10 April 26
Looking Towards The Heavens
Like many others today I was glued to watching the NASA livestream of the Artemis 2 splashdown, with a bit of extra nervousness due to the concerns about the spacecraft’s heatshield. It was a perfect splashdown, but getting the astronauts back to the recovery ship was taking a while, so I went for my late afternoon walk. It was sprinkling a bit, so I grabbed my raincoat and walked where I could have a good view of the eastern sky to see this wonderful double rainbow.
10 April 26
Dodgy Travel Day
Note: this was written last night but only now have I found the connectivity to post it after a long day of traipsing around Mainz.
I am now in a hotel above the elderly nuns’ residence in Bingen on the Rhine. This isn’t an ordinary hotel and in fact is so far above the town that, after a long day of cancelled trains and unsure of how to get back up here, I’ve decided to call it a night. I’ll be doing some exploring in the morning.
Here’s what I’m thrilled about with regard to my German skills: nobody has immediately switched into English when I open my mouth. My German’s patchy, but I’m holding my own, even under the extreme duress of having boarded the wrong train in the Frankfurt airport, and of subsequently having arrived at the convent a few minutes after six, by which time the doors were closed. (It’s a convent.)
The internet here is so weak I can’t upload any photos just now, but I’ve been drawing the Roman baths in Baden-Baden, the buskers outside the cathedral in Freiburg (there is a pair of kestrels apparently nesting in the belfry!), the delicious cappuccino I had this morning in Freiburg before catching the tram going the wrong direction to the train station… More soon.
Postscript: Here are the buskers with no color yet…
8 April 26
Red Onion
Sketched with Derwent drawing pencils, watercolor wash, and a smidgen of black ink with an extremely fine fibertip pen. Onions are always fun to sketch.
7 April 26
Sketching on the Train
Today I took the nearly 6-hour journey by train from Hamburg to Baden-Baden. My friend Dagmar had guided me for three days around Hamburg’s excellent public transit system and I felt comfortable enough to negotiate the one here in Baden-Baden (the train station is a few miles out of the city center).
I didn’t add watercolor to these sketches until I got to my hotel, but I don’t think the color is too haywire…
7 April 26
Zeus Backwards Spells Suez
This is to say I believe that the epic fury of the gods is turning the Iran war into the United States’ Suez Crisis. Our power on a global scale is diminishing day by day.
I’m reading a lot about the Vietnam War right now. I just finished The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s 1972 account of the technocrats in the Kennedy-Johnson administrations who led us into that war. I’ve now started Fire in the Lake by Francis FitzGerald also from 1972, a much-lauded account of how Americans failed to understand the history and culture of Vietnam when they went to war there.
Given the complexity of alliances that are under strain right now maybe I should be reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August too. It’s quite the escalatory mess.
5 April 26
Trossings
There is a Lutheran church in Davis with a sign outside I’m sure was supposed to be “Crossings,” but because the handwritten lettering was a bit inexpert, looked like “Trossings.”
Here I am in the land of Luther, on Easter Sunday, a very big deal in Germany, a day where people in the U-bahn were carrying baskets laden with food to take to a relative’s. We spent the day wandering around a section of town — on the outskirts, really — called Blankenese, a posh area with a lot of villas overlooking the Elbe. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, and we had a good walk up and down the steep cobbled streets. Living in Davis, there isn’t a lot of up and down, and my hamstrings are definitely noticing.
My friend Dagmar has been guiding me around. We listened to a lecture by Eckart Tolle this morning as I drew the flowers on her table…
4 April 26
Big Four Building
Yesterday I went on a return outing to Old Sacramento, a follow-up to my visit to the Crocker Art Museum the previous Friday. The most interesting exhibit at the Crocker was a show of screenprinting from the Royal Chicano Air Force which is an art collective from Sacramento prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. When I walked back via Old Sacramento I noticed that the Sacramento History Museum had another exhibit on the RCAF that was closing soon, so I decided to come back to Old Sacramento yesterday to see that exhibit and do another sketch. This is the so-called Big Four Building, which is the hardware store where the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad initially got extremely wealthy selling goods to Gold Rush miners. The founders were known as the Big Four, and were Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins Jr., Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker.
3 April 26
Chilly Copenhagen
I arrived in Copenhagen in the dark after hours and hours of travel. I was to meet a childhood friend — my best friend, really, certainly my longest-lasting — and her husband here the following day.
We all drink tea, copiously. This meant finding somewhere after lunch where we could have a cup of tea and I could sketch without us all becoming hypothermic, so we ended up at a bar with outdoor heating on the Nyhavn, a big cliché, I know, but this is where we found.
I am not very good at drawing buildings and I didn’t have unlimited time but here’s my sketch, which I colored in after I got back to our hotel… Today was a brisk walk through the wind and cold of the Naturpark Amager, a territory formerly owned by the Danish military which is being allowed to rewild itself. We had hoped to see birds and I did see my life barnacle goose, or rather several thousand of them, but mostly it was a long walk in the wind. (We did help an elderly man with dementia reconnect with his son, which seemed like a kind thing to do.)
2 April 26
Tangerine At Large
I’m continuing to practice my multimedia technique of sketching an underdrawing with my Derwent drawing pencils, then adding some ink lines for definition, and then adding a watercolor wash over the drawing (in this case the Inktense mango pan color). Here is a tangerine from Tuesday’s grocery shop.
