stories about the 1st International Sketching Symposium in Portland. I am still ringing with excitement about all the things I learned and all the people I met, rubbing shoulders with 80 other people who ‘get it’, and all the creative ideas that started to explode from my head as soon as got on the plane back to Sacramento. I’ve not been this excited aboout creativity in many years, and am eager to charge headlong into exploring more ideas. However, it’s time to start scanning those drawings and documenting for those of you who weren’t able to be there. Matthew Brehm, in his excellent lecture on the history of sketching as a social activity, called it the “Woodstock of Sketching”, and I agree, it probably was (apart from the drugs, sex and nakedness aspect of course).

Anyway, in linear fashion, I’m going to start at the beginning, Sacramento Airport.

I’m not a huge fan of airports, or flying in general. I was when I was younger, but nowadays I struggle a bit with them. Have you seen that film ‘Up in the Air’? Yeah, that guy’s not me. (Apart from the good looks of course; only joking).

On the plane, I sat by the window for the obligatory ‘view from the plane’ sketch. The stewardess brought round sodas and juices to the passengers. I forgot to ask for one without ice (they come in plastic cups rather than little cans, like on Virgin and other flights). When my diet coke came, fully iced, and i asked if it were possible to have it without ice, the stewardess gave me a look like i had asked her to tell the pilot to fly the plane upside down. Still, five minutes later she brought me a diet coke without ice.

“Where are you from?” the older guy next to me said suddenly, his wife looking on.
“Britain,” I said.
“People in Britain like their drinks warm?”
“No,” I sighed, “it’s because when I’m done with this drink I don’t want a cup of ice just sitting there.” Well, I don’t, I have nowhere to put it, and I really don’t like swallowing the ice. There’s no drain on the plane. It could get knocked over, onto my sketchbook, or my laptop. No explanation needed.

Apparently there was. “Well, in America,” he announced, his wife nodding, “people drink their sodas with ice in it.”
“No, mate,” I said, “it’s nothing to do with that. I don’t like ice.”
The man and his wife raised their eyebrows. I imagined they would be talking about this over dinner later with their friends, all drinking fully iced sodas, that crazy British guy who just doesn’t understand American customs.

I brought my own bottle of diet coke on the flight back. Some things are just too complicated to explain.

Symposium blog: http://pdx2010.urbansketchers.org/

oregon trail

July 7, 2009July 7, 2009Leave a comment

We spent the long Independence Day weekend in Medford, Oregon, attending a large family reunion. I’ve been once before – it’s a long old journey through the northern reaches of California, up the valley and through the mountains, and Medford really does feel a world away from Davis. The heat came with us though, regularly hitting the low 100s. Right on the rural edge of town, horses, chickens, rabbits, and the sound of roosters crowing. I perched in the shade outside my wife’s grandma’s house, and drew my wife’s uncle’s Corvette, which had travelled even further than we had (in considerably more style), but stopped while adding the colours, just as a truckload of cousins-in-law pulled up. I think the ‘missing’ colours actually give the sketch a bit more strength; it is so easy to overdo it.

I did manage a drawing on the drive up too. I sat in the backseat for a little while to feed and generally entertain my 17-month old son, but he fell asleep, so I attempted some in-car sketching, which is pretty hard. You can just about see the mountainous forests whizzing by there.

like a train in the night

June 4, 2009June 25, 20094 Comments

No 7 of 30. Inter-railing, everyone has to do it once. In America they call it Eurailing (at least I think so; Americans can’t get Inter-Rail tickets because you need to be a European resident, but they can get Eurail tickets). You get a ticket, for less than a monthly travelcard in London, and you can go on any train in Europe as many times as possible for one month. I made the most of it. Lots of stories to tell, and I won’t be telling them here. I should do a series about that trip though, perhaps using notes I made on my travels.

I really travelled light. The bit about the socks is true. Photos prove it; I’m wearing odd colours in most of them. I also never took a guide book. Instead, I constructed one myself, in a simple spiral bound notebook. For weeks I prepared, photocopying this from one book, that from another, pasting in colour metro maps where possible, writing down addresses of possible hostels and sights I might visit, and which stations had the all-important luggage lockers. I was being methodical but allowing for every possibility – if I was in Prague but decided to go to Amsterdam, or perhaps the other direction and see Budapest, it was all worked out in my head (in fact I went to Krakow). I carried therefore the ultimate reading tool – the 1998 Thomas Cook Rail Timetable. Worth its weight in gold. At the back of my self-made guidebook though I left space for my travel notes – and there I logged obsessively every move I made. I enjoyed every single moment.

as the present now will later be past

January 18, 2009January 18, 2009Leave a comment

Time travel doesn’t exist; it cannot exist. Don’t let any quantum physyicist tell you otherwise. And yet, in fact I did manage to travel through time, when I got on a train to Charleroi, my home between ’99 and ’00. I live on the other side of the world now, and was stepping back to take a look around at a life I used to lead. Now that is time travel.

Nothing had changed. Well, not nothing exactly; the shops were now open on Sundays, and there was a new little mini-supermarket right by to where I used to live (which would have been really handy back when I lived there), but otherwise, Charleroi was still the same: unpolished, post-industrial, and very familiar. This is not a tourist town; Bruges it aint, and all the better for 100_3487 it. We had a classic Carolo night out; went to my usual places, rubbed shoulders with locals, had Kwak and Charles Quint at la Cuve à Bière (where the people are all the same as before), chatted drunkenly in the smoky Irish Times, staggered up to the excellent popular all-night friterie Chez Robert for a mitraillette de dinde (I am astonished I could still find it after all this time), and then a couple of Fanta Citrons in the morning for the hangover. The freezing cold sun helped too. While waiting for a train, I drew the picture above on tha banks of the murky Sambre (or at least most of it; the ink in my micron pen started complaining about the cold, so I finished it later). We walked about town, I wandered about in my memories and took plenty of photos, and drew La Vigie, the tall building where I used to live on the 13th floor when I taught at the U.T.

It was a fleeting visit, really (there’s not that much reason to stick around in Charleroi in the cold). Who knows when I’ll ever be back. I’m really glad I went though, and visited the increasingly-distant past, but it was even nicer to get back to the future.