works of wanderlust

Category: art & photography

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • panoramic, one: autumn-ish

    If you’ve been reading along, you may already know that about a year ago I went backpacking in the mountains and returned with a whole bunch of great photos. A few of those photos were panoramic pictures.

    This is not a post about those particular photos, but rather the inspiration and adventures into code brought about by those photos. It was an adventure in thinking about image formats, and trying to figure out a way to display them nicely on a website, so when I go out on lovely autumn weekend and take photos like these… I can post them like this…

    Now, don’t even get me started on the image and video orientation debate. Horizontal versus vertical video! The shift from snapshot to square to tall images on instacrap. It’s all bewildering and when they start making wide screen folding phones we’re all going to follow the little red ball to whatever the latest trend is anyhow. 

    I like my 4×6 photo format for the most part. It’s a generational bias, I know, but still—it’s what I like. 

    All that said, the progress of technology over the last twenty-five years to simplifying panoramic, ultra-wide, auto-stiched photography has arugualby turned it into my second-favourite format. (Which probably means Apple will turn it off soon, dammit, I shouldn’t have said anything!) Back when I got my first camera I literally used software like photoshop or single-purpose software to individually stitch carefully captured photos together to make home-brew panos, and they were at best mediocre.

    Now, there is just a mode on my phone. On your phone too, probably.

    Except, back to that format war thing. People like pics that fit on their screens in the orientation that is most comfortable to hold. In other words, pano pics don’t fit nicely at all on our screens. 

    All this is leading up to the fact that when I added a pano feature into my 8r4d-stagram app, it changed my incentive by one hundred percent to take more pano photos. Which of course means…

    I’ve been taking a lot of pano photos lately. And like you’ve seen scattered into this post, I am interested in sharing some of those here on this blog. 

    Where this all led me was to sit down and write a plugin in WordPress to do something that should have been very simple, but look as did, was not something I could figure that anyone else had made: I built the start of a simple plugin to add panoramic photos to my WordPress blog, and display them in a way that lets you think of them like regular photos, but with a little secret hidden off to the side if you are inclined to scroll and nudge with your mouse or finger.

    I released it this morning on Github.

  • urban sketch, one

    Crossposted on Notes for a Sketch

    It has been a few years since I plunked myself into the blank pages of a sketchbook for my reprisal into the plein air arts. It was an adventure that took me down a rabbit hole of watercolours and personal expression through ink and pigment that has been hard to quantify in the context of the last few years.

    I waned in my artistic efforts this past year or so for two reasons.

    One, simply, distraction and stress.  Bumbling between efforts of professional self-actualization is a chore, let me tell you.

    But two, performance pressure. I got too caught up in the gig-ification efforts of my sketchy self. I saw all these people documenting their personal artistic journey’s online and felt like I could, should, would do the same. But then art becomes performance almost instantly. My art becomes a posting frenzy to get stuff online and getting stuff online becomes the driver for art and trying to post things that are (a) good enough to post and (b) interesting to my nascent audience became this emotionally all-consuming feedback loop of anxiety about quantifying and artistic output and all that jazz. It was no longer about making art but rather about producing content. It is the sad story of our age, to be honest, and hardly unique to me.

    So I admit. I took a little break.

    But we’re leaving for Japan in a couple months, and I would be so regretful if I went there without a sketchbook and the intention to lock in some art on my travels. Bothering with the whole paints and brushes bit is a bit of hesitation, though, so what I’m left with is honing some simpler sketching efforts. 

    I just completed a running streak. I ran every day for sixteen days in a row. I admit this is hardly a record, even for myself, but there is value in locking in on a repetitive daily goal with the intention of building a practice and a foundation of skill or endurance. There is absolutely nothing saying that I can’t do the same thing with my sketching, right?  And with October just a few dozen hours away, looking towards the month as a daily sketching challenge I could easily see myself getting out into the plein airs of the city with such intention to match a running goal, but with a pen and paper.

    So, a new series on this blog. Urban Sketch.

    This is not put here with the intention of returning the world of artistic performance, no. Rather, to use words as  I often use them—for personal reflection, logging, and being mindful of the whys behind my whats. 

