Way Up Above New York City

June 2, 2025June 2, 20254 Comments

My dream as a sketcher is always to go high above a city and sketch everything below – not too high above, I still want to see things. (Click on the sketches and you will see it all in bigger detail). New York City is easily the most exciting place for this. Our hotel was located on 6th and 28th in Chelsea, in sight of the One World Trade Center, the Chrysler, and the Empire State Building which loomed outside our bedroom window. It was too big to include in the view above but would be just to the left of that view. The above panorama was drawn while sitting on my bed. The light and colour of this view changed enormously throughout the day, and I did this in a couple of sittings, about a couple of hours total at most, but I drew much of it in the late afternoon/early evening while the sky was all purples, pinks and blues. Below, cars moving slowly in lines, the famous yellow cabs weaving in and out, and people the size of ants, all looking for the jam. What excited me most is not all the windows or the depth or the movement, or the feeling that I am in the Spider-Man video game, but the water-towers.

The distinctive New York water-towers really are everywhere you look., especially in the view above which was drawn from the roof of our hotel, just a few floors above our room, about 30 stories or more above the street. I was looking south towards the One World Trade Center on the left, and across Chelsea on the right. I was a little overwhelmed by how many water-towers there were, and on another day I might look at the pictures I took and draw a big detailed one, all coloured in. On this day I stood up on the roof of the hotel, which was open to the elements with just an elbow-high glass fence keeping me safe. It was thankfully not too windy. It was late afternoon/early evening, the sky was an interesting collage of shades, and the tall towers in the distance were just blue-grey silhouettes. I drew fast (this took less than an hour and a half) but could not quite finish it, and left a gap which I never had time to fill, and felt that my mind’s eye would fill in the gaps. My eyesight is not that great anyway, and while I sketched one of my lenses actually fell out of my glasses, thankfully falling on my side of the barrier and not hundreds of feet to the sidewalk of 28th Street. I popped it back in. There were taller buildings to my right, and my eyesight was not so bad that I could miss the sight that greeted me there, a man at the window completely, well, ‘stark bollock naked’ as we say and possibly oblivious to the fact anyone could see him at all. I tried not to stare, and thankfully he was not very long. By the window I mean. I think I understand that song about being ‘caught between the moon and New York City’ differently now. I kept drawing (not that obviously) until I could draw no more, and we went for dinner. I was so glad to have the opportunity though to draw New York from above, which is always a dream, and to stay in a hotel where I have the time to actually do it and not feel rushed to leave, even though I still drew faster than usual. New York, all those movies, all those photos, all those paintings and songs and stories, all that culture that has played with our imagination, all right there below me. I want to draw more of it!

another march on campus

April 23, 2024Leave a comment

Here are some sketches drawn around campus last month, all different media, I suppose. Above, that’s the UC Davis water tower as seen from the Arboretum, very close to my office. I drew in brown fountain pen, and there was this little cat on the path. I like this sort of sketch. The redbuds were really glowing then too. I’ve been on this campus eighteen years now, I sometimes look back and think, funny how that happened. That building next to the water tower, the Earth and Physical Sciences Building, wasn’t even there when I first arrived, in fact I was there at the ceremony where they laid the foundation stone, my old manager insisted I come over to witness that. I’m glad I did, but I always regret not sketching the building that was there before, which was knocked down. I do remember sketching the empty space, back in 07 or 08.

There was this one day last month when one of my coworkers announced that there would be llamas on campus, over at the Quad, that people could go and have a look at. This caused great excitement, as it had been a very busy 2024 so far, and everyone needs more llama, less drama. So we all walked over there. I had my llama jokes ready. It was lunchtime so I thought, alpaca lunch. As we got there, it turned out there were no llamas to be found. I guess they hadn’t set their a-llama clock. Disappointed but not despondent, I decided to draw this interesting old tree, and sketched it in pencil before adding some watercolour. I sometimes wish all my sketching looked like this, it felt very free.

This one above was sketched in the UC Davis Silo, on another boring lunchtime. I haven’t drawn the interior of this building from this level for a number of years. I used to come up here all the time, years ago, it feels like something from another time, but it isn’t, it’s just a different end of the same time. I think I would wonder in those days how long we would be in Davis, where we might go next, but we stayed, and I took it upon myself to draw all the changes here over a long period. While it’s not my actual job, it’s kind of become my other job, and I don’t mind that at all.

