half moon bay

August 10, 2024Leave a comment

The first couple of pages of a new sketchbook. It was another stupendously hot weekend in the central valley of California, hitting the 110s in Davis, so we drove down to Half Moon Bay, on the coast just below San Francisco, where it was about 50 degrees cooler. While we have been to nearby Pacifica a few times back in the soccer tournament days, I’ve never been to Half Moon Bay. It was very foggy, and the cliffs were tall and rugged. The town itself was nice, we stayed at a hotel on the edge, and drove down to the walk along the cliffs nearby, and down to the Pigeon Point lighthouse further down the coast (it was all scaffolded up). Near our hotel, the walk to the seashore was made by a little hike through a spooky tree tunnel, created by the leaning of the fog-washed trees bending away from the ocean winds. It was an unusual place, I took many photos but had to stop and sketch, as best I could. I wandered back to the hotel, and managed to get lost on the way, daydreaming little chord sequences in my head and looking at fog. We never actually went down to the beach itself, we couldn’t find the path, but it was very damp, and those sneaker waves were looking a little bit fierce.

Our hotel was located next to a British themed pub called Cameron’s, an older place full of all kinds of British themed stuff that was just begging for a pub sketch. Definitely not named after a useless former Prime Minister who gambled the future of his country on a referendum and lost, and then sodded off. Thankfully there were no pig-themed items about the place. I had a little time before going out for dinner so I got myself a pint of Smithwicks and sat in a little alcove ready made for sketching. At the bar when I ordered my drink, the barman who’d been talking with some of the people at the bar asked me if I was related to another man at the bar, and pointed to someone older, and they were all chuckling. I squinted to see any likeness and said, “oh right, we do resemble each other; in no way whatsoever.” Bit weird. Then again I’m always thinking people look like other people. Only that day I had been wondering if Half Moon Bay was in any way related to the Eastenders character Alfie Moon. Anyway it was nice to have a good pint of Smithwicks (since the Bull and Mouth in Davis doesn’t do that beer any more, unlike its predecessor De Vere’s). It was an interesting place, although all around the pub and the hotel there were British flags which were displayed quite obviously upside down. If you don’t know what way round a British flag should be displayed, well I forgive you I suppose, but the red diagonal on the top left corner should be touching the left edge, ie the flagpole. When you see it painted on the right side of an airplane or a ship it might look upside down but that’s just because the invisible flagpole is on the right and it’s flying against it, and that’s fine. If you see it displayed on a flagpole where the pole is on the left and the bottom red diagonal is touching the pole, then it’s upside down and it means you are a ship in distress, maybe you’ve been captured by pirates or racists or online trolls or something. So imagine my concern when I kept seeing the British flag displayed upside down, I mean we are right by the coast and you never know if there are pirates nearby. Even the logo of the pub showed an upside down British flag. I mean, it’s practically treason. I did want to point this out, but if this is a British themed pub the right thing to do would be to not point this out but to grumble about it to myself privately, in the proper British way, so that’s what I did, I grumbled about it privately for several hours to my family who didn’t really care. Nice beer though, and I’d liked to have spent longer drawing the pub and all the colours (all the flags in view were the correct way round, or maybe I corrected them), but they were setting up for karaoke, and we had to leave for dinner. IMG_1385(2)sm

trees and fever

February 17, 2024February 16, 2024Leave a comment

On the last day of January I got sick, and stayed home, getting progressively worse. By the first day of February I was laid out in bed with a fever and in no mood for anything. I slept all day long, onyl getting up shortly before two to grab something to eat and catch the news – I saw that Lewis Hamilton had signed for Ferrari? How long was I asleep? That was exciting news, though it wouldn’t happen for another year, so I went back to bed. I did get up shortly before it got dark out, and went for a quick walk on the Greenbelt to get some fresh air. I sketched a tree with the sunset behind it while sat on a bench, drawing in that Nero pencil that I got from one of the symposiums (wait, the last symposium I attended was in 2019?). I like that pencil though, with its thick black texture. The sunset was lovely. I was not feeling lovely, so went home and slipped back into bed.

