a new path on campus

February 11, 20251 Comment

Nearly done posting all the sketches from January. If you thought January was long and awful, wait ’til you meet February! Every day brings a new level of ‘things can only get shitter’. It is our jobs to ensure that they do not. My sketchbook is filling up fast. Escaping into the pages is my way of making sense of the world around me, or running away maybe, so I am not drawn into looking at the unreliable narrator in my jacket pocket. We all try to get on with it as best we can. Here are a few more from January, there are some more after that and then we have February to come, unless there is an executive order banning sketchblogs. Even as I say it, it sounds ridiculous and therefore more probable. Ok, above is a bit of construction outside the Jungerman Annex at UC Davis, the little bit stuck onto (though not connected by any door) Jungerman Hall, the big building that hosts the Crocker Nuclear Lab, which has been undergoing major seismic renovations as well as a nice paint job lately. This is a new path being built to the rear entrance of the Annex, providing better ADA access to that space. The light at the end of the day looked really nice as I passed by on my way out of work so I drew it. I am particularly excited for this path actually because I was the one who suggested it be built. I am looking forward to walking up it for the first time, I promise not to just cut across the grass. We get a lot of turkeys around here, you see a lot of them in the morning outside our building, and then they all come over to this patch of grass under the tall pine trees (I think they are pines, we have established that I draw a lot of trees but have zero capacity to remember their names; I’m like that with people too, but I don’t like drawing them). Anyway, first sketch of the new path, a little bit of progress; may we all build better paths to get through this mud.

This is another lunchtime sketch, over at the Native American Student Success Center, near the Quad. This is in the old University House building, one of the oldest on campus. It feels like a turbulent time for universities, as a big research institution we are very much in shock at the actions of this new lot in charge and their attacks on the national research infrastructure. Not to mention all the other attacks on everything else, our very principles of community, our support for diversity, inclusiveness. I will not be abandoning our principles. I had a headache while I drew this, at least I think I did; it’s hard to remember. I’ve not been feeling too well the past couple of weeks, headaches and exhaustedness, general fatigue, and I’m sure the state of the world is having an effect. At least when I drew this I felt a bit of calm, and there was a table and some shade to sit in, and it’s a very nice little building this. The Native American Student Success Center (NASSC) focuses on creating a sense of belonging for Native American students in a culturally appropriate way, encompassing students, staff, faculty and alumni. I really like their hummingbird logo. The land upon which UC Davis is built is traditional Patwin land, and has been for thousands of years. There are three federally recognized Patwin tribes: Cachil DeHe Band of Wintun Indians of the Colusa Indian Community, Kletsel Dehe Wintun Nation, and Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation. It is important that we recognize this, and we do see a lot more Land Acknowledgement statements on campus.

Nearby the University House is this big old tree, that might be one of the more interesting trees on campus. It has a huge bulbous growth in the middle and the limbs lurch away from it like the tentacles of some giant monster freeing itself from the depths. I am still determined to draw as many trees in Davis as I can, and while I have surely sketched this before I’ve never just focused on it. May you live your life in peace, old tree, please don’t break and fall upon me. So, we carry on down new paths, and if they lead to the wrong places, then we build paths to the right places.

advance to mayfair

January 12, 2025Leave a comment

Mayfair is one of those parts of London I’ve frankly ignored for too long. Last year we nearly walked around there, to find the Mercato that we’d heard was cool, but after looking walking over to Savile Row to see where the Beatles played in 1969 on the roof, we ended up catching a tube to St. Paul’s for a walking tour of the City (those Blue Badge guides know their stuff). So I had it on my list to explore this area finally, for the first time in I don’t know how long. It’s that big area full of big super expensive buildings and flash cars, embassies and posh hotels, more Rolls Royces than you can dream of, all bounded by Park Lane, Oxford Street, Piccadilly and Regent Street. That’s a big area and it’s not all the same (I am not even sure all of it is ‘Mayfair’, except in the geography of my mind, but we call it that). So on this trip, I decided to make an effort to explore Mayfair again. I actually used to come through here almost every day, twenty-five years ago, on an open-top tour bus, telling the same old stories, waving at the barber, humming the Nightingale song in Berkeley Square song because I didn’t know the words (or the tune) (or the title, evidently), pointing out where the Queen was born (not the original building) and where Jimi Hendrix used to live before he died. Those well-rehearsed yarns have faded in the memory but not as much as the streets themselves; walking around it was like reading a book I had not read since I was a kid, knowing the lines and the characters but still being completely surprised by the story. I was certainly surprised by the little red Mini parked outside a fancy hotel, covered in a Christmas tree, people were stopping to take photos and so I had to grab a sketch. All along the street were expensive cars, this was Grosvenor Street. The Grosvenors are the big cheeses in this part of central London, and many other parts too, they are the Dukes of Westminster. The Grosvenors built this whole area, as well as Belgravia. This street leads up to Grosvenor Square, formerly the location of the massive U.S. Embassy, and the last time I was there, and in this part of town, was in 2005 when I completed my application for Permanent Residency, and had to go to the Embassy, hand in all my paperwork, have a little interview, pledge allegiance with my hand up (that was odd, did that happen?) and then it was all good, I can go ahead and live in America, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

I found the Mercato Mayfair, an incredible food court inside an old church. There are lots of different options from around the world as well as a bar over where the altar would have been. It was done up all festive for Christmas, and I grabbed some south-east Asian food and a fruity soda and had a late lunch/early supper. I still had a lot of drawing I wanted to do in Mayfair, and the daylight was already getting short. I walked over to Duke Street, near the magnificent Ukrainian church (how had I never seen this building before?) to the unusual Brown Hart Gardens. I’ve seen these on walking tour videos (tall tales about elephants being kept here) and one of the Urban Sketchers London events was around here a year or so ago, and I had really enjoyed all their sketches of these domes. I stood among the rich people in nice clothes and sketched. Behind me three suited men talked loudly about work, all business and deals and masculinity. I would have found it hard being a Man of Business, not the life for me guv. The sunset was causing all sorts of colours to appear in the sky, and made the buildings look as if they were made of gold, which they probably are.