And finally, a panorama that will remain unfinished. I was cycling across campus one lunchtime when I was hit with the thought of drawing the Chemistry Building, not the side that’s all being built (and which I have drawn a number of times), because the shapes the shadows were making as they hit the inset windows was really quite dramatic, you would have loved it. In the end I said sod it, too much detail, and focused on sketching that wicked blue and cloudy sky, which was pretty spectacular in itself, leaving the Chemistry Building to be nothing more than a big outline left to the imagination. Behind it though is another building called ‘PSEL’, the ‘Physical Science and Engineering Library’, which is not in fact a library any more but has been recently redeveloped to house space for several units, including my own program (in fact I’m on the building committee that manages it); it will see a name change at some point, though I can’t say for sure what that will be. There’s still work being done, and I have drawn the building before, but I’ll do a more proper sketch of it at some point, but I made sure it got into this sketch.

a familiar sight, slightly different height

February 29, 2024February 29, 2024Leave a comment

Today is a Leap Day, isn’t it. It’s always exciting to have an extra day in February, but this February has felt longer than most other months so that extra day feels like a day too far. It’s a long winter quarter. I’m looking forward to my upcoming trip to L.A. to draw dinosaurs and not think about this campus for a couple of days. Leap Days are funny though. We all know someone who has a birthday on a Leap Day, there was a girl in my class as a kid who had that birthday every four years, to much amusement. I always thought it would be funny if instead of putting the extra day in February, it could be moved around a bit, so next Leap Year we would have a March 32nd, for example, or maybe for once we could start the New Year on the 0th of January. Imagine having that as your birthday. I always wondered too, what do dogs do? One of our years is supposedly worth seven dog’s years, so when do they calculate their birthdays, and do they get annoyed when people forget? Maybe that’s why they are always chasing postmen, they are looking for birthday cards. Such lofty thoughts go through our heads when looking out above the campus from the top of the stairwell at the Mathematical Sciences Building, my place of work since this very week in 2006. That was not a Leap Year, though the previous year was a personal Leap Year for me, when I made the Leap across the Atlantic and moved to America. I’ve been away from London a long time now. Anyway, as I finished work one day last week I saw that the sky was looking pretty dramatic, and the light was getting golden as the sun set, so I went up the stairwell a bit and painted the sky and the famous water tower, before drawing all the bits underneath. There’s the Earth and Physical Sciences Building on the right, and the rear of King Hall dead ahead just beyond the low Facilities Building. It’s a nice view, looking east.

you know the place where nothing is real

August 4, 2022August 4, 2022Leave a comment

As I play catch-up on my sketch posts, I may as well do one of those where I just post a bunch of the drawings I did on campus in Spring all at once, so here they are. It’s probably a lazy way to do it, but it saves you from reading through all the stories I feel the need to write to go along with them (but you can skip by the stories anyway, I’m not actually very interesting). Above, that’s the Silo, which long term readers will recognize as I have drawn it before, like a million times.

This next one, that was the Tri-Co-Ops, which I have drawn before but not as much as the Silo, so it still feels new. I’ve never drawn it with that spiky arched structure in front of it though. I suppose the structure isn’t actually spiky, it’s the plants behind it that make it look spiky. It’s made of metal and yeah, it looks interesting.

This is the UC Davis Coffee House, or CoHo as it’s more commonly known. This was one of those days where I just needed to sketch something but didn’t know what. I get a lot of those on campus. After all these years I’m often a bit uninspired for new things to draw. Sometimes I draw the same things in different ways, but if it’s something that requires a lot of thought like a ridiculous perspective, often I’m like, I need to eat, there’s not much lunchtime left, don’t want to do something that makes me think too hard. I was listening to a football podcast while drawing this.

Another from April, this is along California Avenue, I cycle along here every day. They were doing some construction work, so I had to draw that because I can’t help myself. It looks different now already. There’s always some construction going on. Be nice if they constructed us a new building, we’re running out of space (us and the rest of this growing campus). I liked the people walking by eyes glued down at phones. The mind needs constant engagement, I get it.

