works of wanderlust

Month: October 2025

  • urban sketch, three

    In the meanwhile, my personal month-of-sketches art experiment continues unabated and, as of nine days in, triumphant.

    To be clear, not even most of the pics are gems. I have been partaking in the act of suburban sketching, which doubly adds to my challenge of (a) seeking out something to sketch and a place to sketch it and (b) making said scene of suburban mediocrity seem interesting enough to sketch in the first place. 

    To make matters more challenging, I’ve been mildly sick for the last couple days, which means going to sit in the park on a chilly October afternoon is not high on my list of priorities, even if doing a sketch kinda is. There was one particular sketch I did from the comfort of my living room window, looking out into the back garden with a mug of hot tea at the ready.

    All that aside, what my goal for the last nine days has been is embracing the clutter and chaos of a scene. Urban sketching (and thus I will postulate, suburban sketching) is very much about a Venn-like diagram of purpose and positioning (artistically speaking) in a way that overlaps with snapshot vacation photography. That is to say, if I were to walk out into a busy city street, stroll into a lovely urban park, or sit on a bench beside a cute little corner shop, I may be so inclined to snap a photo, right? But with a sketchbook in hand, and a pen at the ready, I should be able to stay a little longer and draw the view instead.

    thinking like a photographer

    i used to snap hundreds or thousands of photos each week, and owning, learning, and perfecting my use of camera equipment was a defining hobby of my life. small-p politics of being the camera guy aside, thinking like a photographer is a sixth sense for me and as such has been both a benefit and a curse. it is a curse because sketching is not photography: there is something about consuming a scene with one’s eyes, mashing it around inside one’s brain, and then turning the thoughts about the scene into monochromatic lines on a piece of paper with one’s hands, all of it taking place over minutes or hours of time. this is nothing like the instantaneous click of a shutter that turns photons into matrix of data that represents a near-perfect replication of the light that passed through the lens of the camera in that moment. thinking this way, though, has been a benefit because for years I have already been thinking about composition, light & shadows, shape, form, and style—all of which translate into a meaningful way that my aforementioned brain mashes around what it sees before it turns it into a sketch.

    In that case, the context of the scene is just as important as the focal point. And mostly here in reality the context of any scene is a little bit cluttered and little bit chaotic. 

    Drawing a building will include the vegetation growing around it, the shadows, the posters hanging in the windows, the parking meter out front, the cars parked in the stall astride the building itself, people, birds, trash cans, street grates, and all the lovely details that make the scene feel real. The camera wouldn’t ignore any of that to make the object one is photographing stand out, would it? Neither should the urban sketcher, I assume.

    With this in mind, I have been practicing absorbing the life that comes from that chaos and clutter: it all makes the scene seem more real, I think, and even just playing with the notion of adding as much of that clutter as I can while still retaining the fidelity of the art I am trying to put onto the page…well, it’s a balancing act. But it is resulting in interesting sketches that have made this little challenge satisfying enough to continue.

  • state of the blog, one: un-curated

    When I relaunched this site back in April I suggested that I would try not to write too many navel gazing posts about the blog itself.  I mean, to be fair, I like reading about how the sausage is made—as it were. I wish a lot more people who maintained personal websites and writing projects were actually interested in the creative process as much as they are interested in click-through optimization and search engine manipulation and all the other topics that seem as much about duping users into reading your drivel as is was about actually creating extensive collections of online expression.

    I probably don’t need to mention that writing this as I am in October 2025 the world is in a period of retracting rights of personal expression.

    I have been consciously moving further and further away from the corporate social networks and continuing to build a slow-but-steady presence here online. To my earlier point, this site was never about click-throughs or search engines or tricking you, the reader, into reading anything you don’t want to read. This is just the manifestation of opinion from one guy here on the Canadian prairies and the things I write about span a hundred different topics—you’re going to find something interesting and you’re probably going to be bored by just as much.

    When I relaunched this site, scraping it together from the remains of about four other niche blogs I was maintaining, while I was trying to find my footing and my rhythm I did stray into writing far too often about the blog itself. So, I declared that I would only drop one of those navel gazing “meta” posts no more than once per week. I’ve held pretty solid to that, and the number has been more like once per month.

