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.

the tallest building in davis

November 8, 2023November 7, 2023Leave a comment

Another campus sketch, drawn after work last Friday, the last workday of the year where there’s any daylight to draw anything, because the clocks went back on Sunday morning; enter the dark times, cycling up the streetlamp-free Oak Street hoping not to bump into a random pile of leaves and sticks left helpfully in the bike lane. The building in the foreground here is the School of Education, the Learning-Place of Learning. It’s a pretty nondescript typical campus building, nothing to see here, never featured highly on my sketching lists. Interestingly enough the building rising behind it has not been sketched much by me either, despite being I think the tallest building on campus. That’s Sproul Hall. all nine floors of it. It rhymes with ‘scowl’ not with ‘school’. I remember going to a meeting up on that top floor years ago back when I was a grad coordinator, and wondering if I could get back up there to draw the view some time, but I never did so. I don’t suppose the view will be that interesting, it’s a very flat landscape. They do languages and literature in here, you know. That was my area of study, once upon a time when I studied. I wonder sometimes if I miss being a student. It was so long ago now. I did do a Masters degree before moving out here, and while I loved spending my days in the library, I hated the constant feeling of having some sort of homework to do, that I’m behind on something, that some library book was due. I miss being younger, that’s not really the same thing. Being a student over there is not the same as being a student over here. Besides, I did drama for my undergrad, and we were all a bit different. It’s November now, and everywhere I look are trees I want to draw, it’s distracting me somewhat. I’m anxious for them all to go orange and yellow and red, and for me to catch them before it gets windy and blows them all bare. There are still a lot of nice greens around though. It was the blues reflected in that glass that I was interested in here though.

the arboretum in october

November 4, 2023November 3, 2023Leave a comment

More brown De Atramentis ink sketches, this time from different lunchtimes in the UC Davis Arboretum, at the end of October 2023. This October has been long, and I’ve been feeling super exhausted a lot of the time, mentally, physically, metaphysically, geographically, mathematically, you name it. I also got my Covid and Flu shots for the season, one in each arm, so it was hard to sleep on my side for a couple of nights. I’ve not been exercising enough, and the stress of the world at large is creeping in. It’s good that we have the Arboretum here at UC Davis, a place to go and relax for a while among the trees and greenery. I sat on a bench out overlooking Lake Spafford, where that tree used to be, and sketched. It was sunny, and the foliage was colourful.

On the next day I also sketched in the Arboretum, on the little path near our building, in sight of the water tower. It’s a nice view this. A very nice view, once you commit it to paper. Draw where you live. This is a nice part of campus. A lot of people on their lunchtime walks, getting their 10,000 steps in, while I let that brown ink jump all over the page. In the lunchtime sketch below, I think it may have been working a little less well for me in places, but I did discover that if you draw directly onto watercolour paint (dry, not still wet), you can’t get a thin exact line as it will expand to create thicker lines, though it does come out that bit darker too. I’m still getting used to fountain pen sketching, and this ink in particular, but it’s fun to experiment. The Arboretum has many bridges like this.

chemistry – latest news

October 28, 2023October 27, 2023Leave a comment

And so onto our favourite current construction project on campus, one that’s been going on for a very long time now, the Chemistry Building’s new wing. Last time out it had gone from green coverings to orange, and then into a very Fonzie-esque black leather with studs. Now the final cladding is going on and it’s a kind of fashionable grey rectangular tile pattern (a bit like the Tottenham stadium) which was being placed as you can see here. This being another in-progress view, it’s fun to look back on those in years to come, it will never look exactly like this again. I like this sort of documentation.

october’s gonna october

October 28, 2023October 27, 2023Leave a comment

More lunchtime sketching on campus. You’d be forgiven for getting a bit tired of the subject. Perhaps you come here to see drawings from my global travels, and they come along every so often, even if the ‘global’ bit is mostly just ‘London’. But you get to see a lot of Davis, and UC Davis specifically, that’s where I spend my days. Most of us spend our days in some place or other, looking longingly at the lovely locations the rest of the world seems to be at on Instagram, wishing you could pop over to Paris, take a trip to Tokyo, or dash over to, I dunno, Dortmund, but we got stuff to get on with. October’s gonna October. Here then are a couple of sketches from last week, I left them a little unfinished because they are finished enough, both from Hutchison Avenue on campus. Above, the Student Community Center, always a hub of activity. Below, sat outside the Silo looking over the the Katherine Esau Science Hall, with that huge greenhouse on the top.