Finally, this is the Water Tower, drawn down by the Earth and Physical Sciences building. I was leading a lunchtime sketchcrawl event for the Sustainability Office (we’ve done that for a few years now, close to Earth Day), and I did have a couple of other quick sketches to go with this but this was the main one. Thanks for joining me on this brief campus outing. More sketches still to come…

towering over our heads

March 10, 2022March 10, 20221 Comment

Here’s another sketch of the UC Davis Water Tower (one of them anyway) in the Arboretum, this time with a very spring-like feel with the redbuds glowing. The first day of March 2022, which means we are nearly two years on from that day in March 2020 when we all stopped, and then carried on in a different way.

by the earth and planetary sciences

April 16, 2021Leave a comment

This is the Earth and Planetary Sciences Building at UC Davis, with the big water tower in the background. there are actually a couple of big UC Davis water towers on campus, plus at least one more like this in north Davis, but this is the good looking one, the leader, the big brother. The ‘Barry’ of the Water Tower Bee Gees, standing tall over the others with a huge mane of lustrous hair. Ok maybe not the hair, maybe it’s more Clive Anderson. You remember that interview, the one where they walked out? The one where Barry Gibb got up, said “You’re the tosser, pal” and left? Classic TV moment. I’d always liked Clive Anderson, funny man, and when that first happened I didn’t really warm to Barry Gibb much, but watching it back again Clive Anderson was pretty out of order, and the Bee Gees were well right to say, yeah we don’t need this smug little guy taking the mickey out of us for a few aren’t-I-clever-and-hilarious giggles on late night TV on channel 4 or whatever it was on. Ok, this is obviously a very specific early-90s-British-TV tangent, let’s get back to the drawing. I drew this while on campus during a late lunch (I think I had Zoom meetings during lunch), this is very close to my office. Earth and Planetary Sciences is right across the street from us, and I drew this at the edge of the Arboretum, by the newly reopened LaRue bridge. The water tower is a big presence, and likes to appear in official photos, like a sentinel of education. That metaphor doesn’t, hehehe, hold water. I like the STOP sign in the foreground, with the unusual orange and white striped signs around it, I don’t know what they are for. They add a nice bit of colour into the scene. The Earth and Planetary Sciences building is very interesting. I remember when they had the groundbreaking for it, I went over with my old supervisor to watch the special ceremonial laying of the first brick, and then they went full steam ahead to build it. There used to be a small wooden building on this site not dissimilar to the ones I draw so often at the Silo area, and I remember saying “I should draw that some time” but never did, and then it was knocked down. I did draw a tree with the empty space of the future building behind it. I was really into drawing ALL of the branches.

That was in March 2008, which seems like a very long time ago, but it was actually only a week or so after Spurs last won a trophy. The same trophy that we will be (probably not) winning in a cup final at Wembley in a week or so.

One thing I really like about the Earth and Planetary Sciences Building (apart from the name which is really future-thinking, considering we have been to zero other planets yet) (apart from with robots of course) (we have visited them virtually via Zoom, I suppose) (actually they have some amazing space rocks in there, I lifted one up on Picnic Day a few years ago and it was super heavy) (or maybe it was kryptonite and it just made me weaker? We’ll never know for sure), anyway the thing I like the most is that there are these huge rocks all around the outside of the building, all with labels, some are volcanic and all are interesting. My son is really into geology (or he was, before he discovered looking at his phone all day) (admittedly he does play a lot of Minecraft which is technically still about geology) so when he’d come to my office during the summers we would sometimes go down and look at the rocks. It’s brilliant working at a university where lots of very clever scientists work. In the building next door is the Entomology museum, where they have loads of interesting and frankly frightening creepy crawlies. On the other side is an actual nuclear lab with big nuclear machines in them, yeah I don’t visit that one. These aren’t very good descriptions, they sound like a 9 year old has written them; it’s late, it’s been a long day, and I’ve forgotten how to write, if I ever knew. I can’t wait for campus to all be open again. Soon, soon!

