in the belly of the beast

April 26, 2011April 26, 20112 Comments

The Death Star, or ‘Social Sciences and Humanities Building’ as some pedantic people call it, is one of UC Davis’s most loved/hated/bloody annoying buildings. I’m not a fan myself, having been lost and confused in there on too many occasions, making me late for meetings. It’s like being lost in an Escher painting. I am glad it’s there though, it’s such an oddity. It’s so complicated you would need two R2-D2s to hold its schematics. Even the maddest 1960s British council estate designers wouldn’t come up with something so utterly mental. I sketched it last week while braving the pollen and the dark side (notice how doorways are big here, so stormtroopers can’t bang their heads), and you can sort of see how I hold my pen as well.

how does your garden grow

February 14, 2011February 14, 2011Leave a comment

On Friday lunchtime, I sketched inside the Robert Mondavi Institute for food and wine and other stuff, because I needed to get out and sketch and it’s a couple of minutes from where I work. I have drawn inside here before, from a different angle, and they have an incredible garden full of all kinds of plants and herbs and lemons and what not. There’s a nice smell as you sit and sketch. It’s called the Good Life Garden. I’m not making it up; I was expecting Richard Briers and Felicity Kendall to turn up, or at the very least, Neil from the Young Ones.

I used a white gel pen to emphasize the bare trees. This sunny February weather is amazing! I want to do a long sketch of the building from the new vinyards at some point, but I think time of day is importnat. Lunchtime sketching can be a little frustrating – even though the light is still great, it’s better in the early mornings and late afternoons. At least I have this sunlight. Some places are grey and cloudy and drizzly at this time of year.

beer and wine, i’ll be fine

May 14, 2010May 14, 20102 Comments

UC Davis does wine, I mean really does it. No, they’re not all winos, there aren’t lots of expensive fancy fashionable Napa style wineries around here, but this is the place where those vintners come to learn what the hell is going on with those grapes. The viticulturalists and enologists here are the top of the game, and they know their stuff. So now they have a shiny new complex and vinyard on campus to work with, the Robert Mondavi Institute for Food and Wine Science. I sat out there yesterday lunchtime and sketched inside the courtyard’s Good Life Garden. More new additions are being, er, added to this complex, including facilities for the study not just of winemaking but beer-brewing too (I’m sure a few frat houses have their own micro-brew facilities already set up).

“Beer and Wine, I’ll be fine“, that phrase comes from a friend of mine who vehemently claimed it to be true, and then after downing a bottle of red plonk and a few pints of amber nectar, spent the rest of the night disproving his theory in the toilets of the Dublin Castle in Camden Town. Don’t mix grape and grain. I wonder if any of the high-tech labs are working on similar experiments. No need, mate – just go down Camden, innit.

the sky’s the limit

March 23, 2010March 22, 20103 Comments

This is Maurice J. Gallagher Hall, one of the newest shiniest new shiny buildings at UC Davis. It’s home to the Graduate School of Management.

I don’t often draw such modernity. I was interested in giving it a go, a study in perspective, and decided that I’d leave the big blue sky blank. The sky is literally the limit. I’m not into management speak. I never give people a heads up, aka an FYI, vis a vis the big picture all on the same page. Sometimes I sketch small pictures on the same page though.

bic to school

September 22, 20083 Comments

It’s that time of year again. Things start getting busy in the academic world. I invigilated (or ‘proctored’ as they say here) an exam today, during the air-conditioned silence of which I drew part of my bag (“draw what is in front of you”) in my rhodia notebook, in ball-point pen. I like drawing in biro, though I don’t do anything other than scribble endlessly and mindlessly in it (this accounts for at least 70% of all the drawing I do, mostly scowling faces and figures with lightsabres or football shirt designs, which you never see). Squared rhodia paper seems so appropriate (and I love it, it reminds me of France). Behind the bag, some of the extremely hard stats stuff, none of which I could make head nor tail of, but which I’m sure looked like elegant poetry to the trained eye.

grusinia on my mind

August 11, 2008August 11, 20081 Comment

NATO went into Kosovo in 1999, bombing targets (such as bridges) not only in the region but all over Serbia. Serbia, Russia’s traditional ally. Russia could do only so much. They sent troops down, but not to oppose NATO. Why did the US led forces need to go in? The risk of imminent genocide, not wanting to stand by and watch a repeat of what had happened in Bosnia.

I couldn’t begin to understand what’s actually going on between Georgia and Russia, how strongly the Russians feel about the South Ossetians, how strongly Georgia feels about not wishing to disintegrate further, or be under the sway once more of the bear to the north. Caucasus troubles run deep, and are far less well understood in the West than the Balkan troubles. It was interesting however to read that one side is accusing the other of genocide, while the other is counter-accusing them of ethnic cleansing. The threat of which, as we all know, apparently justifies invasion.

The picture: funny enough, I had this book slotted down the pocket of my bag since I bought it in a second-hand bookshop in the Castro a couple of weeks back. Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (der Kaukasische Kreidekreis). One of my favourite (if not, my favourite) plays, one I have performed in German at university, back in the spring of 1999, at the same time that Kosovo was being torn apart. I co-directed a chaotic, ramshackle and very Brechtian version, in which I got to play the fantastic role of Azdak the judge. In those days I had a Beard to defeat all others. We had almost no set, and so I drew backgrounds of Grusinian buildings with Georgian graffiti over them, backdrops of hanged men, and great mountains, all on transparent cels using only four colours of pen, projecting them onto a white screen behind the actors using a bog-standard (and noisy) classroom overhead projector. For those actors who were gotten rid of for not coming to rehearsal, I recreated their characters in cartoon form and had them projected next to the real actors, even getting involved in dialogue. It was largely shambolic, but I have good memories of the other cast members, and it was great fun. And I think Brecht would have approved.