A lot of the buildings nearby do look pretty golden. I found myself walking down past the Connaught Hotel, which is a five star hotel that looks like it needs a few more stars added to that description. I didn’t draw it this time, but I did stand outside the Pasticceria Marchesi across the road on Mount Street to sketch the beautiful window display. Their cakes were more like crowns or ornate cushions, and there was a line out of the door. This terracotta building was designed by William Henry Powell and I seem to remember having to say something about Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee when talking about it on the tour, back in the days when Queen Vic was the only one who’d ever had one.

The next stop was Berkeley Square, of the aforementioned song about a nightingale. I had forgotten how big this square is, and even though it was already dark I was amazed at how beautiful it was. I’d honestly not been there since swinging past on a Big Bus pointing out all the Ferraris. The one story I always had to mention were the London Plane trees, as there are a lot of them here, trees that were strong and particularly resilient to the infamous London pollution. I had to sketch one of course, in pencil this time, another tree for the collection. I imagined walking through here on a smoggy evening in Victoria times with horse drawn carriages and top hats and gas-lamps. Now it’s Bentleys and Maseratis, and I did notice that many of the map-posts have been converted into special chargers for electric cars, they just plug them into the lamp-post. We live in the future now my friends. I pressed my nose against the Ferrari showroom checking out a car that costs a quarter of a million quid.

Finally, a famous old pub on the corner of Bruton Street, near where the Queen was born (I suppose these days I should say ‘Queen Elizabeth II’ rather than just ‘The Queen’ in case you think I mean Camilla, or Taylor Swift), at Number 17. The Coach and Horses is the oldest pub in Mayfair, and history pours off of it. I didn’t go in this time, but I’ve been inside many years ago with my mate Tel. I have wanted to sketch this pub for years, another in the mock Tudor style (see my sketches from earlier that day for more of that) so it was always going to be my final destination, but as I stood on the other side of the street drawing the outline, and red buses and taxis passed between us, I ended up just drawing the outlines and scribbling the rest in later, as I had to catch a tube and a bus to Highgate Village. It was a nice stroll around Mayfair, well worth the 400 quid in Monopoly money. I mean, pound for pound, square foot for square foot, it’s the cheapest place on the board.

Kaua’i part 3: to Hanalei and back

December 9, 2024December 9, 2024Leave a comment

We enjoyed warm and sunny weather in Kauai for the most part, but on the day we drove up the eastern side of the island (that is, the ‘windward’ side; I always forget which is which, but the ‘leeward’ side is the drier and sunnier bit), we got our fair share of rain and fog. We headed up towards Hanalei, stopping off a couple of times to look at a lush green valley or a mist-shrouded lighthouse. We had seen pictures of Hanalei Bay looking like a made-up postcard under turquoise skies, but there was no chance of that today. It was raining when we reached the small town of Hanalei, and we pottered about the shops and ate at the little food trucks. Chickens were everywhere as always, and some even joined us at our table while we were eating a lunch of chicken, which is only weird if you make it weird. I saw this great little shave ice place (above), though we were too full to eat any, as we had already eaten very fancy donuts from the nearby ‘Holey Grail’ place. I spent a good bit of time in a local ukulele shop called Hanalei Music, talking with the owner whose son was a musician in England. It’s on these trips to Hawaii that I always get that massive love for the ukulele back, it’s just the right place to play it, and I cannot stop. I don’t care that I’m not the most sophisticated player, I can get a decent sound of it for what I need. Anyway, we went out to Hanalei Bay, or what we could see of it anyway, and walked out along the pier close by to where there were people learning how to surf. It was a pretty dramatic sight anyway, and the waves coming in were perfect for beginners. There were a couple of teenagers out on their boards learning how to surf and I noticed a couple of people, their parents, sat on those low chairs on the pier close by yelling out instructions to them. “Get your feet out of the water!” “Stay on the board!” “Mind that shark!” Well not the last one, though there are sharks here. It was exactly like being at a youth soccer game, with the soccer moms and soccer dads yelling from the sidelines on their little beach chairs as though they are experts, “Offsides, ref!” “Kick it out!” “Watch that shark!” (Except for the sharks.) I felt bad for the surfers, but they were all having fun. I don’t know for sure but I think Hanalei is the same place that Puff the Magic Dragon lived by the sea. That’s the legend anyway. My niece likes it when I play that song on the ukulele, so now I can say I’ve been to the actual place, sounds legit.