some spring cleaning

April 2, 2019April 2, 20191 Comment

I still have some March sketches to post (a go-go-go sketchcrawl in Sacramento in an accordion book, and a relax-relax-relax vacation by the ocean in Huntington Beach), but it’s April now. Here is my first sketch of the month. I went down to the Arboretum and sketched the redbuds by the creek, and then went for lunch. April is here, and I have a few months before the summer travels. Belgium and Holland await. There are sketchcrawls planned – several sketching events in Davis, and I want to do that sketchcrawl historical-hunt in San Francisco (I drew a map on Sunday), but I think more than anything I want to lose a few pounds, so April is easing-myself-into-a-diet month. It won’t be easy but I’m going to give it a go. And then when I get to Belgium, I’ll put it all back in chocolate, waffles, beer and frites. So I need to clear some room. Spring is cleaning time too, and I have to clear my yard, it’s gotten a bit out of hand. I already organized my clothes drawers (though my closet is full of football shirts, which by the way necessitate the dieting). Then there is the Art Materials Cupboard. That is eternally out of hand. I don’t know if it’s ever been in hand. It’s the cupboard that whenever I get it all out to reorganize, my wife always says the phrase “oh boy”. Spring cleaning though, it’s not like when I was a kid. My mum was really into spring cleaning. When the curtains and nets came down and that bright April sunlight would stream into the living room, when you could only smell furniture polish and Windolene, when book shelves were cleared for scrubbing and dusting, that was when it was time for me to sneak off to my friends house for a game of football. Of course I could not escape the Spring Cleaning, and my room, usually impenetrable, would have to be cleaned. This usually started with my mum throwing all of my things onto the floor, and then I would have to tidy up from there, and I remember it was a very satisfying feeling to hoover the floor at the end. Anyway, with this sketch I decided to keep it clean, just the watertower shading and the still bright but starting to darken purple-pink redbud blooms.

By the way Davis folks, the next Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl will be at the Arboretum on Sunday April 14: https://www.facebook.com/events/838512119829255/

a tower shining bright

November 27, 2018November 27, 20181 Comment

This is the UC Davis water tower. I have sketched it before, but I don’t mind rehashing old material. I’ll happily tell the same jokes many times over to the same people, over a period of many years, as anyone who has read any of this sketchblog can attest. You might think that I’m sketching for a new audience, maybe someone hasn’t seen one of my sketches of the water tower before, and here’s a new one, but no, it’s really just that after 13 years in this town there isn’t a lot else to draw, so you draw things again. Different times of year, things look different; different times of my life, I see different. Let’s not think too much about it. Cezanne never worried about that when he was painting Mont St.Victoire over and over. Well he probably did, and if I had stayed in Aix-en-Provence myself beyond 2002 then I too would be on about my hundred-and-fiftieth drawing of it, and the Rotonde, and the Place d’Albertas and all the other corners of town that might lose their charm. I’d be dreaming every day, while wandering among the ochre stone and narrow cobbled streets, stepping over dog poo, cigarette butts and dried-up wine, wishing I was somewhere far away and different, like some American college town where they have fire hydrants and falling leaves, wide streets and bicycles, huge continent-crossing trains in the middle of the night, where smoking is banned pretty much everywhere and fresh milk isn’t hidden away like some unloved cousin. Sorry Aix-en-Provence, I love you but I married Davis. I came to Davis 13 years ago, and this water tower was the first thing I ever saw of the town, sticking out above the flat valley like a giant sputnik. It reminded me a bit of my first memories of France actually, when we would visit northern France on school trips, and the most striking thing about the French countryside were the distinctive water towers. This water tower has always for me been the symbol of Davis, more than the bike or the frog or the eco-conscious beard. It’s worth a few sketches I think. I drew this one at the start of November one sunny lunchtime, stood on the banks of Putah Creek, adding the paint on site because everything was such an attractive colour. The sky was a clear and breathable blue. This was before the horrible wild fires up near Chico, that brought havoc to the area and covered northern California with a hazardous smoke for two weeks, even closing down the UC Davis campus. As of last week the rains have finally come and the fresh air is back, meaning we could go back to work today. I didn’t sketch during that whole time; I went to Portland a couple of weeks ago to teach a workshop (I’ll write more on that later), and have been on a bit of a sketching hiatus since. Everyone needs a break. But I’m getting back into it. It’s end of November, advent-calendar-making season, and I have to get that done first. There’s a sketchcrawl in Davis this Saturday (see Let’s Draw Davis) and I’ve got a bit more Walker Hall to sketch, but the rains are coming back…

