Yerba Buena

Last weekend was a good one for drawing; both doing it ourselves and appreciating drawings done by others. Firstly, on Saturday, Julia and I went to Yerba Buena Gardens to draw:

YerbaBuenaTerrace

I ‘ve sketched here before (a study of the church you see here) but this time I tried an overview. The angle I chose was from the terrace, where there was ample seating in the sunlight, which was needed as it was a chilly day, despite being sunny. The park itself is down below, behind the pond and seagulls, obscured from this angle. So there is some weird foreshortening that my crude left-handed drawing may not convey, but I liked the view of the downtown cityscape.

That same evening we went to the nearby Cartoon Art Museum to hear a fascinating talk on Ronald Searle given by Matt Jones. This was a companion talk to the recent ‘Searle in America‘ show put on at the museum and arranged by Matt. (Julia did a great Searle tribute piece for the fundraiser auction to pay for shipping the Searle art to San Francisco.) Matt had slides of additional Searle artwork that did not make it into the museum show, but will hopefully find a place in the forthcoming BOOK on Searle’s work in the USA, that Matt is compiling now. This will essentially be an expanded and super-deluxe edition of the excellent program guide to the ‘Searle in America’ show (copies are still available at the Cartoon Art Museum). Matt also had some charming stories of how he finally came to befriend his hero, one of the greatest graphic stylists of all time, near the end of Ronald Searle’s long life.

After Matt’s excellent talk was finished, the public-speaker/art-curator extraordinaire met us at a nearby posh Indian restaurant, where we had a splendid evening dining and trading old tales with our pals and colleagues, Wave and Gleb. Sunday, I stayed at home doing watercolour washes on earlier drawings, including some TV sketching that I will post later.

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