    But here’s the sausage-making part: a lot goes on behind the scenes to write the words and collect the photos and too, keep the lights on here. No one would or could afford to have me sit here and recreate this kind of thing for them. It is a kind of work of personal madness that it even exists. My blogs have always been a kind of personal passion project. 

    All of that is to say that I do appreciate readers. I do appreciate clicks and when you find this on search. I have some light stats running and so I have a rough idea that people are visiting and they are reading certain topics. I know that, for example, if I shared more cast iron recipes I could flood this site with traffic. If I posted more hiking tips for the rocky mountains, I would probably build a dedicated user-base. Or, if I complained more about oddball observational neighbourhood gripes the search engine would light me up like a firework. I’m not a performing monkey, tho—so you get whatever I feel like writing about and you can feel free to dig through the archives and look for anything that is more interesting.

    Social media really has trained us to expect an internet built for an audience of one. That’s the simultaneous beauty and danger of the algorithm. When it’s acting nice we call it curation. When it’s isolating us to niche information we call it siloing our perspective.

    This blog is my perspective, but there is no algorithm. I have written about that before—somewhere here—and all to the point that like in yee good ole days, when papers and the evening news showed us everything they could jam into their publication-slash-broadcast allotments, we didn’t live in these curated silos of expectations. We just read everything, whether it was something that made us clap like a trained seal or not. 

    I’m no news outlet, but as I keep writing on this blog and filling it with stuff that interests me (knowing only a fraction of it will interest you) I do so understanding that I have far more in common with traditional media publications than I do with corporate social media feeds. There are (as of right now) about four average-length books worth of writing on this site and not a word of it is curated (or siloed) to you. And I think that’s a good thing.

    Thanks for reading.

  • panoramic, two: art expedition

    I went for a long walk on Friday. 

    I could sense that autumn-proper was ending. I mean, partially this had to do with a coherent ability to look at a calendar and see that as we enter October things tend to sine-wave pretty erratically between bitter cold and the autumn warmth reprise. But in there, all the leaves drop and all that’s left is bare, twiggy trees.

    So I took in the last great day of autumn and went walking near downtown—and I brought both (a) my sketching supplies and (b) my phone with the intention of snapping some photos, both for reference and enjoyment.

    What I got were a few gorgeous panoramas.

    And since I’m in the panorama vibe lately, having uploaded my plugin for review to the WordPress directory, I’m still feeling pretty fly over having given myself some elbow-grease access to sharing these sorts of pics.

    My first view was from Kinsmen park below the high level bridge. I missed the glory shot of the streetcar traversing, but I did sit down here for a while sketching.

    There is little park up at the north end of the high level bridge that is probably on the short list of the most scenic spots of the city. The two bridges with the river valley below and the Uni on the opposite bank. I stood up here for half an hour taking various shots. These were two of my favs.

    Finally, and as admittedly as much as I could use some practice on panoramas involving symmetrical scenes, I spent a while on the legislature grounds trying to snap some architecture pics that did the place justice. Oddly enough, the best pic in that place was in pen and ink. Sometime I surprise myself.

  • weekend wrap, eighteen

    We lucked out and got a couple nice autumn weeks to walk through the trails and sneak in some colourful runs, but it seems as if October has other ideas for us. The weather turned cold over the weekend, dropping into the freezing temps for Sunday morning.

    This weekend we:

    Went out for dinner on Friday night. No one wanted to cook and everyone was on board with sushi, so as the sun set we went off to local japanese place and ate our fill. Along with other things, the Kid is now perfectly fine with raw fish sushi. If that sounds strange, just consider that she has been inching towards it with sushi rolls that are more in the imitation crab, avacado, or tempura shrimp realm and is only now embracing salmon and tuna rolls. In other words, we can order a little bit more ambitiously and she’ll just eat whatever. Another unseen benefit of her aging out of childhood.

    She did, however, invite company over to watch a movie so Karin and I were relegated to the main floor of the house. We played some board games. I won. Enough said.

    Saturday morning the ladies were going in six directions with appointments and other stuff. I played some video games for most of the morning, but joined them just before lunch to brave the hoards that had descended upon Costco. My reward was a hot dog. 

    The dog joined me for a bit of a lazy walk. I’ve been working on my daily sketching challenge so I went to the park to draw something. She sat content by my side for nearly an hour as I worked on the shading of a copse of trees.