Saturday nights down at FC Davis

June 25, 2018June 23, 2018Leave a comment

There is a new team in town. Well, a new football club. Soccer, that is. They are FC Davis, and have been playing for the last few months at Aggie Stadium, on the UC Davis campus. We have been to a few games already, starting with the 1-1 draw against the East Bay Stompers (yes, Stompers), who had one tall player that had a big bush of hair and scored a penalty (you can see him below). Many fans were making reference to him being the Lion King because of his mane, which I think he seemed to enjoy, especially when he scored; he was definitely their main player. Lots of the people attending I recognized from AYSO, being a soccer coach myself, and while it wasn’t a big crowd it was a fun, local atmosphere. The kids of course just loved rolling down the grass verges behind the goals, that’s what you do when you are 9 and 10. It was a bit confusing having the field play on an American Football gridiron – the soccer field was laid out in barely visible yellow marking, much wider than the football lines, and on one occasion at least a player took a throw-in from the wrong place. I was expecting a Mexican wave to start on the other side of the stadium, one bloke to stand up, then another person thirty seats away, and another even further, but it didn’t happen. The sun went down, and it got quite chilly, and the game ended in a 1-1 draw (or ‘tie’ as they prefer to say here).

The club have an interesting colour scheme of black, gold and white, though we only saw them play in white (with gold numbers on the back; the FIFA kit police would not like that). Their badge is a lion; I’m not sure the connection of the lion with Davis California but a lion it is. I’m sure the same can be said for other teams with lions in their badges too, such as Chelsea (no, that is from the lion in the arms of the local Borough of Chelsea), England (no, those are Richard III’s coat of arms), and Aston Villa (ah now that one has a lion for no reason other than lions are cool). Still it’s a more interesting symbol than, I don’t know, a bike or a cow (with apologies to Oxford United fans, and I know it’s a bull). The FC Davis lion is quite stylized though; my son thought it was supposed to be a monkey, so we now call them the Golden Monkey Lion Kings, and I am sure this nickname will not catch on. I also don’t think my new fan song “One Lion” will catch on either, a reworking of the famous 1996 Lightning Seeds / Baddiel and Skinner classic. It goes “One Lion on the shirt, Water-Tower still gleaming, Three months of hurt, Never stopped me dreaming.”

The next time I went they totally went and won for the first time at home. They played Napa 1839 (who very sensibly have a wine bottle as their badge; I wonder if their nicknames is The Bottlers? I don’t know but I already have a slew of potential headlines about them, if ever I have to sub-edit their match reports for a tabloid paper: ‘Napa Caught Napping’, etc and so on, I’m sure there are lots of good wine and bottle ones, ‘Napa bottle their opener’ if they lose their first game for example) (many apologies to Napa for this by the way, got nothing against you, it’s just these headlines would work really well in the British gutter press). So FC Davis won this one (there’s no way they’d get me to write match reports, I go off on more tangents than the Argentine midfield), and Napa sported a two-tone green outfit. It was a close contest, but when FC Davis scored the winner the goalscorer took his shirt off to celebrate with the roaring crowd.

The third and most recent game we went to was against FC Academica. I kept saying it didn’t matter what the score was, “it was academic”, but nobody seemed to hear me. This was a good game. Academica were pretty tough, and took a commanding 3-0 lead. But as it turns out, FC Davis have a a lot of lion’s courage in them, because they came in the last 20 minutes back to tie it up to 3-3, and really should have won 4-3 but had a free kick disallowed (I think VAR would have probably rectified it). It was a very exciting end to the game. I sketched as much of the match as possible (click on the image below to see in more detail). I haven’t had a chance to come to any more games but it was fun sketching them, hanging out with the family and friends and the players on our team, having pizza and beer, and it only cost five bucks to get in. Go Golden Monkey Lion Kings!!

Sorry, ‘Golden Lions’, that is the real nickname. If you’re local and interested, you can visit the FC Davis club website: https://www.footballclubdavis.com/

tower of white

December 22, 20144 Comments

Oh the sketching is back. I got out one lunchtime when it wasn’t rainy and walked along the UC Davis Arboretum, which runs by Putah Creek. I was on my way to eat from that little food truck outside the Mondavi. They do nice chicken-cheesesteak sandwiches. Anyway I realized it’s been a while since I last sketched the UC Davis watertower, so I stopped and drew it with the palm trees in the foreground. The bridge to the left was pretty hard to see behind the foliage so that got left out. Sketched in a Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook.