works of wanderlust

Month: October 2025

  • urban sketch, five

    I have a mere three sketches left in this October (sub)urban sketching challenge I set for myself.

    Good thing, too. The weather is starting to become a factor to my outdoor sketching efforts. The one rule that I set for my October month of daily drawing was that they were not just doodles of the houseplants. I had to draw some kind of outdoor scene that could be considered suburban sketching or adjacent. I have tried to meet this goal head on by ensuring that there was something “human made” in every scene, whether that was just a park bench or a fence post. Because the problem with the suburbs is that its all mostly single family homes, cookie-cutter shopping areas, sprawling parks and cars.

    I also loosely set myself the goal of avoiding when possible drawing from a photograph. The caveat to that was, of course, weather. Sure, I have sat in my vehicle and sketched what I saw through the windshield, but there have been two occasions where the weather was less than cooperative for my efforts and/or I put the sketch off for too long avoiding the weather and I found myself sitting at the kitchen table later on after dark drawing from the photo on my iPad screen. But only twice.

    In other words, all these vague and quasi-restrictive rules have done the thing that often drive proper art: conflict with simplicity and opportunity. I made the rules loose enough that I didn’t create so many obstacles that it became impossible to find a subject. I also made the rules strict enough that—as I wrote above—I couldn’t just draw from my couch or kitchen chair every day either. I had to go out. I had to go on walks and find scenes. And when I couldn’t find scenes I had to just draw what I saw.

    And that’s the rub, isn’t it.

    I went into this combatting another mental obstacle: my inclination to think like a photographer. And photographers want perfect scenes and clear subjects and all those things that seem like they would naturally apply to a good sketch, too. But there seems to be a subtle difference that I just can’t put my finger on—it’s something to do with drawing the mundane and the ability of a pen and ink piece of paper to become something far more interesting than a snapshot. Maybe it is the passing of the visual data through a human brain. Maybe it is the focus of detail through the fingers of a person with feelings and memories. Maybe it is the emphasis that comes from the interpretation that stops being as literal as a lens and a pixel sensor is forced to be by its own nature. Art is subjective not just in the consuming of it, but also in the creation.

    A single tree might be interesting enough as a photograph, but takes on a subjective interpretation when the shapes and colours and shadows pass through my eyes, swirl around my brain and shoot out my fingers as pen strokes. It is no longer a pixel perfect image, but an evoked feeling of a tree in that moment.

    heavy pen

    reluctant as I have been to use heavy pens, I have leaned into fine liners for much of my urban sketching in the last couple years. understanding and becoming friends with strong, bold black ink on the page is a work of confidence as much as it is skill. i am yet to be skilled, but i have learned a kind of confidence in finding the places where solid fills of black ink are not only welcomed but adored when they arrive. i too long thought of my black brush pen as simply lacking the detail of my 005 fine liner and little more than a blunt colouring tool. instead, i have started to see it as important as the page itself: white paper, detailed lines, black shadows, all of it in balance and harmony when drawn right.

    Don’t get me wrong. Many, many artists aspire to draw photo-realistically and a hundred fold people who are their audience applaud the efforts. I admire such skill. 

    Yet, Realism in art is just one branch of a towering tree-worth of styles.  Not every image needs to be a replica of a photograph.

    I’ll give an example that is one step removed from my sketching: I am making a video game. It is artistically best classified as a modern-retro 8-bit game. It is not 8-bit and it is not as simple as that implies. But the art style evokes an 80s arcade aesthetic. It is not trying to be photo realistic. It is not using the best of the best graphics engines to make it look unimpeachably perfect. It is leaning into a style. And while making games that are visions of realism is a fine achievement both technically and artistically, there is more to art, style and creating than replicating the capabilities of another art form.

    So here I found myself with a pen, a sketchbook, and a set of manageable rules that forced me to push through tedium, weather, uninspiring architecture and tight deadlines, all while drawing one image a day then letting it go. There was no working towards perfection day after day after day on one work. It was about sketching in the moment and ignoring the inclinations of a wandering photographic mindset.  