    I’m going to try and draw every day in October. I had intended to go to the art store today, and I still will because I do really need to refresh my watercolour paper for the winter season, but I’m going to go with the intention of getting back into that artists mindset, too. And I’ll write more about it here, of course, as the months wear on.

  • retro post: what i learned on summer vacation 

    retro post: I wrote a blog for over 16 years at this very domain …and some of it is even worth reposting here again. This might be one of those posts.

    Perhaps it’s a little abstract… but then that’s the point.

    Everyone with whom I have had more than five minutes worth of conversation these days wants to know: “What did you enjoy most about Europe?” — and I stumble through the fragmented and chaotic answer that, simply, there was just so much to see and so much diversity that I can’t, honestly, pick one thing that I enjoyed “the most” without discrediting the rest of it. And now, nearly a week after my last bumbling moments through the dutch countryside, I still couldn’t put my finger on one precise moment in time when I said to myself: “Hey, this is THE moment. This is IT. This RIGHT HERE is my vacation at it’s peak.”

    Wouldn’t that just be too simple. 

    Thinking about this problem has led me down an interesting path, however. I think I could see it from afar even when I was racing through the multiple cities and countries, riding in a train or bus or driving a car, eating multiple gourmet meals, drinking a broad selection of beer and wine, retracing steps through cobble-stone streets or even just waking up each morning and pushing away the fog to recall what country I fell asleep in the night before. Perhaps even Karin and Ryan could pick out that moment when traces of the theme appeared literal in snippets of conversations or examples bubbled to the surface of contemplative moments in random locales.

    So, what did I learn on summer vacation? The exact words haven’t exactly ‘gelled’ in my mind yet, but I think — I think — it has something to do with the contrast between REALISM and IMPRESSIONISM — in art, in form, in function, in life. Everywhere. The contrast. The purpose. The deception. The truth. The pursuit. And even, as it were, the consequence — positive and negative — of following those paths. 

    Huh? 

    Though, of course, I can’t speak to the ineffable experiences of my travelling companions, near, close, or far, if I’m referring to the other two or the other fifty. It doesn’t even matter. Everyone gets something completely different from a so-called adventure through the world and I wouldn’t assume to enforce what anyone else got from their own wanderings any more than I would take (with good humour) having my own moments interpreted. But I need to solidify this (in as much as that is possible) so that I can go back to normal life and stop pondering the meta-purposes of vacation and just happily incorporate them into my humble existence.

    Life goes on, they say.

    One of the most literal examples that hangs in my mind is age — and what is REAL age? We saw some (arguably) old buildings. Commonly, buildings built as early as the 12th century (plus or minus countless generations). They were all over the place, with museums, restaurants, shops and stores, internet cafes, Pizza Huts, and storage rooms stuffed into their interiors. Eight hundred year old buildings being used to sell french fries or store folding chairs. But how REAL are those buildings? The bricks and sandstone is replaced every other decade. Some were bombed to rubble in the various wars, and rebuilt exactly as before on the same foundations. Wood rots and is replaced. Halogen lights dangle from medieval architecture. Are those REAL buildings? Or are they just IMPRESSIONS of old, long-since-disassembled structures for we moderns to enjoy?

    Or, consider the example of Prague. I’ve now been to Prague. At least, I think I’ve been to Prague. We saw the city and it’s life brimming from the seams of a tourist haven. We sheltered our visit by prancing through palace, stepping carefully across the Charles Bridge, buying tacky souvenirs and ice cream from abundant shoppes lining the narrow, winding, cobble-stone streets. I wonder: was this REALLY Prague? Or was this an IMPRESSION of Prague: an idealized simulation of what Prague might be if it were just an example of modern tourism: Beer, goulash, and “Czech Me Out” t-shirts in every store window. When the rain came and washed away all the tourists the square was uneven as if something was stewing below trying to gurgle out.