We left the rainy Hanalei and headed back down the windward side of the island, stopping off at Lydgate Beach. The rain had stopped and it was sunny and cloudy, and there is a nice little man-made cover here so people can swim about without being pounded by back-breaking waves or eaten by sharks. We splashed about for a bit, enjoying the tropical paradise, and then sat for a while under a tree, where I sketched the scene above and strummed on my ukulele. An older man even commended me on my ukulele rhythms, asking how long I’d been playing, and telling me he has quite a big collection of ukuleles now. Yes, I’m hoping to eventually do the same, get different sizes and different woods. I need to learn a few different songs first. The colours of the world in front of me were exactly why we came to Hawaii. The tree we sat beneath is drawn below, another of those monkeypods I think, but very much with its feet in the sand.

And below, a sketch I made of the sunrise at Poipu, by our hotel, on our last morning in Kauai. Quite a nice view, really. Since coming back I’ve watched a lot of videos on YouTube about rip tides, having heard a lot of stories about the dangerous tides you get on the beaches of Kauai. The waves here were really strong. When I look at the ocean now I see “danger danger danger!” but I still love it. I love the sound of it, I love splashing about in it, I love looking at it. Of course I have tsunami nightmares too, but I look at the ocean and see this impossibly powerful entity right before me and just marvel at the sheer terror and beauty of it all.

Ok last couple of Kauai sketches, done at the hotel on our last morning there, some of those nice pink flowers, and a couple of palm tree trunks carved with tiki designs. It was time to go home, but Kauai was a lovely place for an anniversary vacation.

last tree of the book

November 2, 2024Leave a comment

One last tree for the portrait-format Moleskine, final page of the sketchbook. That format fits drawing trees really well. I’ve gone back to the landscape format Moleskine now, but I’ll use the portrait books again. I’ve thought about having two sketchbooks on the go at the same time, one in each format, but that means carrying two around with me, and that’s a bit silly. This tree, along with the one behind it, is on University Avenue as it meets Russell Boulevard. I loved the texture and character of the tree. The trees still had more of a late summer feel to them, whereas now a few weeks later we are fully in autumnal mode. It even rained last night, quite a lot too, the first day of November. The rest of the year is going to start barreling in now. And in a few days is that day I’ve not been looking forward to, you all know the one, and I have been trying to bury the level of dread and anxiety I’m feeling about it. Whatshisname is going to bloody win. I don’t like even thinking about him. Expect a hell of a lot of furious drawing as I try to block out all of the noise. Running too, I have this 10k in three weeks and I’m not exactly as ready as I’d like. I think I imagined I’d lose more weight, but Halloween candy keeps magically appearing. The mornings have been a bit too dark for running before work too, so that’s pushed my runs to the weekend mornings (I don’t run evenings after work), but the time change is this weekend so that should help with that. I have been pushing my runs longer, I did 4.5 miles easily last week, slower pace but felt good, and I’m easing those distances a bit further each time. The run is the annual Turkey Trot, I usually do 5k but am pushing myself to go further this time. I haven’t decided which football shirt I will wear; I thought about getting a Galatasaray shirt (for the Turkey connection) as I always liked their kits, and when they beat Arsenal in that final years ago while I was living in Belgium (the Arsenal supporting barman turned off the TV and took it away, while the Galatasaray supporters in my kebab shop across the street started celebrating), but I don’t have one. I will probably just represent N17, and wear a classic Spurs shirt.

September Trees – Part 2

October 9, 2024Leave a comment

Time for side two of the album of trees from September. It is October now, the weather is still very hot (over a hundred for several days now) and I haven’t stopped drawing trees, though I am tired of this heat and need some cooler weather now please. It was cool standing in the shade of the big tree above, on Mrak Lawn. You can see one of Arneson’s Eggheads there, “Eye on Mrak/Fatal Laff”, one of the most photographed of the Eggheads. This was on the Friday before the new academic year began, just before the rush, the last moment of calm. I like the new year starting, usually, but this year I was feeling a bit of apprehension. I have quite enjoyed the quiet, even though the Davis summer is long and hot. I know that once all the people are back and things are moving that I always feel differently – I’m a city person after all – but maybe I am just always seeking the quiet spaces now, away from the noise. The world feels so noisy these days, with the news and the adverts and the endless sewage of voices that are shoved in your faces every time you look at your electronic devices that supposedly connect us all. This leaves our heads feeling noisy, as thoughts bounce around in there like birds trapped in a glass room not really sure where to land. The trees absorb some of that noise, I think. They just stand silently, no plans to go anywhere. They are alive, I wonder sometimes if they are happy with where they have ended up or if they don’t like some of the other trees nearby because they are always dropping leaves or attracting squirrels, or if they don’t really think about it because they are, you know, trees.

