A B C, easy as 1 2 3

September 12, 2009September 12, 20091 Comment

Drew this one a couple of weeks ago and forgot to post. This is a typical scene in Davis. Guilbert House on A Street. And that is ‘A’ Street, not ‘a street’. These imaginitively titled streets so many American towns have; seriously, all those A, B, C, D, etc, and 1st, 2nd, 3rd…come on, they could be anywhere, let’s have some soul, something with spirit of place. They are just points on a grid, and look bad on street signs. A, B, C, they feel like placeholders rather than names, as though the town planners when dreaming up their grids thought, we’ll come back to those. Well, A follows B, etc so surely that makes it easier to find yourself if lost? Except in Davis, between A and B is ‘University St’, so that doesn’t work. Ok, so keep the alphabet, well how about we rename (as some cities do, such as San Francisco) those streets so they run alphabetically? And we could have them themed with things relevant to Davis, a college town, they could be named after subjects taught there, so we’d have Applied Math St, Biophysics St, Chemistry St, Drama St, Electrical Engineering St… If you’d rather see the letters remain, and I don’t doubt people are very attached to their lettered streets, then we could make it more academic, so you’d have A+ St, A St, A- St, B+ St, until you get F St, which is just before U St. You don’t want to live on U St.

Then we have the First, Second, Third Streets, well they sound remarkably like grades you get at British universities, so we could Americanize them a little and have them on a US scale of four, so First St would be 4.0 St, then 3.9 St, etc etc. Alternatively, name them after Amendments to the US Constitiution, so First St becomes ‘Free Speech St’, then ‘Bear Arms St’, then ‘Don’t Quarter Soldiers in Peacetime St’, and so on. Let’s face it, a lot of people would be lost after streets one and two. Imagine telling someone you live on the corner of Film Studies and Revision of Presidential Election Procedures. They’d never come visit.

newspaper taxis appear on the shore

September 11, 2009September 11, 20091 Comment

It was 9-9-9 a couple of days ago, and passed without much notice (a good thing). I remember when it was 6-6-6 a few years ago. Next year we’ll have 10-10-10 and then 11-11-11 and 12-12-12 and then we can go back to having a normal life and not caring about unusual dates. Today of course is 9-11, and is called so even in the UK (where 9-11 would otherwise be the 9th of November). Here are some newspaper boxes I drew on 9-9-9, on a lunchtime in downtown Davis. No stool, I sat on the sidewalk (oops, I mean the pavement), as people passed by. These things are so American, these newspaper boxes, the make me think of old films, yellow taxis, steam coming out of the street, hot dog stands (that’ll be New York then). This however is just Davis, but it’s still America, small-town America. Small-ish.

Also posted at Urban Sketchers.

look into my eyes, look into my eyes

September 7, 20093 Comments

“Ah come on Ted, you never know, there might be something in it. Sure it’s no more peculiar than that stuff we learned at the seminary, heaven and hell and everlasting life and all that; you’re not meant to take it seriously!” – Father Dougal Maguire

I’ve wanted to draw this building for quite some time. I don’t know who the Davis Psychic is, or what they do, but if they have half the prognostic track record of Mystic Pete then they can’t be half bad. Mystic Pete, for those who don’t recall, is the famed predictor of football seasons (that year when he said that Newcastle would win the league! And they came 14th), and I am his representative on Earth, etc etc. He’s taking a sabbatical this year (and coincidentally Spurs start playing well). Anyway back to the Davis Psychic. That’s a bold statement, a yellow house with purple trimmings. Who is the Davis Psychic? Perhaps we’ll never know. Here is the page on the Davis Wiki: http://daviswiki.org/Davis_Psychic. The wiki writers seem to think the Davis Psychic is a mystery figure with a Hummer who elusively hangs up the phone whenever they call (or whenever they crank call, by the sound of it). I wonder if they have an assistant called the Davis Sidekick? Maybe a Dougal type of person, in a tank-top? “Well, I’m very cynical as you know…”

sacramentalists

September 6, 20092 Comments

I went sketching in Sacramento yesterday; it’s been a while. The bus is 50 cents more expensive now. Not much else has changed though. I decided I finally wanted to draw that tall brick building downtown, I think it’s an elk’s lodge or something, and was excited when sketching out the perspective lines. However, this being downtown Sacramento, there are a larger than average concentration of street mentals per square yard, so I was distracted. As I was sat on my stool, one slightly agitated gentleman started screaming into an empty doorway at the brickwork, some nonsense about his “enemies in the drywall” and how they’re coming and what not. I carried on. But then he took residence in the middle of a large structure of metal poles and began yelling abuse at the universe in a variety of voices. I’m not really into that, and I felt a bit like, you know, I didn’t want to hang around such nonsense for too long, so I abandoned the interesting perspective sketch and traipsed up to Midtown to draw a wooden building, on the corner of 23rd and J, with a tree to the right and some blue sky. A typical Pete; it’s my equivalent of a three-chord song (but it takes considerably longer, when drawing every tile and slat).
Shame; you would have liked the brick building. Maybe next time.

flits from shop to shop just like a butterfly

September 3, 2009September 3, 2009Leave a comment

It was so warm and sunny on Saturday in the City. We went up to Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill (and like a nob I forgot the camera) to see the Labyrinth, before heading over to Fillmore Street to have lunch and look around the really cool shops they have there. My wife like ‘Seconds to Go’, a cool second hand store that is in the drawing above, and I loved ‘Paper Source’, a great store stuffed wit many different types of paper for all purposes; I bought some cardstock to make some cards of my drawings. They were very friendly in there.