drawing boards

October 27, 2023October 26, 2023Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago we held another Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl, this time at the UC Davis Quad, and we had a good bunch sketching with us. I drew the boards, I always seem to draw those at this time of year. I never get ‘board’ of them , hur hur. I see this one is for ‘Cherry Pie Comedy Improv’. I went to a Comedy Improv night once years ago, I asked them whether ‘Improv’ was short for ‘Improve Your Joke Writing’. I didn’t really, I made that up. I don’t know if I’ve ever been to an Improv Night, I’m sure they are very good, never really appealed. I was brought up on Whose Line Is It Anyway, the original British one, Clive Anderson hosting, Paul Merton, Tony Slattery, Josie Lawrence. Proops. Sessions. I suppose showing up at a sketchcrawl is a bit like doing an Improv, using your honed skills to come up with sketches, though thankfully on a sketchcrawl nobody laughs at it (so very much like an Improv night). “Whose Line and Wash is it Anyway”. I do remember going to party when I was at secondary school organized by someone who really liked Whose Line Is It Anyway (as did I) and we all played games like on the show. I barely remember it at all, come to think of it, that was so long ago. That show was so long ago, I’ve not seen it since about 1992. But back to the sketching.

Here we see some sketchers that I’ve sketched with many times, above are Alison Kent, met on my first sketchcrawl in Davis back in December 2005, along with her husband Allan Hollander (below), I have sketched them both many times. On the right of Alison is Robert Dvorak, well known art instructor who I have also sketched before, and the last time I saw him was when I bumped into him sketching a workshop in Yosemite. Also below behind Allan are a couple of other sketchers, we had a lot of students join us that day, many from the Landscape Architecture and Design programs.

I organized this sketchcrawl before I realized how invested in the Rugby World Cup I was going to become, so for my last sketch, I found a table in the courtyard of the Memorial Union, jumped on the strong wifi connection, and watched part of the first half of Ireland vs New Zealand. I was rooting for Ireland of course, but it didn’t start so well. I cycled home fast for the second half, and it was an exciting finish, the Irish nearly made it, but New Zealand held out for the win. (I think they will win the World Cup this Saturday, against South Africa, who narrowly beat England after coming from behind, I’m still a bit gutted about that) (Look at me, I’m a rugby fan all of a sudden!)

I really enjoyed seeing everyone’s sketches at the end though, it inspired me to do a lot more sketching. We’re still holding the sketchcrawls monthly, though I’m not sure the date of the November one, I think someone else might organize it. I’ll post it here when known. You can check out the Facebook group to see other people’s sketches: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LetsDrawDavis.

Friday 13th October, 17 years later

October 26, 2023October 26, 20231 Comment

I said before that every day is Friday 13th these days, but at least the actual Friday 13th has a Saturday after it, I suppose. Halloween is coming up too; I am less interested every year, unfortunately. Remember that one year I drew loads and loads of Halloween stuff, had a Halloween party and drew the invitations, drew most of the decorations, we made costumes, I’ve not even got a pumpkin this year. Well, a very small one at work, on which I have drawn a cartoon of King Charles III with a pumpkin on his head, ‘God Save The Pumpking’. That sits on my shelf. We had a real Friday 13th a couple of weeks ago, and it was no less of a Friday 13th, so to de-stress a little I of course entered the sketchbook at lunchtime. I remembered back 17 (seventeen!) years, to Friday October 13th 2006 no less, a barely recognizable world away, when I also drew at lunchtime, and I had drawn the side of the Bike Barn, the first time I had ever drawn that building. That sketch is below. I wanted to draw it from the same angle, to see what had changed (obviously my sketching style has changed, though I still can’t draw bikes, that’s the same). Those taller trees are gone, replaced with much smaller trees. People now whizz by on those electric scooter things that so many people have now, silent platforms whizzing up behind you on the bike path. Still I think in 2006 I was definitely expecting actual Hoverboards by 2023 and we don’t have those yet, these are the closest thing. They may as well be Hoverboards. In the sketch above I’m drawing on Stillman and Birn Alpha paper with a Uni-ball Signo UM-151 in black-brown, coloured with watercolour. Below, well that was my first Moleskine sketchbook, and it was the ‘regular’ Moleskine paper not the watercolour stuff I have used since 2007, I didn’t know about that then. It wasn’t in the landscape format I’m so wedded to now, but I had seen so many sketchers online using this Moleskine sketchbook that I thought, right, I’ll try that too. And boy did it not work for me. See people would use it because it was popular, but nobody seemed to actually like it. The paper was too waxy, so most pens just couldn’t write well on it (I discovered several years later that the Uni-Ball Signo UM-151 in black actually works perfectly on it, it’s the only thing I’ve used that I’ve liked), and as for using watercolours, well forget it, you may as well be trying to watercolour paint on a jar of honey. Pencil was fine, but the paper is so smooth that there’s no character. It’s also very yellowy, which has its charms I guess, but that yellowy tinge when you scan it makes you feel a little ill. What pen did I use here? I think this was before I was using the Micron pens, so it was probably a regular old Uni-Ball from Office Max, those were good but nothing like as good as the UM-151 and didn’t perform well on this paper. (I tried my new fountain pen with fantastic document brown ink on this paper recently to see how that would be and that was not a pretty sight). For colours, I used the coloured pencils I would draw with that year. I had this set of watercolour pencils, but I’d already learnt that I wasn’t going to work so well so just used them dry. I liked it, but have never gotten on board with good coloured pencil use, that particular art avenue never opened up for me. Still, I really liked this sketch, and for a piece of observation and development this was an important one for me, maybe my best Davis sketch to date. A good feeling about a sketch can propel you to keep going, and this one definitely did that. You never know where it will all end up, so in the meantime just keep on sketching.