It’s at this time of year the trees start changing and getting ready for winter. Not all of them do, some stay the same. I start thinking about when I might start wearing my warm sweaters again – not any time soon, if this heatwave continues. It’s getting busy at work as we get on with the general running of this big university, helping the branches of academia grow and develop, insert tree-based analogy here. On the other side of the world this week, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the 2024 Urban Sketching Symposium is about to start. Sketchers from around the world are descending upon that colourful capital and starting to post their experiences already, their sketches, their photos, their connections with each other. October is not a good time for me to go to a Symposium. Last year it was held in New Zealand, another far-flung place I have always wanted to visit, but at another time that was not really possible for me due to timing (April). The last one I went to was the huge one in Amsterdam, 2019, when about 800 or more sketchers descended on the Dutch capital in the middle of an unbearably hot summer, back in the pre-Covid world that feels like a different planet in so many ways (though it’s still unbearably hot). Sure, we are ‘back to normal’ now, but so many of us are still not really. I think I’ve reverted back to the solitary reclusive sketcher that shies from the big events, and the small ones too. This has been happening since before the pandemic, but the past few years have made me even more so. It’s hard for me to really explain it. I sketch, I post on my website, I also post on Instagram, and while I keep up with a load of sketchers online who still inspire me daily, I don’t interact so much with all the wider groups these days, your Facebooks and so on. The algorithms are a mess. Instagram’s ok but a bit limited, I’ve stopped posting on the old Twitter, and Threads is useless. I post to Flickr, but not in the old groups which all feel so 2006. This place right here is my main outlet, old fashioned though the blog is. At the launch of Urban Sketchers I was a correspondent for the main USk blog, but I have not posted there for years since it’s not really for that any more, and is more about the network of local chapters. I never did set up an official local chapter round here. Keeping up with all the global sketching community is overwhelming now, it’s massive. I’m in my little corner doing my thing. I am feeling more reclusive than ever with sketching (and in general, if I’m honest), going back to the default setting of hiding away. Maybe I just need a proper Symposium experience, like in the old days, to kick me out of this, and give me some new ideas and energy.

It was the very first Urban Sketching Symposium that effectively brought me out of my shell in the first place, so to speak. We’d only been a thing for barely a couple of years, but the idea of getting sketchers together for a few days of workshops, talks, sketching and mostly interacting in-person was always on the cards, so Gabi and co organized the first event in Portland, Oregon. Not too far from Davis, really. I nearly considered not going. I was part of Urban Sketchers from the start but that old feeling that my place is to hide away. I’d been going through a bit of a personal crisis at the end of 2009, feeling at my lowest ebb, and I think I took a decision in 2010 to figure out how to somehow grow more, take charge of myself a bit. I was encouraged by other urban sketchers to come to Portland, so I took the leap. It really was a lightbulb moment for me when I got there. The Correspondents had a dinner the night before the Symposium, and for so many of us, gathered from not just America but literally all over the world – Kumi from Tokyo, Gerard from Belgium, Tia from Singapore, Isabel from Mauritania, Simo from Italy, Liz from Australia, Lapin from Barcelona – who had not met in person before, but all knew each other and recognized all our different styles immediately. It was exciting to finally meet Gabi Campanario from Seattle, Matthew Brehm from Idaho, and Jason Das from New York, with whom I’d spoken a lot online already, plus several others whose work I loved and still do, Veronica Lawlor, Shiho Nakaza, Laura Frankstone. The Symposium itself started next day, and there were about 75-80 of us total, and it was far less rigorously structured than the Symposia now – we only realized on day two that name tags might be helpful – but as we all wandered about Portland in our groups, it felt like everyone there got to know each other, and I met a lot of people I’ve stayed sketching friends with (and huge fans of) since, such as Kalina Wilson, Rita Sabler, Don Colley, Mike Daikabura, Orling Dominguez, Elizabeth Alley, Vicky Porter, to name a few I discovered there for the first time. I had dinner with a group of the local Portland sketchers and have been back a few times since to sketch (and eat and drink!) with them on their monthly sketchcrawls. The talks were especially fun, the bit where I asked Frank Ching about curvilinear perspective and Gerard Michel got up and gave an animated explanation to the room in French was brilliant. One of my favourite moments was in Matthew Brehm’s talk, when he described it as the ‘Woodstock of Urban Sketching’, and he was absolutely spot on.

It really was where I lost my shyness as a sketcher too. I remember being in Frank Ching’s architecture workshop down in Portland’s Saturday market, and I didn’t know where to sit and sketch, normally looking for the out of sight place where I would not be bothered. I was sketching with Shiho (who introduced me to the pen that day that I still use daily) and we decided, why hide? Why not just sit in the middle of the market, and let people go around us? I think we were back to back. And it was fine, and people came up and watched, and I didn’t mind, for the first time ever I didn’t mind being watched. It was as if suddenly I realized, it’s ok to go out sketching, it’s normal, and not only are other people doing it, but by doing it ourselves we are giving other people permission to do it. And I drew pirates. I remember sitting outside a little bar one afternoon with a group of us and just seeing each of our minds racing with ideas, none of us able to sleep much, and I realized we need more of this to get sketchers together. On the plane ride home, I couldn’t sit still for ideas, and filled several pages of a notebook with thoughts and phrases and plans, and wrote down “Let’s Draw Davis!”, deciding to start a monthly sketchcrawl in Davis, making fliers that I would post about town and start an email list and make it open to anyone, and promise myself that I would get out of my shell and actually start trying to meet other artists and sketchers in this little city, and encourage others to become urban sketchers. I even brought extra pencils and little sketchbooks with me in case people wondered what we might be doing, and would like to get sketching themselves. And it worked! I’ve met a lot of the local art community over the years, and continued meeting sketchers from over the world, and organizing big events in London, all the fun art stuff. Yet now I find myself shying away again. Maybe I need to, if you will not excuse the pun, branch out a bit.