These trees were an experiment using these Derwent ‘Graphitint’ watercolours that I bought recently, I was really interested in seeing what they could do. I think I like them? I mean I suppose, well no, I don;t like them that much, really. They don’t act like normal watercolours for sure, they do have an interesting texture and yes, feel like they are full of graphite pencil which I suppose they are. This is the view of the back of Covell Commons as seen from the Greenbelt in north Davis. That green rise, that’s beside where me and my son would play with the football when he was much smaller, before he was on soccer teams, we’d go out for a kickaround there setting up a couple of goals, and I’d usually lose. Seems like a long time ago now, but I always think of that patch as our little patch. This isn’t the most accurate sketch, though the day was gloomy with rain coming in and out, so atmospherically it’s accurate enough. I probably won’t be using the Graphitint paints while out urban sketching much but they are interesting enough. I was feeling much better by that Sunday, to the point where my energy was rushing back in, so much so that I could not sleep at night at all, leaving me exhausted the next day.

november’s gonna november

November 30, 2023December 2, 2023Leave a comment

Since today’s the last day of November, and tomorrow is December, here’s a bunch of sketches from around Davis this past month showing the colourful trees they have nowadays. You’ve seen them, the trees they have now, with all the colours. It can be very exciting, especially for the person with a paintbox who just has to record it somehow. Above is Oak Street, I cycle down here every day, and now the sun sets so early I cycle up it every evening in the dark, and there are no streetlights (but occasionally piles of leaves in the bike path). This was back on the 19th; today is the last day of November. I heard this morning that Shane MacGowan has died. He was 65. I am really pretty sad about it.

I stood on the corner of Russell and Miller to draw this. Russell and Miller sounds like one of those comedy duos you used to get, one of those ones that were extremely unfunny, but had absolutely no idea how unfunny they were. A bit like Hale and Pace, but even less so. I also sounds a bit like the sort of law firm you have to call if you get bitten by a dog, or if your foot gets run over by an e-scooter. In the foreground is one of those ‘Spin’ bikes, you’ve seen those, those e-bikes they have nowadays. You’ve seen them, you use an app, there’s a bike, it rides a bit faster and you can appear suddenly behind regular bikes on the bike path like “surprise!” before whizzing by saying “see ya later suckers!” and then when you want to stop using it, you can just get off an leave it in the middle of the sidewalk in the way, so someone else can come and have a go. There used to be ‘Jump’ bikes, now there are ‘Spin’ bikes. There are also these ‘Hump’ bikes, looking more like modernized mopeds but completely silent and people ride them on bike paths at twice the speed of a normal bike. They give me the ‘ump.

In the sketch above, I drew with the full intention of adding in the yellowing oranges and browning greens of all the foliage, but didn’t get back to it later, and so I left it up to your imagination. The great thing about this is I can re-use it in April or May, and colour the leaves in a more spring-like green. It’d be like going back to an old song and reworking the bass or adding better lyrics. This was on 4th Street, in the run up to Veterans Day.

So, Shane MacGowan has died. The first record I ever owned that was all mine was The Fairytale of New York, which if memory serves my mum got for me as a present a few weeks before Christmas in about 1987, and which became an instantly beloved classic in our home, and everywhere else too. I still have it. We had a lot of Irish music in our house, a lot of music in general, but we loved the Pogues, and Shane MacGowan sang in an Irish accent, though he was from London, and was absolutely one of a kind. Our world was Irish north-west London, this was us.