Seventeen years though. 2006! People talk about that time now in retro terms, which is scary, like we would talk about the 70s back in the 90s. This was the end of that long first summer I had spent in Davis. I spent a lot of time riding around on my bike, in the heat, listening to this one album by Belle and Sebastian that came out that year, I got a new guitar, I started drawing a lot, having started to discover other sketchers online starting to form connections (two years before we coalesced into Urban Sketchers, when we all had our own blogs and created Flickr groups, and before all the Social Media madness overtook everything) (except MySpace, that was still a thing for another year or so). That summer I went back to London for the first time since emigrating, and spent about three weeks there, just seeing friends and family, very relaxed, still young. 2006 as a time period feels so long ago. I don’t know how different Davis feels then from now, compared to how much London has evolved since then, for me obviously I’ve just been here longer, sketching everything. If I moved here now as opposed to then, it would probably not feel so different. The world at large though, that feels very different. In some ways better, in a lot of ways worse. I’m glad I was young when I was. In these days of constant information/misinformation bombardment it can be very stressful. I’ve always had a sketchbook to climb into, that’s still why I use it. I’ve changed – maybe. I’m just older, have a bit more confidence, have many years of work-work and sketchbook-work under my belt. I found a note I’d written from Friday October 27, 2007 (sixteen years ago tomorrow), the other day. It was in the pack pocket of that Moleskine, funnily enough, and I was clearly in a bit of a funk about being able to do anything, something I’m still familiar with. It said this:

“While scratching my unshaven chin and frowning at a pile of papers I came to a sudden conclusion today. I cannot write, only wrong. I make no art, only fart. I can’t compose, only decompose. My guitar is better displayed than played, at least by me. My sketching is sketchy, my drawing barely draws breath, and my painting ain’t. I can’t debate, only outdate; I can’t converse, only confuse; I can’t think, only splash ink. *I might feel different when I shave!”

I mean, all of that is still true, I still feel like that every now and then (and I always feel better when I shave and cut my hair). But it’s still a busy-October way of feeling. Too many Friday the 13ths.

tree by Turner Wright

October 24, 2023October 24, 2023Leave a comment

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.

RMI

October 17, 2023October 17, 2023Leave a comment

This is the Robert Mondavi Institute (RMI) of Food and Wine Sciences at UC Davis, very close to where I work. I’ve drawn it a couple of other times, and am surprised I don’t draw it more because it is an interesting building. I stood in the middle, in the Good Life Garden surrounded by all sorts of flowers and foods, and drew the view looking east. The sky was dramatic that day; I couldn’t stand in any shade, so when the sun came out I would hide under my hat with my collars up, like a spy. Those limes in the foreground looked nice. This October is getting me down man, getting me stressed. Needed to stand in a big garden for a bit. I actually went to a meeting in that building over the summer. When I say it was in that building, it was actually mostly over Zoom, I was one of three people there in person (including the host) while everyone else were little faces on this big screen. I was taking notes, but being in person I couldn’t do that thing where you’re looking at the screen nodding as if you’re paying attention, but actually getting some other stuff done. It was pretty awkward being one of the only people actually there. That was summer though, now most of our meetings are in person again, and it’s less awkward when you’re in a room full of people. I have been the only one on Zoom though, in a meeting last year when I was in London, and if you’re the only one, generally you are a big head on the big screen instead of a small head among many others. I probably looked like Holly from Red Dwarf.

green and brown food truck at the silo

October 16, 2023October 16, 2023Leave a comment

There are more food trucks at the Silo these days now that the quarter is in full swing. I ate lunch, and stood in the shade to draw this one, which I think sold coffee and ice cream or something, I didn’t inspect it too closely despite drawing it for half an hour. I couldn’t really read what it said. Not very investigative of me I suppose, I was in a hurry, I had other things on my mind. I just liked the colours of it. I just wanted to do a quick sketch with that fountain pen, that was fun.