A lovely sunny Monday lunchtime. This is the UC Davis Quad. You will notice on the right there are blue hammocks set up with people taking naps inside. This is very much encouraged in Davis (also in nearby Napper Valley). Taking a nap is good for you. What do you call it when someone is pretending to be asleep? Fake Snooze. I haven’t tried the hammocks myself, they are usually all occupied. Ironically they didn’t have these when people were camping on the Quad years ago in the ‘Occupy’ protests. Back then, UC Davis was put on the map of infamy by the ‘Pepper Spray Incident’. Did you hear about the peanut who was pepper-sprayed? He was a salted. Peanut. Ha ha, ha ha. It’s very peaceful here now, though we still have protests and a number of marches, as you would expect. This for example was March 18. Sorry I appear to have been possessed by the spirit of Tommy Cooper.
Tag: UC Davis
a talk about gratitude
I went to the UC Davis Worklife Champions event last week (I was one of many who got a Worklife Champion recognition, which was nice – thanks!!), and the speaker was Prof Robert Emmons, who gave a talk about “gratitude”. I drew and took notes as best I could, and I’m not sure what I did with his arm there, it looks like “Gratitude is a Choice” was a mic drop, it also looks like a pretend arm with the real arm inside holding a remote control like in that episode of Father Ted. Drawing people is always a challenge when they are moving. I drew this on the back of a piece of paper with some Worklife stuff on the other side.
duck soup
A break from the London sketches, to show a Davis sketch. I’ve not sketched as regularly as usual since coming back, which is common after a trip abroad. I get back to Davis and I’m like, yeah I’ve drawn it all before. However I don’t think I ever drew the view from my office. I have been in a new office since summer 2017, having previously been in a windowless office in the same building. In that office, I had to draw on the whiteboard to pretend there was an outside world. Now I can see what the weather is like. Usually it’s sunny. Lately however we have been having ridiculously wet and stormy winter weather, rain that has been flooding some areas. Many of our soccer games (and this week’s tournament) have been cancelled, causing my son to instead kick his ball against the front door (a lot). Good weather for ducks they say. Not all ducks. Apparently one duck got sucked into the embarrassingly-named Lake Berryessa “Glory Hole” (which I see is referred to as the ‘Bell-mouth Spillway’ by some news outlets, which sounds SO MUCH better). I don’t think the duck made it. When I heard the news I immediately thought of Donald Duck going red and getting angry and making those furious steam-eared Donald Duck noises. What do you think of when you see the headline “Duck gets sucked through Glory Hole”? Actually don’t tell me the answer to that, honestly. The rain was bucketing down as I sketched this, stuck inside on my lunchtime, eating a microwave ready-meal of ‘roast’ turkey. Speaking of turkey, there are these two turkeys that live near our building and are a verified Menace to Society. One of them chased me into my building one morning. I wasn’t going to fight it, I’d look pretty silly fighting this big leathery-feathered bird on the way to work. It was pretty aggressive though. I did that thing where you make yourself look big and say “I’m the boss”, but the turkey was having none of it, and came at me with his huge beak and surprisingly long claws, giving it all that. So I went inside the building and made faces at it through the window instead. It stood there looking at me, trying to be all alpha male (which clearly it was), but I won out really, not being drawn into a battle of talons and feathers, I walked away with my dignity still intact, when that turkey went low I went high, and if it chases me again then I will run away and live to run away another day. Bloody thing. You tell people back in London about these turkeys and they’re all like, “just kill it and have it for thanksgiving!” Like yeah ok, I’ll kill a wild turkey with my bare hands and skin it and freeze it until November, or I could just not do that, and go to Safeway instead and buy a frozen turkey. Infinitely easier. Or they’ll say, “if that was over here,” (and this is in London, not the countryside) “someone” (immigrants is what they mean) “would hunt that and eat it! They would! I read about it in the Sport! They do that to all the geese!” Or they could just not do that, and just go to Sainsbury’s instead and buy a frozen goose. I do like telling people back home about the wildlife around here though, the black widows, the massive birds of prey, the coyotes, the mountain lions (bit rarer here but not that far away), rattlesnakes, bats with rabies, cats with the plague, sharks with jetpacks, trans-elemental spectres, werewolves, and those bees that come together and form a massive giant hammer and stomp all over things. And they always have the same response, “oh if we had those over here,” (in the inner-city housing estates, not like on the moors and fens) “if we had trans-elemental spectres then people” (foreigners is what they mean) “would hunt them for dinner and eat them, it’s true, I saw them doing it, I read about it in the local paper, they ate all the elemental spectres from Grahame Park duck pond.” Or maybe they could just not do that, and go to Lidl instead for frozen trans-elemental spectres.
This story is starting to have very little to do with the weather. Time to ‘rain’ it in a bit (I see what you did there). Anyway, it is rainy and continues to be so. I probably could have added some colour to this, to show that it is rainy and grey, but the small person at the bottom with the umbrella should be illustration enough. And because I like looking back to days of Davis past, below is a small sketch I did from the same building (but from a window further along) back on a rainy day in November 2006. I had been in Davis barely a year back then. I don’t think I had even seen a wild turkey back then, let alone any of the other dangerous wildlife.
Post-script: It turns out the bird that fell into the watery glory hole was a cormorant, not a duck. Cormorants make bad headlines though. Good job it wasn’t a rooster.
sketching the same scene twelve years apart
Today is my fourteenth birthday. Sorry, I mean today is the fourteenth birthday I am having since I moved to America. Fourteen birthdays in California. I counted them, and it’s fourteen of them in total. In terms of my life it’s a bit like, was there really football before the Premier League? And of course there was, but we only quote records since the Premier League started these days. It was a good reboot point, a good place for newcomers to jump on board the story without knowing years of character history, like a new issue #1 in Marvel Comics terms (they do that a lot). And I have just realized, the top flight of English football has been called the Premier League for nearly two thirds my life now. You start measuring your life in halves and thirds and quarters, and wow those quarters become thirds pretty quickly. Fourteen birthdays in America is a third of all the birthdays I’ve ever had. I don’t like doing anything for my birthday any more, it’s just one more day of aging, same as yesterday and tomorrow, but with cake. I do get anxious leading up to it though, thinking about all the years, all the different phases of existence, who I was, who I will be, all that stuff. Some people look through photo albums at their old selves, but of course I look through the old sketchbooks. I have an album on my computer (also a Flickr album) of all my Davis sketches and it takes me through a journey of staying in one place. Interesting to see how my drawing has developed, gone one way, back another, but not quick obvious changes. A sketch is a series of decisions based on decisions I’ve made before. Above, yesterday’s lunchtime sketch. It’s the view of the Silo from Rock Hall, UC Davis. Below, the same view from the same spot on the same date February 6, but twelve years earlier (and Rock Hall was the Chemistry lecture hall back then). Above, sketched in a Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook, below sketched in a WH Smith sketchbook. Some things have changed. That grass is gone. The general view is not all that different though, unlike some of the recent sketches I’ve posted with more dramatic changes. Will I sketch this again on February 6th 2031?
california hall
The new lecture hall on California Avenue at UC Davis is now finished, except for a few bits outside. Classes are now being held there (hooray!). So, time for me to sketch it, since I have sketched this spot for the past few years.
Below, sketches from the past few years, to show the changes from a nice green spot to a brand new building…
so long january
Another quick one from campus, this is the rear/side of Shields Library, a very big library full of academic books. January was very long this year wasn’t it, don’t you think? I know it has the same number of days as every other month with 31 days, and there are even a couple of holidays, but it just really dragged on. Like looking at your watch and seeing that it’s still 2:41. Nope, still 2:41. I’ll check again now, at least ten minutes have pa- still 2:41? What’s going on? January is like waiting for your food at the restaurant only to be told they lost your order. January is like those endless commercial breaks during any primetime American TV show. January is like those but actually it’s election season so the ads are all repetitive and political nonsense (actually no, January is nothing near as bad as that). January is like when you get stuck on a delayed Eurostar and they have to make announcements every ten minutes in English, French and Dutch. January is like a meeting where it feels rude to be the only one getting up to leave at the end but someone always has an extra question to bring up and they take a really long time bringing it up even though it has nothing to do with anyone else but them but you still have to sit there and pretend to listen out of politeness, and then you start piling up your notebook and pens and then they go into an all-new topic and nobody seems to want to wrap it up. January is like being stuck on the freeway in traffic for hours after time spent away from your home and all your stuff but your phone and iPod batteries are dead and the only thing on the radio is Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. I could go on but January would be like one of my blog posts where I just say whatever comes into my head, like this. January goes on forever. And then February is like, ok now it’s March.
Outside Walker Hall
I have kept on sketching Walker Hall, from the outside, because it is near to work and easy to go and draw at lunchtimes. All of these are form this month, January 2019, and I’ll probably take a break for a while now until the building changes a bit more from the outside. This is a fun project though, and as this renovation continues, it’s a reminder that Walker Hall will not be seen like this again. Sketched documentation is showing a moment in time that will pass.
