A Fortnight-long Sketchcrawl

Going to Europe—including a wedding—with no camera raised a few eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic. But sketching our way around Madrid, Segovia, from trains, from benches in three countries allowed both of us to connect with our surroundings in a different way than a digital camera would have.

For a start, anything’s fair game, subjects that would not have been “worth” photographing. My new shoes. The top of the head of the balding man in the seat in front of me on the plane. The half-drunk glass of sangria on a table, an old wooden door, Jennifer and Harald’s boots. Sure, we did sketch the grandiose—I did two sketches of the aqueduct in Segovia, for instance—but there is much pleasure to be had in tracing lines that outline the simple, the mundane.

Blogging for us grew out of our log book, a journal with pen and a few sketches about our dwelling-place. Sketching for me at least has in turn been influenced by blogging, in that I chose where to go in, say, London, in part by what sketching opportunities might be had.

(I should probably fess up at this point that I did shell out an enormous sum to go up the London Eye precisely for this reason, only to succumb to vertigo and possibly regret, but then I made up for it in far more prosaic settings along the South Bank, such as the kid who was bungee-trampolining with a grin on his face almost the size of the pods revolving slowly above and to his right.)

We had different trajectories, Numenius and I. We mostly sketched independently. And, at night, we’d look at each other’s books and get peeks into each other’s days and glimpse alternate universes and our courtship from years ago, a slowly unfolding narrative conducted at a slight remove of time and a considerable remove of space…

Try it, I urged a Canadian tourist whose brother-in-law had invited me over to their table across from the Museum of Garden History, having caught a glimpse of the fish-lampost I’d just rendered quickly in pen and ink. Your life will be changed.

She did, right away. She drew a sketch of me. It was rudimentary and she was embarrassed but I urged her on, because this is important.

I really do believe that.

[Postscript: Doc Rock’s comment reminds me that I should add a link to Danny Gregory’s site and urge readers who’d like to find out more about this kind of thing to see his books, Everyday Matters and Creative License. I certainly did end up telling quite a few people about Danny’s books while I was away.]

Hope's the Thing

A submission for the Illustrated Poem Marathon (thanks, Crack Skull Bob).

I did this one a few years back by freehand-tearing some construction paper which I then exposed, along with the calligraphy, on photo-emulsion for silkscreening.

The poem is Emily Dickinson’s.

Blank Books

I’m pretty close to settling on the art supplies to take on our trip to Europe (the main thing left to decide is just what pencils and pens). One thing of course to bring is an artist’s journal, always a challenge. This year I’ve been doing my journal in these great Pentalic drawing books and will be taking one of these along. The paper in these is 90 lb. weight which is thick enough to take a good wash. These Pentalic blank books are hard to find though; the art section of the UC Davis bookstore started carrying them last year but I’ve never seen them in any other art store.

The solution to having the perfect journal is bind one’s own. I’m thinking of taking bookbinding this fall at the San Francisco Center for the Book so I can do just that.

City Notebook

I have yet to become a member of the cult of Moleskine, but Pica has been looking into these notebooks as a possibility for a journal. On their site today she noticed an upcoming product of theirs that will be very neat. This is their line of City Notebooks. They describe this as “the guidebook you write yourself.” Each of these notebooks has an overview map and a set of street maps together with many blank pages, tabs, and overlays to allow you to write out your own notes about a city. Their line of European city notebooks will be out in the fall, with the United States ones to follow in Spring of 2007.

Days

Nicole of Turning Leaves recently posted about her French diary-journal, her agenda, and how she gets her mother to send her a refill from France every year. It works for her.

I used to have the Economist diary, a slim leather affair my father bought me every year for my birthday. I fell prey to the 1980s Filofax craze in England and loved the modularity of it, how much stuff I could put in one place. I got sent by my work to a Franklin Planner course when I was at Harvard, and got the larger leather case to hold it all. Now I was lugging around four pounds of planning in my bike basket, and when Handspring Visors appeared, I was thrilled to make the transition to a tiny thing.