Let’s get back to the trees. The previous trees were from the Northstar Park, not too far from my house. The big old oak above though is outside the Chemistry building, right opposite the Bike Barn, and has seen a lot of construction right next door while that new Chemistry wing has been built. A number of smaller, younger trees had to be sacrificed for that building to happen, but thankfully this big old mighty tree remains. Its trunk is such an interesting shape, and I pass under its shade most days on my way to work, I am very grateful for its shelter from the sun. I try to find the path with the most shade, the sun does not fit well with my skin. I drew this in pencil as you can see, it made the drawing go a bit faster. It looks like a traditional map of languages, starting out with the big trunk of Indo-European, branching off early into Indo-Iranian and European, then getting all Indo-Aryan, Italo-Romance, Germanic and so on. Like Minna Sundberg’s illustration of it from about ten years ago. I love a language family tree. Languages were my obsession for many years; I’ve kind of let that go a bit, but I still get very excited when I read about it. It’s nearly twenty years since I wrote my Masters thesis, which was based around medieval English and its relationship with French. As far as family tree models go, they are very useful but of course don’t tell the whole story – certain languages having strong influences/cross-pollination on others not in the same branch (or even tree), mixed-language societies where code-switching leads to blurring of the boundaries and pidginization, enforced standardization, but on the whole they can be very helpful in showing how languages at their core developed from each other. Besides, as we have established, I just really love a drawing of a tree.

This is the second tree in this set which has a lot of yellow blooming on the sunny side. This one is next to the Bike Barn, drawn on the first day of Fall quarter. I did another type of tree drawing this summer – I finally updated our Faculty Family Tree. It’s something I have wanted to do for many years. Back in 2008, for the UC Davis Centenary, one of our Emeriti in Statistics, Professor Mack, created a massive genealogy, with lines carefully hand-drawn in pencil, small black and white photos, and names of all sorts of historical mathematicians and statisticians (that bit was typed by me), all collected into one huge board that we displayed for the Chancellor, and have had on our wall ever since. A lot of new faculty have joined us in the intervening years, some have left, and I thought that it would be nice to update it somehow (especially as we can now add Newton and Galileo to the map). And yes, you’ll notice I said ‘map’ there and not ‘tree’ because it was while I was in London this summer, on the Underground, that I had the idea of finally doing this project, and drawing it in the style of the tube map. I had kept a spreadsheet of the lineage of all new faculty who had joined us in the past sixteen years, and got to work in Illustrator, taking about a month to draw the whole thing up. I had it printed as a poster, and it made its debut at a special event in (funnily enough) Portland, at an event for our alumni held at the Joint Statistical Meeting and hosted by our Dean. It’s now on display in our main office on campus, and the great thing is I can update it every year as I find out more information, or as people come or go. It was even featured in the L&S Magazine back in August. Perhaps the biggest tree I have drawn this year.

And finally, two big old oak trees on the north-west corner of the Quad – above, the first day of the quarter, below, the last day of September. Everyone is back now, behind me groups of sororities and fraternities and clubs and other campus groups, as well as the Jehovahs who have been there patiently every day this summer, were gathered outside the MU grabbing the attentions of all the newcomers on campus. Bikes are whizzing by, and e-scooters which go faster and more silently, and e-bikes which go faster still, and now those e-bikes that look more like mopeds, but people ride them on sidewalks and bike lanes much faster than any regular bike; one nearly knocked me over behind Hart Hall the other day. I’ve not been out during the busiest parts of the day yet when classes interchange, but late September/early October is when most of the crashes happen. Yeah it’s great having the people back. I’m still drawing trees, and probably won’t stop any time soon. The Symposium is starting now. Maybe I should think about finally submitting a workshop, trying to teach something. I never feel confident enough to feel like I have anything to pass on; maybe I could teach about drawing trees. Yes, maybe I could. I will try to come out of the shell a bit more, be less of a recluse, I will, but for now, you’ll probably find me under a tree.

September Trees, Part 1

October 6, 2024Leave a comment

I drew a lot of trees last month. It started out when I decided to draw the big tree outside Rock Hall, followed by a big tree outside Physics on that same lunchtime, and just went from there, filling my sketchbook pages with trees over the following couple of weeks. We lost a lot of trees in Davis the past few years, mostly during the big storms at the start of 2023. I miss their shade, especially on the very hot days, and this hot summer is lasting right into Fall as we are currently in a first week of October with multiple days over 100 degrees. A tree is a good place to stop and think for a while. Trees are alive, very much alive, and to sit in its shade makes you feel like you are protected by a large giant. I’ve not been much of a tree climber; when I was a kid I would climb trees because I was light as a feather, but never too far up, because I wouldn’t float down like a feather.

