works of wanderlust

Category: art & photography

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • urban sketch, four

    I’m nearly three-quarters of the way through my October sketching challenge as I write this and I have yet to miss a day.

    Two things have emerged from that effort:

    First, I think my drawing has legitimately improved. Doing anything daily is inevitably going to contribute to the effort of general practice and growth, but there is always the risk of hitting a plateau and not realizing any noticeable gains. Self-perception is hard. Self-evaluation is even more difficult. But drawing every day feels a bit like running every day: you build on the gains from the day before and the vibe is never really given to a recovery phase where things stagnate or decay back to the starting state. Whatever that metaphor means for the effort of learning an artistic skill, it feels like it is meaningful here as a comparison.

    Second, me concern for lacking meaningful subject matter in the aesthetic wasteland that is the suburban clutter that is the place I live has ebbed into a kind of seeking the beauty of nature fighting against the cookie-cutter-ness of this world. Sure, the houses and windows and rooflines all start to look the same, but the trees are poking out around them in different ways and framing scenes with a kind of pleasing quality that I am getting better each day at noticing. I think that is important. I mean, I wrote earlier about my struggles with getting out of the photographer’s mindset and of moving away from thinking of my sketches as photos with an ink pen instead of pixels. I think I am starting to feel that vibe a little more strongly as I plonk myself down in unlikely places and frame a scene with sharp inked lines to give a sense of something beyond what is just there.

    My plan with this effort was to re-prime my sketching senses before we head off on a vacation where I think the world will be significantly more sketch-able than suburban prairie Canada. Japan is graced with interesting architecture and a kind of shinto-driven aesthetic that emboldens spaces with a kind of symmetry and beauty that one could spend a lifetime studying to attempt to understand. I have a couple weeks to sketch it, so I wanted to go in hot and ready as I have ever been to draw it—and draw from it.

  • 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.

  • 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.