I recently worked in LA, helping my buddy RHODE with his personal project, brain-storming together in an intense schedule that did not leave time for much other than work. But on my last weekend in LA, Julia came to town, and we managed to squeeze in a day of sketching on the beach.
While everyone else was wearing swimsuits, we were the two dorks in dressed in sensible clothes drawing the SANTA MONICA PIER. But hey, there is more than one way to have fun in the sun!
Last weekend, Julia and I went up to the CAPAY VALLEY, a picturesque farming area about 2 hours drive from San Francisco, to attend an OUTSTANDING IN THE FIELD farm-dinner. The trip made a good excuse for a weekend of drawing.
Our posh dinner was set for Sunday so we planned to devote all of Saturday to exploring and sketching. During breakfast on the porch of our inn, we saw a deer and her two baby fauns walking through the garden and into the forest. With that charming sight in our minds, we put on back-backs and set off, musing on the advantages of country life. Our inn-keeper had given us walking directions to some interesting farms nearby but, when we arrived, there was nobody to ask permission to enter the properties. It felt presumptuous to ignore all the “Keep Out” signs and set-up drawing in the owners’ absence, so we retraced our steps back to our inn.
Suddenly, we were startled by a grisly scene; about 10 feet from the trail we walked on, one of the fauns we’d seen earlier that same morning was having its throat torn out by a huge black Labrador, while the clearly-distressed mother watched from a safe distance with her other baby. After a pathetic yowl, the faun was dead, almost before we knew what was going on. Thoroughly deflated, we decided to get in the car and go seek things to draw elsewhere.
Although the valley is incredibly pretty from one end to the other, it was surprisingly difficult to find a place to sit and draw, because everything picturesque is on private property, plastered in “No Trespassing” signs. On the other hand, maybe we were not looking hard enough; seeing Bambi slaughtered by Cujo had sucked the fun out of the day for us. Whatever the cause, by the end of the first day, all we’d found to draw was an abandoned school house. Driving back to our inn that evening, we saw an old rusty truck and resolved to draw it early the next day before our dinner.
The next day was a vast improvement over the first. We drew the truck as planned. While Julia devoted all her time to the truck and did a fantastic pastel, I managed to bang out another sketch, of a nearby wagon before we had to head off to our event.
The dinner we’d gone all that way to attend took place at one long, long table seating 140 people, placed between a row of trees in the fig orchard of CAPAY ORGANIC FARMS. For several months now, we’ve been getting a box of their produce delivered to our front door every other week, so when we heard there was to be a farm dinner hosted on their property it seemed like something we shouldn’t miss. The dinner was preceded by a tour of the farm itself which was an lovely setting for an evening meal with just about the best weather you could have wished for. Our table-mates were strangers but excellent company. Each of them had some connection to farming or wineries and we had lively and fun conversation that made the entire journey well worthwhile.
Last Weekend, Julia and I returned from a fantastic 2-week visit to France. Our first few days in Paris were a blur of activity; sight-seeing, and meeting with my old friends, and the next few days at the FESTIVAL in Angouleme were more of the same, with book-buying besides! By the time we got to SAINTES on the Atlantic coast, for a visit with my Dad, the pace slowed down enough to finally fit in a little sketching, though nowhere near as much as I would have liked.
These first two drawings show some of the Roman artifacts that are highlights of a visit to the region around Saintes, including a spectacular Gallo-Roman Amphitheatre:
During our 2nd week, the weather turned decidedly colder and the sketching moved indoors. These sketches were drawn inside the chilly Cathedral of Saint Pierre:
We spent our last day in France inside the the Louvre, that repository of Western Civilization’s greatest hits… A day is not enough to see anything but a teeny fraction of what is there, so we decided to focus on SCULPTURES, and the sketching thereof:
As a consequence of being a nest of over-achievers for well over a millennium, France is a country with such an embarrassment of riches in History and Art that it is impossible to take it all in… but I can’t wait to go back and try!
This watercolour of the beach at Van Damme State Park looks a lot better to me now that I do not have the real thing right in front of my eyes for comparison.
The northern California town of Mendocino has some very distinctive and quirky architecture. One prominent feature is the towers looming all over town.
At first, I thought they were observation towers or merely a quirk of a long-ago architect, neither of which explained the sheer number of them. It took me a while to realise that they were in fact water towers, because the tanks themselves are often hidden from view, by a surrounding balcony, and unlike the free-standing, open, scaffold-type water tank-stand that I have seen elsewhere, these towers contain windows & doors and are incorporated into the buildings.
Last weekend, Julia and I went up to the North coast on a sketching trip. I’ll have some more pics to post later but to begin with, here is a beaten down old truck we stumbled on towards the outskirts of the lovely little town of Mendocino.
The weather was beautiful & sunny, and despite occasional gusts of strong coastal wind, we both got a lot of sketching done, and had a wonderful time together.
My creative goal for the weekend was to think and draw tonally rather than with lines, as I normally do. This does not come naturally to me but it is something I must train myself to do. I worked all weekend in water-colour, using a great new set of colours Julia had given me (my old set is not very good and utterly thrashed, besides) and even when I did lay down some lines on paper, I was attempting to describe areas of shade rather than edges of objects. The use of AQUARELLES meant that whatever line-work I put on paper very quickly dissolved under my brush and forced me to think tonally again.
A few times, the wind was so harsh that it sucked the fun out of sitting outside and we were not able to finish the sketches on site. We each took some photos of our subjects and finished off some details later that same evening, in the comfort of our cosy hotel. In general, I don’t care for drawings done from photos, I personally find they can seem sterile, but I must admit that using them as part of a “data gathering” mission enabled us to do a lot more sketching in a short amount of time than we normally do. And, as the drawing and observations of the light patterns was always done on site, using the photo as a memory jog later on, maybe it wasn’t cheating too much…
My current pocket sketchbook has a long history; it was purchased in 2002, drawn in sporadically until 2004, then lost and only just found again late last year.
Consequently, there are OLD sketches amongst the new, such as these from a trip in 2004, when Bosco, myself and Chris (pictured below) went driving south along highway #1 (along the coast) and wound-up at beautiful Big Sur.
It was a purely spontaneous trip and by the time we got all the way down there it was dark and we didn’t want to drive all the way back. Of course, travellers without accommodation reservations are often punished by fate when there’s no place to stay the night (today is the one day in the year when a ball-bearing convention is in town; who knew?!) and, given that there are not many hotels down there, we were prepared to sleep in the car. As luck would have it however, we DID manage to find a decent, affordable place to stay; a lovely inn overlooking the sea.
We had a very pleasant evening and did some exploring and sketching the following day and then drove back to SF. Sometimes, Spontaneity is rewarded.