Part of me though is like, yeah but get a move on eh. The changes are subtle – the roof is covered in different material now, in a different colour. Also, I look back at my sketchbooks from exactly a year ago, and it looks like it used to, undisturbed by large machines.
Walker Hall actually dates back to 1927, as one of the first permanent buildings on campus, designed by the architect William Hays. It was renamed in 1959 for Harry B. Walker, former agricultural engineering professor, this being the old Engineering building. In 2011 it finally stopped being used, and sat empty. I remember years ago there used to be a wall, and a load of cacti, and the path along the back of Walker Hall was narrower and didn’t have such a good view of Shields Library. I remember walking past the windows above next to the rows of bikes and seeing people drawing on huge tables, design students most likely, though I never went in for a look around. That side of the building has an unusual pattern on it now. My most recent sketch was the one below. I think that will do, for a while.
inside walker hall
As you may know I have been sketching the ongoing reconstruction/renovation of Walker Hall, the big old building in the middle of the UC Davis campus that is being transformed into the Graduate Center. It’s an interesting and exciting project that will provide the university with a dedicated hub for graduate students in a setting that retains the elements of a historical piece of UC Davis architecture with a refreshing modern upgrade. Phew that all sounds like a brochure for a condo complex. Never ever write like that again, Pete. Anyway, there was a nice write-up about my documentation of this on the UC Davis Graduate Studies website, and back in November I was invited to go inside and actually sketch the site. “As long as I can get a photo of me sketching with a hard hat!” was my response. Urban Sketching cred you know. Of course the yellow vest has in the time since taken on slightly different undertones on the other side of the pond but it can be a handy tool. Years ago someone told me that they often wear a yellow vest when they go out filming on the streets for their art projects, so that nobody questions them, they look like they are from the council. Well I’ve never done that, but it was nice to be officially kitted out by the management for sketching a building site, though I could only sketch after the builders were out of the way, and I wasn’t to jump over any big holes. I didn’t have long before the sun went down so I did as much as I could, and coloured in at home. Above, the view from the second floor overlooking two of the wings. Below, the sought-after picture of me in a hard-hat, sketching that very scene.
The front of the building will remain mostly unchanged, though I imagine the tiles will be cleaned up a bit.
Inside was gutted with cables and crevasses and equipment everywhere. I loved this broom though. I
The scene below was mostly drawn afterwards. It was the last thing I attempted to draw and I plotted out the perspective and where the intersecting lines would go, I drew the yellow tape barriers and the crane, and then I had to go. So I came back to it this weekend and finished it off. It’s funny drawing it from the outside so many times and then finally showing the inside.
Finally, a sunset photo from the second floor. I have several more sketches of Walker Hall’s exterior that I have sketched since, but this seems like a good place to stop.
les parapluies de davis
Sketched through the window of the Market Place (UC Davis South Silo) while eating a sandwich. Sketched on the third anniversary of David Bowie’s death. I still can’t believe he has gone. Look at what he has missed on planet earth, these past three years! My sandwich was spicy, jerk chicken with chipotle mayo and pepper jack cheese. Maybe I was trying to numb the thoughts of Bowie still being gone. It wasn’t raining but the metal parasols over the tables look like a crowd of umbrellas on the other side of a wall. Maybe it was raining on the other side of that wall? We could be heroes, just for one day. What d’you say.
kappa kappa gamma
This is a fraternity house on Russell Boulevard in Davis, on the edge of the UC Davis campus. Kappa Kappa Gamma. Good job they have that Gamma. (If I created a fraternity I’d call it Gamma Gamma Gamma Gamma Gamma Chameleon). I sketched on a late Saturday afternoon, shortly before the sun started dropping low. After the rainy week there was a day of sun (followed by more rain next day). I stood on the grassy field opposite, and mosquitoes, out for a dinnertime feast, swarmed about me, not put off by my occasional clapping of the sketchbook (was I hoping for a dead mosquito squashed all over my sketch, well yes I probably was but in hindsight maybe not, they were very big mosquitoes). I must have done a very good job in stopping them biting me because I had no itchy spots afterwards, but they did fly around me a lot, like drones trying to close an airport. Anyway this is a building, seen from across a street, with a tree in the foreground to one side. If I have three chords those are my three chords. I do like those trees that run alongside Russell though. Not so much the leaves, while are a bit annoying to sketch, but the bark on the trunk, I should spend a whole sketchbook just studying that. Hey there’s a good idea. It’ll be a bit dull but at my time of life I am allowed to be a bit dull. What my excuse was in the earlier part of my life was I don’t know.
petescully 