This one above was drawn on one of those Saturdays when I needed to get out and sketch, to look for those autumnal leaves, and grab a milkshake before cycling home on my regular acoustic bike. I listened to a podcast talking about George Harrison and the Travelling Wilburys. I loved George, but back when I was in my early teens, the Wilburys were a bit of a joke, a bunch of grandads (in their forties). Back then, I became obsessed with the Pogues. I was obsessed with the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols, but at the end of the 80s I loved the Pogues. I remember buying the Peace and Love album from a record seller at the Irish Music and Dance Festival in Southport (at Pontins, Ainsdale Beach). We would go to every year for a week of listening to Irish greats like Brendan Shine and Philomena Begley, and I’d get to hang out with other Irish immigrant kids from all over the UK, getting pals from Glasgow and Lancashire and Birmingham and all those Irish bits of London. I never got to see the Pogues live. I think my mum did, and I know my cousin had seen them playing in Archway many years ago. I listened to their greatest hits on my cheap portable tape player, travelling all over London on the tube or on the bus; walking down the south bank of the Thames listening to ‘Misty Morning Albert Bridge’; I remember sitting opposite Parliament, I must have been fifteen or sixteen, long before the London Eye ever came along, and drew Big Ben, and was chatting to this homeless guy from Liverpool, and he told me all about his situation, I remember giving him the drawing when I was done, and he was really nice, and I remember thinking a lot about that conversation on the way home. I think about those years when I hear the Pogues, I was an awkward skinny freckly lad with untamed red hair and creative energy fighting to get out, and I played my guitar a lot, badly I might add, and I played mostly Pogues songs because they were easy as fuck, three chords in a few different ways, and lyrics that were picked right off the littered streets where I was living. I used to get this book of Pogues lyrics out from the library. I actually used that book for a study in poetry for one of my English GCSE exams; I don’t think my teacher was impressed with it. But they were presented as poems, and they read like poems. They were illustrated by this guy who would mostly just scribble in biro and it would be brilliant, and I loved that complete looseness, matching the ‘tripping-over-the-kerb and getting up again’ of the lyrics, telling so many stories about the simplest things, a freedom of expression I found so hard to achieve. I could not sing, I still can’t, but Shane MacGowan, his voice, his looks, his whole presentation, it felt like you didn’t have to be ‘good’ at something to be great at it, he was great, the Pogues were great. I played songs with D and G and A a lot, to the point that the frets on my Westone Concord (which is still living at my mum’s house, hiding from view) are to this day completely worn down in the chord shape of D. Three chords is really all you need mate, boom there’s a song. Years later at the end of the 90s, while I was living in Belgium, I actually wrote a song called ‘Misty Morning Waterloo’, a tribute in the title (though actually about those foggy mornings leaving London on the Eurostar to go back to Brussels, I always hated leaving London behind), and that only had two chords in it. If I’d just tried a bit harder, I could have got away with one chord.

So yeah, I’m very sad about today’s news, and I’m going to spend the next few days thinking about Shane MacGowan, listening to the Pogues, thinking about London, listening to ‘London You’re A Lady’ (which is probably my favourite Pogues song, an absolute belter of a poem and always makes me sad thinking of my old home town). But it wasn’t the only news of one of my late 80s London heroes dying. Terry Venables, ‘El Tel’, one of my favourite Spurs managers, died last week too, and we all loved him. November 2023, you took a toll. The sketch above was drawn on campus, in the middle of the month, those colourful trees were just begging for someone to sketch them. It’s December tomorrow, and then this godforsaken year is nearly over, and then there’s another godforsaken year coming right up. I’ll keep on scribbling. Below, last one in the set of November’s trees, another escape downtown catching the colours at the corner of 3rd and D. November is done with now.