But it doesn’t work for me, the PDA, because there’s nowhere to write stuff down when you’re on the phone, there’s nowhere to sketch. It’s sterile and, when it goes south (which they inevitably do), you’re stuck. Numenius promises he’ll download all my data onto his Linux box but so far I’m living at the edge of my backup-module. I’d lose all my addresses if my Visor stopped working. The last printout I have is probably from 2001. Almost everyone I know has moved since then.

In any case, I switched back to the Franklin Planner I had in the cupboard, because I like to be able to use a pen. It’s pared down—no address list, for instance—but it still takes up real estate in my bike basket. It’s not something I would take on a trip, for instance.

The perfect diary for me isn’t something you can buy in a store, though it doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking (and I will certainly look when we’re in Spain in a couple of weeks, though how you make that a sustainable thing, I don’t know).

The perfect diary would have room to write and draw and even paint. I think I’m talking myself into making my own. Ideas, anyone?

Noodler's Black

Sunday I picked up a bottle of black Noodler’s Ink and have been playing with it quite a bit. This fountain pen ink has gotten a lot of praise on the net—my interest in it is that it is permanent and waterproof. Most fountain pen inks are quite water-soluble when on the page, which means painting over an ink drawing with watercolors creates a mess. For such pen-and-wash sketches, I’ve generally used either Micron Pigmas or Gelly Roll pens, but neither are as fun to draw with as a fountain pen. I’m pleased with the way the Noodler’s Ink behaves. At right is a drawing of a sunflower in Noodler’s black, painted over with watercolor.

Sketching Around the World

I used to fancy myself quite a photographer when I was in boarding school. I took rolls of Tri-X, developed them myself (in Dektol, a paper developer, much to the bemusement of some pseudo-professional photographers in Madrid), adored the high contrast and mega-grain. And then I got tired of my fingers smelling of stop-bath and switched them for fingers stained in black ink, which they more or less have been since.

I feel I have nothing to add, now, to the deluge of digital photos inundating the blogosphere. But when you draw ten different drawings of the same sunflower, one of them might be interesting. I have learned a lot about myself on Saturday.

Contemplating our trip to Europe, I find I am drawn to blogs that feature a lot of sketching. I have my journal made, though I haven’t pinpricked my grid yet. I’m dying to have at least an hour or two at the aqueduct in Segovia: a structure spanning a city with no mortar, built 2,000 years ago. The press of stone on stone keeping the arches together.

We are out of practice for stone (the Central Valley hasn’t much). We’ll do our best…

Tournesol

Traveling Without Camera

We’re not planning to bring a camera on our upcoming trip to Europe. Or at most, an old point-and-click loaded with Tri-X. The proximate reason for this is that last winter we lost our little digital camera, and haven’t felt the necessity to replace it (we still have a bulkier, older digicam that works quite well). But ultimately for me, it’s a matter of being far more interested in travel sketching than photography. On her trip to New York last March, Pica only took a sketchbook to record her journey, and that was a great success.
Digital photographs seem to build up by the thousands on hard drives and CD-Rs and never see the light of day, but travel sketchbooks actually get looked at.

An Afternoon With Escher

The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento currently is hosting an Escher show that is visiting from the Portland Museum of Art.

Escher was everywhere male when I was in boarding school, along with Tolkien. Posters were hung in the boys’ studies, much like Mucha and Monet were hung in ours; the appeal was both cerebral and “difficult,” portending more meaning than was perhaps there.

Today I found an artist who was a master printmaker. His “space perception” pieces were very late and followed extensive architectural, landscape, and life studies. He lived in Italy for a while and was mesmerized by the Alhambra and the intricate moorish tiling.

The best thing, I thought, were the book plates he designed for people: linocuts in black and white, distilling down a person’s essence into what they’d want thought about them on the endpages of their books. This design format went the way of the dodo just like the album cover but gosh I’d like to see it reclaimed… just as it was wonderful to see Escher today being enjoyed by women as well as men.