16 August 06
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?
15 August 06
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.
14 August 06
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…
12 August 06
12 August 06
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.
29 July 06
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.
20 July 06
Triangulating San Francisco
This week I’ve been taking a class at the San Francisco Center for the Book entitled “Mapping as a Creative Strategy”. The first half of the class was a look at traditions of mapping, including a field trip to the maritime library at the National Maritime Historical Park to look at many old maps of the California coast, North America, and San Francisco Bay. This latter half we’ve been working on our own projects. Most of the other students are San Francisco residents, and it was interesting for me to try to work with the perspective of being a visitor to the city, and not being intimately familiar with its neighborhoods.
I started out by making a list of the dozen places I’ve been to in San Francisco these past few years, and penciled these in on my street map. One of the themes that came up in discussion was making a map of places you’ve never been. So I came up with the idea of triangulating several of these places to wind up in spots I’ve never been before. The familiar landmarks were the San Francisco Center for the Book, the S.F. Public Library, the Maritime Library, and the Sutro Library (a bookish selection, to be sure). Finding the midpoints between these landmarks, I came up with a set of 4 new locations to go to.
Today I did my grand tour of the city. At each stop I made a sketch on bristol board. I started out north of the Civic Center, headed west to Haight and Lyon, circled Buena Vista Park to Roosevelt Way, then wound up at Noe and 20th. It was a long outing, but it was wonderful to explore the city this way!
19 July 06
Pen With Attitude
(The result of a conversation with a new pen in the afternoon)
18 July 06
The Pen With The Transparent Barrel
Saturday’s outing in Portland was the second such pen show I’ve ever been to. Unfortunately, the pen I’d like to find, though out of manufacture, I think is too plebeian to be at such an event. This was a $6 Pentalic fountain pen that had a transparent cylindrical barrel with a green ink converter inside. This pen had a wonderful nib. I discovered it in college, and went through several of them, either losing or breaking them in the end.
I did find a pretty nifty pen though at the show. This is a Sailor Super Script fountain pen. The nib of this pen is bent back at an angle, allowing one to make lines that are extra fine to bold depending upon what angle one holds the pen. I picked one up for $15—I think it is great for sketching. It too has a transparent barrel.
17 July 06
The Black Pen
As Numenius mentioned, we were in Portland this weekend. We found out after we’d booked tickets that the Portland Pen Show was going to be taking place while we were there. I’m not a pen collector, as such, not the kind that goes looking at the condition of bakelite through a lupe, but I always like a pen that works well.
This one called me from across the room. It was, it is, a Pen With Attitude. It was made in 1910 or thereabouts, hard rubber, but it was the nib that caught me by the jugular, a flexible italic. A contradiction in terms. A hybrid, a bastard.
I started to make lines with it. No, it said, not like that, like this. I want to do more loops, because I’m half copperplate. I felt wrenched by the power of this thing, unworthy to wield it, unable to stop.
Both Dale and the young Canadian red-haired man who was trying to sell me this pen with me were sort of in shock at what was going on. I’m afraid I was oblivious. I said anything, didn’t let the pen from my hand, kept caressing the paper with these lines from Somewhere Else.
I didn’t buy the pen. I have no business paying $125 for a pen, not when I have others in my drawers I hardly ever use. I went out for a cup of tea and came back, almost buying a lesser Levenger item.
But not.
The next day, after that damn thing had yakked at me all night, the insistent patter or scolding or seduction hollering or whispering, we went back.
I now own this pen. Or it owns me. I’ll let you know. Thanks to Dale and Susan (and Masha and Erik) for insisting I go back. I’d have regretted this one if I’d passed it up…