atmospheric river / bomb cyclone

January 8, 20234 Comments

Before we return to the sketches of summer 2022, here’s 2023 so far. Here in California we are going through some of the worst wave of storms I’ve seen since coming here, knocking down more trees than I’ve experienced before (in my life that would be since the Great Storm of 1987 in the south of England, the Michael Fish Not-a-Hurricane). We knew the ‘Atmospheric River / Bomb Cyclone’ was incoming, but weren’t expecting it to cause so much damage. Atmospheric River and Bomb Cyclone sound like two flavours of anti-perspirant spray, or maybe a double A-side twelve inch from a 1980s dance group. With all these trees down I wasn’t not sure whether to call it ‘Arbor-gedden’ or ‘Arbor-calypse’. The situation has been pretty serious though.. The first biggie was on New Year’s Eve. It was pouring with rain and the wind was picking up, but we weren’t going anywhere, just played some board games and ate a nice roast dinner, and then noticed that the internet had gone down. We watched a movie saved on the iPad (the new Pinocchio, funnily enough) We could hear some big crashes not far away, but couldn’t tell what that was, maybe a big tree limb had snapped off. Just before midnight, the rain and wind had stopped revealing a bright starry sky. My son and I took a little walk around the neighbourhood and saw some trees had come down, but turning back towards our road the lights were out, but we could just about make out that a big tree had fallen and totally crushed the carport opposite. That’s it above, as seen first thing next morning. The car was just missed. Then walking away from that we nearly walked right into a huge tree that blocked the entire street, twice as big as the other fallen tree, and that had taken out the street lamp too. We found a way around and went back home. Power was out through much of Davis, but we were ok. The next morning I saw that the huge tree that came down had also totally flattened a car and pulled up the pipes from beneath the street, right outside our neighbour’s house. The sound of chainsaws had started at about 2am, before crews even made it out, there were neighbours just cutting away branches so that people could get past. Another enormous tree came down on top of all our mailboxes (that stopped the junk mail for a few days). I walked around, and saw that trees were down everywhere, a huge one already cleared from the main road, plus one house which had two trees fall on it, one damaging the roof and another crushing a car (I know the owner actually; he told me that they heard the first tree come down and went out to see, and only narrowly missed getting hit by the second tree which took out the car – so very, very lucky). This was just in our few blocks, trees were down everywhere. I’ve seen a lot of trees fall in Davis, but never this many all at once.

It took a while for the internet to come back on at home but I went into work a few days later, to find that the massive tree in front of our building had fallen too. Other trees have gone down outside the Math Sciences Building over the years but this was the biggest, a huge pine I think it was, and the roots had pulled up the sidewalk too. Crews have been out there ever since with chainsaws and shredding machines pulling it all apart, the the huge stump is still on its side and roped off. Several other trees around the building have had large parts come off. In front of Mrak Hall, two historic trees, oaks I think, fell on the main path. I walked through part of the Arboretum, mindful about loose branches, and saw one of the big Redwoods in the old Redwood Grove had fallen too. A lot of old trees fell on New Years Eve, a lot of history (and some much-needed shade) went with it; it made me feel sad. However, we were told that this was only a taster, that the really big storm was coming on Wednesday evening, with the worst hitting on Thursday afternoon. I got a little bit drenched cycling in on Thursday morning, but by about lunchtime it was another calm lull. In the early afternoon however I could see from my fourth floor office window a long black line against the sky, ominously stretching from north to south, moving fast in our direction. By the time it reached Davis, it was like we were suddenly engulfed in a giant grey wave, with the view from my window being a wall of water across the city. I had to quickly sketch while watching this deluge.

Thankfully the storm didn’t bring quite as much damage to our area as on New Year’s Eve, but still caused chaos around the state, and there have been big floods already with the region on high alert for more. There was another lull on Friday, and then on Saturday night (last night) the next wave hit, and boy was there some wind. It reached around 65 mph here, and I was pretty nervous watching as best I could from my bedroom window, as the silhouettes of large trees dancing around like jelly against a sky illuminated by flashes of lightning, to the constant pounding drone of the winds. The one tree that is right outside my window was giving it all that, mouthing off and getting lary, but by sunrise the tree had sobered up and acting as if nothing had happened. I took another walk this morning to survey the damage around our part of Davis, and while there were some big branches down and at least one tree it didn’t seem quite as bad, but I can’t speak for the rest of town and the news showed that midtown Sacramento got pretty badly hit. Our electricity was on, unlike for much of town after some power lines went down, but the internet was out. I cycled down to campus during today’s lull to check that power was on in our building, thankfully all ok (first day of the quarter starts tomorrow!), but didn’t sketch anything. All along each street there are piles of branches, and chopped up tree trunks, or the scars of where they crashed. Last night was pretty scary, but the news is telling us the next wave of this Atmospheric River will hit tonight, the winds of the Pacific stretching out its long arm to give us another clobbering, and this one will be even worse than last night? It’s nature’s way, sure. Fingers crossed that tomorrow will be ok. I’d say ‘touch wood’ but frankly I want to keep as far away from any wood as possible…