I don’t really have a lot to say about the trees themselves. I could be all naturalist and tell you all what type of tree they are after drawing, but I didn’t bother checking; many of them are types of Californian Oak, but don’t quote me on that. I should know better. When I was 11, I won a competition which was held in schools across the London Borough of Barnet, when I designed a ceramic butterfly. I was really interested in pottery when I was at junior school, and thought it might be something I carried on doing as an art form into later life, but in my first ceramics class at secondary school I got the impression that the teacher, Mr Herring, hated me for some reason. I got the impression he hated a lot of people, but he gave me a discredit on day one when, after he had thrown a huge lump of clay at a pupil, I told him my old pottery teacher told us never to throw clay. He also told me my drawings were really bad. I got a second discredit for not doing my homework once – the homework was literally drawing, but he’d made me feel like I couldn’t draw – and that resulted in me getting my one and only detention at school. In all the time taking those classes I don’t remember making one actual thing. But before Mr. Herring’s class put me off doing ceramics for life, I had won a prize at primary school for my ceramic butterfly. In fact, they told me the main reason I had won is because of all the preparation drawings I had done, they liked them so much. My prize was a book called ‘The Young Naturalist’, and it was all about looking out for insects and identifying plants, it was stuff I was always quite interested in when I would go camping with the cubs and scouts. However, I could not really read it much at home, because my older brother and sister took all levels of piss out of me telling me that a ‘Naturalist’ was one of them people that goes around the woods in the nude with other nudey people, and that I must be one of them if I had that book. Now even though I knew full well that they meant ‘Naturist’, and I knew the difference between the words, I could not be completely certain, they might have been telling the truth. Either way, I thought it best to hide that book, in case anyone got the wrong idea and thought that I, a freckly red-headed 11 year old kid, might be secretly spending my weekends dancing about woodlands in the nip. To this day, I try to avoid using the word ‘Naturalist’, and have even so far resisted getting my US citizenship because I’m a bit worried about the ‘naturalization process’, nobody is making me take my trousers off and go dilly-dallying about an orchard. So that’s the reason I can’t really tell one tree from another.

Being around the trees does make me think though. A little thinking can get you into a lot of trouble, a wise man once said (it might have been Brick Top in Snatch), but this is a place for my thoughts. One piece of music was going through my head when I drew these trees, the song ‘Trees’ by Pulp. It was on their final album in 2001, ‘We Love Life’, an album I very much adored, and brings me back to those first few months in Aix-en-Provence, listening to that CD in my shared apartment above the bakery. Pulp have been very much in my head recently, because after 30 years of being a fan, last month I finally got to see them live in concert. It was an amazing experience, my mind going right back to the 90s. They played at the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, a pretty decent sized venue. My wife and I travelled down from Davis, I bought the t-shirt, we sat pretty high up. The opening band were not great, a duo playing very odd experimental (self-indulgent) music, the classic avant-garde-a-clue. Pulp on the other hand were amazing. The bass player Steve Mackey died last year so this your is a tribute to him. They reformed in 2023 for a series of gigs, and these ones over here in the US were their first gigs over this way in many years. Jarvis was great. I was a massive fan of Pulp in the mid-90s, ever since I saw one of their video for ‘Lipgloss’ on the ITV Chart Show in late 1993 (I used to watch that show on Friday nights when I was 17, that and The Word; I didn’t have a social life then, just like now). I loved His’n’Hers, Different Class blew me away. They played loads of favourites, ‘Babies’, ‘Do You Remember The First Time’, ‘Disco 2000’ (which reminded me so much of those sweaty nights at indie clubs in Soho in 1995-96) and of course ‘Common People’ which is still one of the great pop songs of all time. Their 1998 album This Is Hardcore is another album I adore; the title track is an absolute classic and I was so pleased they played that one live, but they didn’t play ‘Help The Aged’ (which we rewrote as a football song in 1998 called ‘Help The English’ and those are the lyrics still in my head). They played some songs from We Love Life too, but unfortunately not ‘Trees’. And yet, that is the song that has been in my head the most this month, as you can see.

Each of these interludes between trees is going to be a little story or thought all of itself. That’s ok. This will be a long post. There will be eight trees. And there will be more in the next post, about nine. The great thing is, you don’t have to read the words, you can just look at the pictures. The words are here to break up all the pictures really. I drew these trees around UC Davis and downtown Davis, some with the fountain pen like the one above, the rest with the uni-ball signo pen like the one below. I listen to podcasts a lot when I sketch, and since the Pulp show I have been gorging myself on podcasts featuring interviews with Jarvis Cocker. There’s something about his dry, gentle Sheffield voice that is so reassuring. I listened to the audiobook of his 2022 book ‘Good Pop, Bad Pop’, which he read himself. It’s a book about the stuff in his attic, and how talking about the stuff (and deciding whether to keep it or chuck it) becomes in a way the story of his life. I feel that way about my drawings, and this blog, I guess. I could go through the random things in my own house, or those things from my childhood still somewhere in my mum’s loft, and draw them, picking apart the story of my own existence. Self-reflection, or escaping the present into the fog of nostalgia? It’s best to be careful about these things. In that interview I did recently on KDRT it was remarked that my posts are a kind of life story (this one is, that’s for sure), and I think that’s part of the excuse to draw, is the excuse to look back while looking at the world in front of me. The tree above is right outside a funeral home, and I kept thinking that I should do all my thinking while I am alive, because (to paraphrase Paul Weller) there’s no thinking after you’re dead. Wow, that got dark! Best get back to listening to some Pulp, that will cheer us up.