    That evening we had invited to the fiftieth birthday party of my former boss. We’ve kept in touch, and she pinged me earlier in the week to see if we were free. The place was packed and it was a bit of a rager for a fiftieth. Matched her style, though, and I had a good chat with some former colleagues who had made the shortlist. A limoncello shot was later regretted. 

    Sunday was a crazy run day. I met a few of the crew in a weird neighbourhood in Mill Woods for our ten klick pre-run. We ran a bunch of trails with which I was formerly unfamiliar, all of which ended us at the Towne Centre parking lot. Then we stood around in a crowd of about six thousand people waiting to run the Run for the Cure 5k breast cancer run. SL is a manager for CIBC bank, the title sponsor, so she rallied us onto her team and we wore colours and rounded our our ten klick pre-run with a crowded five klick fun run to make our training distance fit. Then we went for pho. 

    I was hosed for the rest of the day. The combination of running fifteen klicks, partying the night prior, and standing around in shorts in the sub-zero temps spent what was left of my energy and I chilled on the couch until dinner, then chilled on a different couch until I went to bed. I did fit in there somewhere reading all the social media posts about the teachers strike, but once again having a semi-adult daughter pays off.

  • urban sketch, two

    Crossposted on Notes for a Sketch

    It’s hardly worth logging a few messy sketches but I will say since declaring that I was going to start a daily art challenge and do a sketch every day… well, I have.

    The afternoon after my last post I made my way to the art store. There are a couple good ones in the city, but I’ve been supporting the place near Whyte Ave called The Paint Spot. It is a pretty typical art store, crammed floor to ceiling with more art supplies, books and toys than one could ever hope to try in a lifetime. 

    I went right back to the corner and bought a couple big sheets of cold pressed watercolour paper. This is the paper we used in the art classes I took and my winter goals include trying to do some regular painting in the shelter of my basement when the temperatures drop. I can break down one of those big sheets into about twenty to thirty smaller canvases, so with a bank of nearly fifty to keep me busy over the winter I should be able to start honing some winter watercolour scenes come December.

    I also made the mistake of walking past the sketchbook aisle.

    Let me be clear. I do not need any more sketch books. 

    I have a medium-sized shelf filled with sketchbooks that are not even close to half-used up. But I do see a new book and get it in my head that, hey, I could use this sketchbook for just that project. You know, like for example, I walked past the sketchbook aisle and I thought to myself: self, what if I bought a book with the intention of using it for practice art? Like, what if I started the book knowing I was going to fill it with half-baked ideas and doodles and experimental stuff?

    That’s the other problem. I stopped buying cheap books. I’ve become one of those artists who buys ahem-quality-cough-cough supplies. That’s great and all, but bougie as that is I then draw myself into a corner of feeling like the art inside those pages needs to match the quality of the canvas. As in, I’ll buy a nice leather-bound sketchbook then feel this overwhelming sense that every picture needs to be good enough to be drawn in a leather-bound sketchbook. It is a bit stifling, to be honest.

    suburban sketching

    there are no strict rules for what makes and urban sketch, I suppose. one could reflect upon the philosophical nature of an art form that was perhaps conceived as a kind of tourist snapshot art form, visiting a place of architectural urban beauty, a place built by people, and turning it into a sketched scene upon a piece of paper or in a notebook as kind of plein air reference art form. if one lives in a place of cultural significance or often visits those places then urban sketching is a revelatory form of personal expression, finding an excuse to sit for a while and take in a scene, soak it in with ones eyes and translate it to scribbles on a page. my reintroduction to the sport was inspired, actually, by a visit to dublin where I sought out an art supply store so that I could compensate for my lack of planning and find something to urban sketch the city. but if one lives, say, in the suburban outskirts of a small-ish and insignificant city on the canadian prairies where nothing much of architectural consequence exists then one is thereafter reduced to sketching little more than cookie cutter houses and chain restaurants and neatly planned community sprawl. to differentiate that as suburban sketching seems fair.

    So, yeah, art store got a few of my bucks and I bought a nice “practice” sketchbook that I have deemed will be messy and disordered and full of whatever drawings in whatever form I choose. 

    I have drawn in that book four times. 

    And I have drawn in one of my bougie books thrice, contributing there to my daily challenge requirements of a sketchy urban sketch.

    Oh, and you thought art was relaxing, huh?