autumn in davis

December 28, 2020December 28, 20201 Comment

Post #2 about all the autumnal colours that painted Davis streets in late November to early December. It was like a fall extravaganza. Above is the corner of B and Ovejas in north Davis, the streets over here were looking ridiculously autumnal, like you get in an American rom-com set in the suburbs. A lot of Davis looks a bit like that, I guess. I don’t really watch American suburban rom-coms. I’m not even sure what rom-com stands for, probably some futuristic tech from the 80s.

This was downtown, corner of 3rd and D, when the trees on 3rd turned red with rage. Things were still a bit open here, with Cafe Bernardos and other places having their outside seating for the COVID age, but I don;t know what it’s like since we went into a stricter purple tier, they told all the restaurants to be take-out only for the time being. At this time though there were a lot of people still about, enjoying the Fall colours, just before Thanskgiving. We had a Zoom Thanksgiving with family, played Scattergories. Same with Christmas, except for the Scattergories, we just opened presents.

Above is International House, corner of Russell and College Park. It was a warm day when I sketched this, with the sun on the back of my head (kept my hood up). International House does lots of things for the international community here in Davis, including organizing the International Festival every year to promote cultural awareness and global appreciation. I’m well into that. It looked lovely on this day. The adjoining street College Park looked gorgeous too. This is one of the most stunning streets in Davis in my opinion (it’s more of a big ring than one street) with amazing houses, including the UCD Chancellor’s residence. I’d love to draw most of these houses, I do feel a bit self-conscious sitting outside one though, so have never sketched them. I did do the drawing below though, but this was mostly done at home. I did a very quick sketch outline from a spot in the road next to a pile of leaves, but then drew the rest from a photo with the fountain pen and the watercolours. Caught the feel of the street I think.

The one below I drew and painted standing right there, a street near my house right on the north Davis Green Belt. The houses here are nice too, if not quite as grand as College Park, still very pretty. I love living near the Green Belt, but in November it was more the orange red yellow and brown belt. This one didn’t take too long, just under an hour, a lunch break while working from home.

And the one below was down on D Street, in Old North Davis in the block off of 5th, near downtown. The trees were mostly brownish orange, I didn’t draw or colour everything because I was getting a bit stiff from standing, the light was starting to go, I thought I might finish later but I never did, this was enough. This was pretty much the last of my autumn sketches for 2020, a little period of excited energy that has now faded away with the leaves. I’ve not sketched much in December at all, in the run up to Christmas, as the stay-at-home orders got tighter and the days got much shorter, and I just didn’t want to leave the house at lunchtime. Maybe I will today. I still have a bunch of different coloured autumn leaves I collected while cycling around town which I intended on drawing, like some sort of botanical artist (I am in awe of botanical artists and really should try more of that myself), but they might all be too crunchy and dry now. I took a lot of photos of colourful autumn Davis too, but it’s the sketches that make me really feel the season. Now it’s winter, which in Davis means, well not exactly American rom-com suburbia, which would be snow. No, for us it’s just colder than Fall, with fewer leaves on the trees so you can see the buildings clearly (great for sketching shadows!), with more bright skies than overcast ones, a bit of rain but not like back in England, just enough to close the soccer fields. I should like to do a book about Davis (ha, been saying that for ten years), but maybe one where I go through the months of Davis, and show what the town looks like in different seasons. “The Year in Davis”. I don’t know. I also want to do one just of panoramic drawings of Davis streets. I have ideas but then never finish them off, I just like to keep drawing. Better get back to it then.