Speaking of 90s music, one of my other favourite bands Oasis have finally announced a truce and will play a number of big shows next year, you may have heard. Of course I was very excited to hear the news, but had mixed emotions about it. The shows of course have had insane levels of interest, and the whole fiasco about dynamic pricing – you wait online in a queue for seven hours for expensive tickets to a show in a massive packed stadium where they will probably sound a bit shit, and if you are lucky enough to actually get through, you find the cost of the tickets has doubled or tripled? And you are on the spot. I didn’t even try. It was overall a very bad look, left a sour taste. Like Pulp, I was obsessed with Oasis in the mid-90s but never saw them play live, it was too hard to get tickets. I considered Knebworth in 96, but that would have meant hanging on the phone all day, and besides I had to work on the Saturday at ASDA. One of my co-workers did go, I think I even covered for her on the Sunday, and she had an amazing time (while I made tea and toasted teacakes for shoppers). I didn’t mind. I had already seen the Sex Pistols that summer at Finsbury Park, and nothing in the world was topping that. I never had the patience for competing for tickets to the big gigs, though looking back Knebworth would have been fun. I did eventually get tickets to see Oasis in France in 2000, when I was living in Belgium. It was I think in Metz, and I didn’t really know how I was going to get there and back from Charleroi, so when the band had a big fight in Spain and Noel Gallagher quit, they cancelled those shows and I was partly relieved. When they split in 2009 I thought it was a long time overdue; there are a few songs on the last few albums I really enjoy but nothing like the energy of the 90s. For the past fifteen years, I have loved Noel’s ‘solo’ albums, and even those Beady Eye albums made by Liam and the remainder of the band. Most of all I’ve enjoyed the interviews, and the silly drama of it. The music is part of my own personal history, it’s not for everyone but there were big reasons that it hooked onto me when I was 18-19. When the announcement came they were finally getting back, well it wasn’t like when Pulp re-formed and people were like, oh ok. With Oasis the whole world all seemed to have an opinion. People delighted in telling the world they hated them. Well, I loved them. Part of me wanted them to never get back, because it was over and done with, but well, playing some live shows with all the old stuff is all part of the fun. The Sex Pistols did it, after all, and they still hate each other thirty years after that. I’m mostly looking forward to the interviews, to see what the pair of them will be like together again after all this time (and when they will split up again).

Music has been on my mind lately. I got that record player, and belted out the Sex Pistols’ version of ‘Substitute’, the first song I ever learned on the guitar. My uncle Billy played that song to me on the same vinyl record back in about 1988 or 89 and I was transfixed with the sound. You could play like that, simple angry chords, and it was great. You didn’t even have to get it right. I learned the chords from ear, got the words all wrong, played it fast like the Pistols and slower like the Who (marginally slower), and to this day I still get it wrong but it doesn’t matter, my version is right because it’s my version. I have loved playing the guitar since then. I got an acoustic guitar at a car boot sale for about a fiver, a fairly crappy old thing but it played and stayed in tune, and I learned all my chords on that. At school I would play the basic nylon string guitar in the music room, I always got a tune out of it but it was quiet, it was hardly right for playing Anarchy in the UK. I started writing songs almost right away. One of the first I wrote was called ‘Strike’, written as a homework assignment in Music where we had to write a song about something in the news. Me and my friend Kevin performed it in class, me on the guitar and him on either the keyboard or tambourine, I forget now. The chords were some thing like G-E-D-C-G, with no melody, and the opening words went something like “down to the station I usually hike, today I’ve got to take my bike, because there’s a strike.” That’s all I remember. I didn’t even have a bike. Still it was a start, and I started writing any old nonsense after that, looking for chords and tunes, some very catchy, some very crappy, latching onto whatever was floating about. At this point I loved the Pogues, the Pistols, the Beatles, the Jam, the Who, and loads of Irish folk and rebel music, I had this song book with guitar chords that we picked up at one of the Irish music festivals. I got my first electric guitar on my 14th birthday (thanks to my big brother), a trusty Westone Concord, though I didn’t have an amplifier so never plugged it in until I was in front of an audience at school. I wrote and performed a lot of songs at school, I had that band called ‘Gonads’ with my mate Hooker singing (a much better singer than I ever was) and we would get booed off annually at the Christmas Variety Show, which we loved. Funny enough I remember first hearing Oasis after leaving school and thinking, wait this is the sound I was after, I could never get it but this is what I was going for. I had given up the idea of being in a band by then. I did keep writing songs for years, in waves, and I think a part of me would write them with my old mate’s voice in mind, and they were never for playing or showing anybody, and eventually I stopped, seemed a bit self-indulgent. I do still find myself coming up with tunes though, playing them into my phone as 20-30 second unfinished sketches, and there they stay. I like to think that informs my sketching somehow, inspires me to draw more quick and less ‘finished’ sketches, but come on now.

This collection of trees is a bit like an LP isn’t it, with a Side One and a Side Two. A lot of these ones were drawn downtown while walking about on a Saturday afternoon, before heading to Armadillo Records to look through some vinyl. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1989. I stood outside Froggy’s on 2nd Street to draw this one above, I was attracted to the reddish orange hue the tree took on at head height. Reminded me of myself, maybe? My hair is fading now though. The leaves haven’t fallen, but the bark is getting – wait, stop turning everything into some sort of tree tie-in. So, in this post I’ve covered even more mawkish autobiography than usual, from triumphs/failures in ceramics as a kid, finally going to see Pulp, failing to see Oasis, learning to write songs as a teenager, to now when my hair is fading and I’m obsessively drawing trees. In that radio interview recently Bill Buchanan described me as restless, and he was right, I’ve always been like that. Now I have started drawing trees, I can’t stop seeing trees to draw, especially those parts where all the big limbs start sprouting off from the main trunk. I wonder if the tree knows beforehand how many big branches will sprout out, which ones will be the main branches, which ones will get cut by some arborist or some force of nature, and just how far will some of those branches go? It’s all starting to feel like another autobiographical analogy again, and we’re not having that. Trees are just trees and I’m glad for them. They keep us cool and provide us with the air we breathe, and yes they can occasionally fall and ruin carports and rooftops, but that’s nature’s way isn’t it. Side One finishes with a tree and a bench in central Park, Davis, and that’s where we leave it. The bench is green in real life, if you’re interested. I could have left it out, but it seemed important to include.