    Karin noted my third example: Language. There was only a single occasion over the course of three, widely-travelled weeks when English was insufficient. We ordered pizza in a small city in Slovakia and the waitress fumbled to communicate with us. We ate only because our fingers were adept at pointing to the menu in the appropriate places. But everywhere else — EVERYWHERE — I could communicate verbally in English to whomever I happened to meet. Some might insist that this is great. Sure. No effort on my part. Why complain? But was that REAL? Was it authentic? Was it something that represented an exact picture of the culture and people in who’s city I was a visitor? Or, what was it? An IMPRESSION? A feeling on the canvas that had been painted there to help me feel comfortable about my travels? An interpretation of Polish or Hungarian culture splashed across a North American theme.

    We discussed the (literal) REALISM versus IMPRESSIONISM with Henk who’s bias leans towards interpreting emotions on canvas. His art is impressions of his inner thoughts and deepest beliefs. He expressed his disappointment at the abundance of REALISM in Canadian art. So many “Grizzly Bears” and “Mountain-Scapes” does not seem to compare with dynamic feeling evoked by interpretable art. I wonder about blogging: this is REALISM. This is life, scripted. This is a photographically concrete image of what happened today. This is a precisely painted Douglas fir standing beside a river with glistening salmon jumping in the currents. REAL. But I want to write more IMPRESSIONISM.

    I took photos of grafitti in Eastern Europe. When I was caught, my travelling companions spying me out of the corner of their eye snapping a digital recreation of some Polish spray paintings, there might have been a bit of a chuckle. But then grafitti is IMPRESSION isn’t it? Loosely? Culture art seeps from the hearts of the people and erupts onto repeating surfaces of granite and marble, sandstone or cobble-stone.

    I rode on a bus for two weeks with a cross section of North American and Oceanic personalities. We had all arrived at a small hotel on the fringe of central Berlin with passports in hand but very little else tying us to our true personalities. Names and birthdates, countries of origin, and anything else we dared to express of ourselves. What happens in Europe, stays in Europe? Maybe. But what is REAL? Who is REAL? Is that guy with the hangover every morning really a tea-totaling moralist? Is the outgoing girl at the back of the bus really just shy and reserved. Does the smart guy with his nose in his book really burn away his days at home playing video games? Or, is the quiet couple near the front of the bus really taking a break from being the outgoing centres of attention back home? Who can say? Did we all just become IMPRESSIONS of who we’d like to be when we get on a bus full of strangers? Or can we even change the REAL?

    And of course there was my camera. Thirteen hundred photographs slipped neatly onto a wafer-thin memory card, glimpses of fragments of cities. Extracting the essence of the life into pixels is what we all happened to do, each of us, toting around cameras and flashing the shutter open for fractions of a second for what? A glimpse of the REAL so we could bring those memories home and relate them to our families and friends who couldn’t travel with us. But those literal images are REALISM subject to IMPRESSIONS of our memories. Nothing more. I called my incessant snapping “photo journalism” wherein scenic shots were bracketed by reference shots, or foot shots, or people shots, or artistic elements to be pasted together later. It was all to refresh my own mind, to flash my own IMPRESSIONS into something concrete so that there might be a glimpse of proof to my memory. For what it is worth those captured moments can never be experienced again. I took those photos because the moment was interpreted as special — irreplaceable — a glimpse of a fraction of a second to be recalled for as long as I can make the image last in my head, on paper, or as data. There is nothing REAL about it.

    But then what’s the point? What DID I learn on summer vacation? We travel about the world, leaving our lives and our things behind (mostly) locked safely in our little homes. We walk out the door, we get on an airplane, and the next thing we know we’re barrelling across Berlin in a train, drinking red wine on the Danube, or frying schnitzel in a camping trailer in a small country village in the middle of the Netherlands. And then it all becomes just a memory. I guess I affirmed to myself both something obvious yet also something that lends to the further interpretation of life: REAL lasts for a fleeting moment, but as humans with minds and imagination we are left to give out IMPRESSIONS to the world. We express, that’s all. I hinted at this earlier, but maybe I’ve been a little hard on myself. I’ve been aiming for the REAL. I’ve been aiming for precise, exact, but fleeting moments when all I can do is provide impressions of it all. And that could be something elusive yet satisfying: art, words, thoughts, everything. Maybe this seems a little dissatisfying for you, I having travelled the world and come back with nothing more than a glimmer of philosophical existentialism. But then again, this is just my impression.

    original published date: Friday, June 9, 2006