    It has mostly worked. I’m 28 for 28 with three sketches to go as of this writing. My sketches have become freer with style, and my pen become more willing to see a subject where my camera would have seen background fluff.  It has been good. And no, not all the sketches are good, but they are exercises that each and every one have obeyed a rule to create an minor obstacle to build a tiny bit of skill in the overcoming of it. And that’s been worth it.

  • third-place-less

    I’m sitting in a coffee shop trying to do some writing, but first I needed to get some words off my chest: this was fifth out-of-the house writing location I tried. It’s shortly after lunchtime on a Monday in October and the first four locations I tried—including three other cafes and the local public library—were so stuffed full of people that I would have been squatting in the corner hoping for a sympathy chair had I stayed longer than walking in and right back out again.

    We’ve stopped making third places.

    Or, if you want to call coffee joints third places, we’ve stopped making the kind of third places where you don’t need to spend anywhere from three to eight bucks to buy a drink so you can use their wifi guilt-free for an hour… tho, even then, I had to drive in a loop of about fifteen kilometres just to find one with a spare seat.

    First places are where we live.

    Second places are where we learn, work and contribute.

    Third places are where we go to be social and thrive and be outside of the other two places. I like to write and create and think in third places… but this usually means I do most of my writing and creating and thinking over an expensive coffee in a local Starbucks. 

    Fair enough, there’s a teachers strike on right now and the library being packed with teenagers who are off school because of the labour dispute was not a surprise, but I’ve been there on any other given day and finding an empty chair is always a roll of the dice.

    And true, when I go out at 8am with my writing device ready I usually have my pick of places to be a write and create and think and sit pretty much anywhere I want in the doing of those things.

    But we’re not a society that creates public buildings to just hang out in. There’s a local rec centre, but I’ve checked there, too, often and found it just as hopping busy as any cafe or library, it’s thirty or forty seats filled with people who beat me to the punch with their computers or whatever.

    Parks are wonderful third places, as is the bragging rights of the city having an absolutely enormous river valley trail system filled with nooks and crannies. But too, we live in a winter city, so on a cool, late-autumn day when the rain is off and on and the wind is blowing a pre-winter chill, sitting outside is not a great place with a sketchbook let alone an expensive laptop computer. 

    Where are our third places?

    Certainly if you have a few bucks to throw at a coffee or a beer or a hamburger you can sit in a cafe or a pub or a fast food restaurant. Is that the healthiest situation for a society? I have written elsewhere, or maybe even here, on the trouble with losing our third places, the virtualization of our seconds and the isolation of our firsts. The ones we have left are filled with social media trolls and AI ghosts in the machine or pay-to-play hot seats at a bustling corporate cafe, and it all seems a little sickly and sad. Even more so as winter creeps closer day by day and I remember that I’ll be trapped in my house for weeks on end soon, hunkering down and trying to find the motivation that is so much more clear and urgent when I’m out and about in public.

    Either that, or I’ll drive around looking for a warm seat in what is left of the third places, shell out my three bucks for a mediocre coffee and try and feel like the world is not blurring into something even more isolating than in already seems.

  • head over feets, twelve

    October has been a bit of a fitness blur. I can’t seem to get it together to get in much swimming these days. Yeah, I know… the pool is only a twenty minute drive away, but twenty minutes each way plus the swim and the other dawdling around that and it seems like I need to set aside nearly two hours just for a swim with the local pool closed. Once a week is my low bar and I’ve been struggling to leap over that. Alas. So it goes.

    But I have been running.

    And lately, my fitness logs included…

    I had been promising that my days of Wednesday run club were over for a while during the span of my language classes (which were happening on the same night) but the class was cancelled this week so I haunted the run club for yet another six klick loop around suburbia at sunset.