Muir Woods

October 1, 2024October 1, 20242 Comments

We went to Muir Woods, in Marin County north of San Francisco. I’ve never been there before so it was pretty cool. It’s a National Monument, so our National Parks pass got us in. I love all the Redwoods. (I don’t love John Redwood much, but he’s not a tree, he’s a Tory.) These trees are genuinely enormous. The first time I came to the US we visited Armstrong Redwoods, but haven’t been back since. I’d like to visit the Redwoods National Park, though it is quite far north near the top of California, and I’m not liking the long car rides. Muir Woods was really beautiful, though to get there you have to go up some pretty windy roads with steep drops. It’s part of Mount Tamalpais, and backs onto the Pacific, though we didn’t go down to Muir Beach. We took a long walk along the main groves, without any steep climbs, and while it was pretty busy it was still nice listening to the sounds of nature amid all the green shade. One area, Cathedral Grove, is designated a quiet path, but nobody told the people behind us who were talking very loudly. These trees are big, I wouldn’t get them upset. It all reminded me of the recent Planet of the Apes films, they were all up here weren’t they. I sketched this one big tree that had an opening in it, where people would stop and get their photos taken as if the tree was consuming them. Don’t give the tree any ideas, I say. I was inspired by all these trees though. I’ve spent the rest of September filling most of my sketchbook with drawings of trees, and once you start it is hard to stop. Each tree is different, and old, and very alive. After our walk around the woods, we drove down into Mill Valley for a smoothie, before driving around the Marin Headlands and getting some nice photos of the Golden Gate Bridge.

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.

go tell it to the trees

January 31, 2024Leave a comment

It’s still January, if you can believe it. It’s been a productive month sketching-wise. I wonder what the point of it all is, all this sketchbooking, but then I remember last January, all those trees that came down, it’s not like the trees got rebuilt or anything, they are gone forever. The big old trees have really interesting shapes and textures at this time if year, when they are free of all those leaves that give us much needed shade in the hot summer, now they open up to provide light. So I am continuing in my documentation of these large living beings, they are worth a look. This one is outside California Hall, the new lecture hall built a few years ago (it’s in the sketchbooks), with the outline of Kerr Hall in the background. I keep thinking of that Pulp song “Trees” when sketching trees, and that album “We Love Life”, their last proper album as a band from back in 2001. That was quite a long time ago now, but it always makes me think of the year spent in Aix-en-Provence when I first heard it. I liked it a lot, but it’s more what the sound of the music brings me back to I guess, and I think of the chilly mornings walking my usual route to the Faculté des Lettres along streets with bare plane trees and the occasional dog poo, to teach my classes in English. The taste of a fresh poulet-frites for dinner. Completely different life, I can barely remember much of it now. Looking on Google Street View, it looks like the old ‘Fac’ has been demolished and replaced with a new modern building, which looks a lot nicer. No doubt if I’d been there, I would have drawn it all being knocked down and then being built. Looking at this sketch, that tall Kerr Hall behind was where my current department used to live before our new building (shared with Math) was built, just before I arrived. Time moves along, the trees just watch it all go by.

goodbye, tree

September 18, 2023September 17, 2023Leave a comment

Sad tree update. We thought after all those big storms at the start of this year that we had seen the last big tree loss in Davis for a while, but this one is particularly sad. In the UC Davis Arboretum by Lake Spafford, very close to Mrak Hall, stands a tree called a Japanese Zelkova, out on its own and in a perfect spot to provide loads of shade not only to students and picknickers, but also to the many ducks and geese that call this part of the campus their home. This tree was planted back in the 60s and was so well loved. So when they discovered a serious crack in the trunk last month, likely caused by the weight of the many branches (which have always been meticulously managed), which was not possible to fix, the tree was deemed too dangerous to leave and so scheduled for removal. Here’s some information about the tree: ucdavis.edu/news/damaged-lake-spafford-tree-slated-removal . The UCD Arboretum IG account also posted the news, with a photo of how Lake Spafford looked back when the trees were first planted in the sixties: www.instagram.com/p/CxGiZm_husi/?img_index=4.

I went down there last Wednesday, the day before it was going to be taken away, and sketched it one last time. What a beautiful tree it was. There were already a couple of workmen there with a machine taking away the bench. The poor tree probably knew something was up. Trees aren’t just furniture, they are actual living things, but it was going to die. I mean, yes they often become furniture afterwards, but I’m trying to be sensitive here, I love trees. I said goodbye to the tree (in my head, not out loud, obviously), and went back to work.

I came back next morning, to see if the deed had been done. The main trunk remained, but completely removed of all branches. It reminded me of Aslan, shaved and murdered on the Stone Table, but I heard no crack of Deep Magic to bring it back to life while my back was turned. I sketched it (see below), and went off to a meeting about temporary visas elsewhere on campus.

By Friday, it was completely gone, just a stump and a sign commemorating the tree left. I did not feel like sketching it. This area has a lot less shade now, and shade is good for keeping the ground cool during those long Davis summers. Goodbye, lovely old tree.