Tag: turner wright hall

late July, UC Davis

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July 2024 accordion - UC Davis side Here’s what I did in the second half of July. Or rather, half of what I did. When I was in London I bought a Seawhite of Brighton accordion sketchbook, one that is just under 7″ tall (that’s 17cm, I did buy it in England), and each page is about 3.5″ wide (about 9cm that is), and there were about 16 of those pages/folds, and well, you do the math. I mean, the maths. I have got one of these particular accordion books by Seawhite before, about 12 or 13 years ago, but it was bigger, and I never got past the first drawing. This time I was determined, a series of drawings of UC Davis, with another series of drawings of downtown Davis on the other side. To be honest it wasn’t hugely ambitious, it’s all stuff I have drawn a million times before, right, and the individual drawings aren’t exactly long panoramas themselves (unlike the four very long ones drawn on Hutchison in the 2016 panorama Moleskine). It does look pretty good all stretched out though, it does get a ‘wow’, but the idea was to show the two sides of the Davis we know, or I know. For the UC Davis side, we have six locations all drawn in ink and watercolour: Hart Hall, Shields Library, Heitman (formerly the Hog Barn), Mrak Hall, the Memorial Union, and Turner Wright Hall.

Hart Hall UC Davis 071724  accordion 2024 UCD - Shields Library  accordion 2024 UCD - Hog Barn  accordion 2024 UCD - Mrak Hall  accordion 2024 UCD - Memorial Union  accordion 2024 UCD - Celeste Turner Wright Hall

No stories with these, just the images as they are, UC Davis in the middle of summer. It’s quiet. In a month’s time all the people will start coming back and the quiet days will turn back into busy days, and before you know it the rest of 2024 will whizz past and we’ll all be six months older. I’ve enjoyed the quiet of summer, if not the heat (it’s relatively cooler now though, which is nice), and my daily sketching has slowed a bit since I did this book, and I have not been to many places, nor have I organized any sketchcrawls, that can wait. I drew some London pictures to go on the wall, and also to go into the Pence’s annual art auction. I have (as of last week) started getting into lino block printing, which I’ve not done since some time in the late 80s at school, and it’s fun so far. The biggest creative project I’ve done this summer (even bigger than this accordion book) is the faculty family tree I finally created for our department at UC Davis, which you can read about and look at in this article here. That was a project many years in the conception but which I finally decided to create when the idea hit me on the London Underground. And finally, I’m running again, albeit slowly and more heavily than before, aiming for the 5k on Labor Day and then (gulp) train up for a 10k by November…

Check back for part 2, a whole spread of downtown Davis.

tree by Turner Wright

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Turner Wright UC Davis 101223

Another lunchtime, another part of campus, this was outside the Art Building, by the Turner Wright Hall, next to those Arneson Eggheads that look like they are in a one-way argument; a spot I have sketched before, not that that’s ever stopped me. I liked the colours. I’m drawing a lot at the moment, because (I think) it’s something I know how to do, and in moments when you feel like you can’t really do very much at all, that means a lot. Even if sometimes it feels like a waste of time/energy that could be spent better, it actually isn’t, and in the long term, well I have this huge body of art work to look back on, and people seem to like it. It’s never enough though is it. There always has to be another drawing. Like, do more, do better, try out another idea, another pen, another type of line. There’s no ‘finishing line’ though, not even the end of a sketchbook, because I tend to race towards the end of that sketchbook (I have about a third left in my current one) just so I can start a new one, that magnificent feeling of Page One. I’m drawing in these books, creating them and controlling the narrative, but I think I’m also reading them. Some sketchbooks, they are like novels you just can’t put down, you’ve drawn on one page and you can’t wait to see what happens next. The plot point might be “the Silo” or “the Arboretum” but it might somehow be the best sketch of the book, one of those ones that inspires you to draw a load of other sketches in a similar way – or not, maybe it will be a sketch that convinces me to give up on a certain palette or pen. All the sketchbooks just show the story of my life, the mundane, the world I’m in. I’m not that interesting, Davis might not be that interesting, but there it is, here I am, I’ll keep on drawing it (“everything is interesting if you take an interest in it” a younger man once said, hoping that would be his catchphrase, and it’s still true). This sketch shows I’m really into the trees on campus still, worried about them all after so many fell since last year. I decided not to colour in the trunk but let it stand out against the background colours. On to the next page.