    Thursday, we had good intentions and we met down on the south-side for an after-dark loop with some trails. LC caught his toe on a buckling bit of pavement, tho, and took a hard fall on his knees. So, PS and I ran back to the cars to get him a ride and that pretty much wrapped up our run early. We did have a solid two klicks before he fell, however, and running back to the cars we were making a fast clip to get it done fast. Overall, four klicks with a generous negative split on the return.

    Because of the Thursday evening events, I figured I’d better sneak in another run for the week. I drove downtown on Saturday morning for my eleventh Park Run (not so impressive but getting into the double digits I guess) and ran a sub-29 minute five klick. It was stupid chilly, tho, so I stood in the hot shower for longer than usual.

    Sunday was the last of our training runs before the race. We generally taper on the Sunday long run before a race, so we settled on an adventurous ten klick run into the river valley. It provided some generous hills getting in and out of the dog park, but it’s always a quiet and peaceful place to spend some time on a weekend. And some great views, too. I should really take the dog down there again before winter-proper arrives.

    I was back down in the dog park on Tuesday. Kim was planning a route for run club the next day through some of the single track trails and I think she wanted to get a gauge of the rolling grades and meandering tree roots right around sunset for a dozen people, so I joined her for a test run nearly exactly twenty-four hours before that run. We logged a 6-ish trail run (only the second time I’ve had my trail shoes on this year, sigh) and beat the sunset back to the cars. I missed the run the next day because I had my Japanese class, tho. 

    And then suddenly race day was upon me. I’m going to wax a little more now than I usually would in these posts. In the olden days I may have written a whole stand-alone race report, but really, there isn’t that much to write about a small local race on a chilly October morning. If you’ve been following these posts you know that I’ve been working myself up towards the Fall Classic 10 Miler, a sixteen kilometre road race and one of the last big-ish events in the city until we all reluctantly sign up for the Hypothermic Half in February.

    The Fall Classic has been running for 40 years. It was in fact the 40th anniversary year of the race and the medal we all got was designed around a huge number 40 at the centre. I last ran this race exactly ten seasons ago in 2015 and I always joke that it held the distinction of being a race I ran in which winter arrived half way through the course because, simply, the wind whipped up through the river valley that mild October day in 2015 and when I passed about the 10km mark the cool morning had turned into a sleeting storm. It was not so bad this year, but not much better. We had rain and a cold wind blowing up out of the river valley and onto the valley-adjacent boulevard that traces the bulk of the course.

    I have been a wee bit sick, too, this week. Fighting off a slate of autumn infections stirring up as a result of suddenly resuming all my indoor group activities and spending time indoors with people coughing and cross-infecting. I ran anyways and felt it at about 11-12km through the course.

    But I finished. Not a wonderful time, but about what I would have expected for not having raced a proper race (again, Park Run doesn’t count) in over a year (Edmonton half marathon pacer, August 2024) and feeling the cold and the rain and low-grade sinus infection.

    And like every other time I run a race with nothing else in the docket I woke up Monday morning a bit tired and a bit glad it was over again and a bit wondering what my next goal is going to be.  For now, I need to settle into the value of my rec centre pass, prepare for a couple weeks of vacation soon, and ponder how to keep fit over the winter… as usual.

  • weekend wrap, twenty

    I guess this was the final weekend in October, huh? I started this month with a personal art challenge, drawing every day, and so far I’ve kept up my end of the deal. But somehow whenever I immerse myself it the act of doing something daily over the span of a month it seems to speed up time and I blink and… well, it was the final weekend of October.

    Friday evening was a tiny little self-contained adventure.

    I had to go pick up my race package from the store up near Whyte Avenue. The wife had a little AGM meeting to attend with a big purpose right near there. Her meeting was for a board she sits on and it was the meeting when they were electing a new president to replace her—happily so—since the kid is no longer doing that particular extra curricular thing and she doesn’t need to run the organization and fundraise for other kids, huh? 

    I dropped her off and drove up to the Running Room and grabbed my race shirt and bib. Ran into Kim, because she was working, and PS, because he was also picking up his package at the exact same time.