I sat on the pavement outside Crepevine (where we had eaten lunch) and sketched the colourful street ahead of me. It’s a cool part of a very cool town. There are so mnay different neighbourhoods here. I could draw San Francisco for ever.

Also blogged over at Urban Sketchers.

bay windows

September 1, 2009September 1, 20091 Comment

We spent the weekend in San Francisco, staying in a suite at the enormous Hyatt beside the Ferry Building. The view from our enormous wide-screen window was incredible, the Bay Bridge and Embarcadero, and we had blazing hot sunshine on Saturday morning. We even saw Robin Williams at the Farmer’s Market. Naturally I chose to draw just a small segment of this view, looking out at the Bridge (above). Sunday morning saw fog roll in and add the familiar cool summer grey to the City, so I drew again, looking down at the perspective lines racing up at me.

Below is a photo I took on the sunny Saturday morning, the best part of the view (I never had time to sketch it), with the Bay Bridge rising above a light blanket of mist. What a stunning city.

P1030101 small

give trees a chance

August 25, 20095 Comments

So rested he by the tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.

I’ve been a little uninspired by drawing in Davis lately. Oh the Davisites will not like me for saying so, but I’ve just not wanted to draw the place much, prefering little shoes. Hey, I have drawn a lot of Davis. I have just been craving a little more urban; I like trees and bikes and all but some barbed wire and brickwork could be fun too. A couple of summers ago, I would draw here in the UC Davis Arboretum on most lunchtimes, but it all got very samey. Plus (and more importantly) I would go through my green paints like there was no tomorrow. After some days of near-agoraphobia, I felt the need to go outside today – I actually wanted to draw some of the construction vehicles opposite work, but they seemed to be all off on their own lunchbreak – so ended up back down here in the tree world by the creek. It’s nice here, you can hear the insects and the birds and the ducks, and the traffic and the joggers and the lunchtime gossipers; bring your mp3 player to blot out this din. Still, it was pleasant to draw there. Maybe I’ll do it again tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll draw another shoe.

see you on the other side

July 31, 2009July 31, 2009Leave a comment

Having just drawn Mrak from the other side of Putah Creek, and noted over the past few years its vanishing appearance, I chose to draw from the front side (or it may be the back; like Buckingham Palace, the front is really the back and vice versa).

And naturally, I have drawn it before, and therefore you get to see how the view is slowly vanishing even on this side, as a forest grows at its very toes. Well, not exactly, more that the last time I drew it was late Fall or early Winter (whichever it is called here), and the trees did not have many leaves. But it illustrates the recurring theme. That drawing was way back at the start of Moleskine #2; I am now more than halfway through Moleskine #4.

the slowly vanishing mrak hall

July 27, 2009July 27, 2009Leave a comment

I’ve drawn this view three summers in a row now. Each year, the creek has been a green pea soup, the tree on the left has been an orangey brown, and the weather has been a hot hundred degrees. Well, near enough. It was certainly over a hundred today.

Mrak Hall, the university powerhouse, stays ever the same in the background. In 2007, however, there were two grassy hillocks, with two of Robert Arneson’s Eggheads on them. Probably the highest ground in Davis? They were razed to the ground, for the new law school extension. When I drew it again in 2008, the hillocks were gone, replaced with some wire-fencing, a load of mud and a construction truck. Now in 2009, the shell of the law school is now there, King Hall, blocking the view. I’m glad I drew it. I’ll draw it again next year, with the finished law school, if they finish it.

boring conversation anyway

July 10, 2009July 11, 20093 Comments

Do people even use phoneboxes any more? I barely even use my cellphone. I have a pay-as-you-go plan, which is not like the one I have on my still-active English phone (which still has the plan set up years ago on one-2-one, even has that logo on the screen!). No the one I have here means that you spend $25 to top it up fro three months. If you don’t add more money by the end of the three months, not only can you not use the phone but you lose whatever money you have left (and since I never use it, that’s usually most of it). If you renenw, it doesn’t just add three months onto whenever your three months is up, it just goes three months from whenever you topped up, so essentially you lose days, unless you renew right on the last day. Confused? I am. I have never liked mobile phones here. It’s just incredible to me that you get charged for receiving a call. That’s why I never give people my number, because I’ll never pick up if I don’t recognise it (for a while I was getting a lot of marketing calls, especially around the time of the election).

Speaking of cold calls, I hate those ones that have that pre-recorded message, “this is your final notification to renew your car insurance”, or some such, when yesterday and the day before and the day before that were the final norifications, and tomorrow too, all from companies I’ve never done business with. I hate the robots. At least with real people calling I can antagonize them a bit (sometimes I talk reeeeallllyyy reeeeeaaaallllyyyyy slowly), but even then my heart’s not in it, and I feel sorry for them. After all, everyone’s gotta work. I had to do it, once, for about a week and a half, many many years ago. It was not fun, and the guy running the show (I think he was called ‘Boyd’ or something) fancied himself as a bit of a hardnose, so I left to get a job as a male dinner-lady at a posh school. I remember one time, I made the marketing call, and ended up chatting to an old guy on the phone for about half an hour about his work (writing travel brochures), literature, travel, I forget now. Either way I didn’t sell him whatever it was they were selling. It cheered me up though. I sometimes wonder if those cold callers wouldn’t also fancy a nice long chinwag, a chat about the footy, or the state of modern television, just to ease the drudgery of their work. But if they do, I wish they’d stop calling me right in the middle of Jeopardy.