    I got it into my mind to go back to the store where I bought my little sketchbook, the one I’ve been doing all my drawing in for the challenge this month. It turns out that they are only sold at like three places in the city, and one of those places was on Whyte Avenue. But Whyte Avenue, the city’s gentrified Uni-adjacent trendy shopping strip is a terrible place to try and go casually on a Friday evening. I could not find parking—at least not some free parking (and I was feeling a bit too cheap to pay) so I ended up driving laps around the neighbourhoods for a while until I got frustrated and just decided to try to drive back to the studio to pick up the wife… which is when I got trapped in a construction zone hell and it took me twenty minutes and a few middle fingers to navigate.

    I picked her up and we decided since it was almost 8pm to finally grab a dinner. There is a little sushi and rice bowl place on the way home so we swung in there and ordered, and as she hands us our food in to-go bowls (confusingly) she told us that they were closing at 8 and we could only stay if we ate fast. Ugh. So we ate our sad little bowls at home twenty minutes later and settled in to watch some television.

    I got paid for a couple of my contracts last week, so on Saturday morning I made my way to the store to (finally!) replace my laptop. I’ve been working on a mix of (a) the shared family computer, (b) a ten year old gaming desktop in my cold, cold basement, (c) a fourteen year old recycled MacBook Pro hacked to run Linux and (d) a six year old iPad that is starting to show its age. Since setting up the corporation I’ve always known that the best tax approach is to use the money and invest back into the company rather than pull it out as salary and pay a bunch of taxes on it. So, new laptop for the business was bought… and then most of the afternoon setting it up and getting all the softwares installed on it.

    We had a lite dinner and settled in for some more television on Saturday evening.

    Sunday I woke up to rain. Rain is not inherently bad, but Sunday morning was also race morning and I looked out the back door as even the dog refused to step out and tried not to think that I needed to be at a start line in a couple hours to run sixteen klicks.

    I met the gang for a carpool over to the race and we were plenty early to spend time wandering around and overthinking the weather. Of course, soon enough the race was run and it being the first real race I’ve done in over a year (Park Runs apparently don’t count, but they’re also only 5k) I was spent. 

    We piled in and went for a late lunch at some enormous asian buffet place on the north side that I’d never even heard of, and I stuffed myself to borderline feeling ill.  

    I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening recovering from the race (and lunch) and went to bed at a far too reasonable time for a guy with nothing much to do on Monday morning except write.

  • panoramic, three: oculus graffiti

    There is this strange place literally walking distance from my house. 

    The graffiti tunnel, more formally known as The Oculus.

    I say “walking distance” though it did take me over an hour to walk there and an hour to walk home—plus I spent time there taking photos, sketching, making a video and then stopping for lunch on my way home. Three and a half hours later I got home from a little suburban adventuring.

    About twenty years ago now they built a stretch of the city-circling ring road that swung round the southwest corner of the city. At about seven o’clock on the circle the road passes over a little feeder creek. Readers of this blog will be slightly familiar with that creek because we run through many of the trails that weave over and around and past that creek—but north of where the Oculus sits.

    Rather than just build another bridge, some industrious city planner seems to have decided that this would be the future site of some connecting trail linking the neighbourhoods on either side of the freeway, so they build a hulking concrete culvert with a beautiful paved footbridge traversing through the middle and atop the creek… and never connected it to anything. Never. Even twenty years later it’s this seemingly abandoned piece of pedestrian pathway that requires a map and some hiking boots to locate. 

    To be fair, they are doing some roadwork about 500m south of this point now and it is a strong possibility that the lack of connection will be formally remedied in the next couple years—or never—but if it’s going to happen it’s going to happen soon. Or, yeah, maybe never.

    Still. In those twenty years much has transpired under the freeway and much paint has been spent on decorating every reachable surface with graffiti. It is a sight. I mean, if they ever connect it, I’m sure they will repaint it as a stark and boring Industrial City White—but for now, it is a destination for adventure and a sight worthy of some stellar photographic efforts.