works of wanderlust

Category: travel

  • 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

  • in a theme park.

    As it turns out, Disneyland is not a great place to sketch.

    Oh, sure, it might be a great inspiration for sketching. There are a few thousands of people worth sketching. There is colour and shape and light and shadow and trees and architecture and—deep breath.

    There are also about fifteen places to sit, total. You never really stop moving, and if you do it’s usually because the ride queue is jammed up, and all the best sight lines are meant to be snapped with a camera and moved out of the way for the next person.

    Sketching in Disney kinda sucks.

    But also, it was a bit of a challenge.

    In 2022 we went to Florida and checked out Disney World and I had it in my mind to do some sketching there. When we arrived I started carrying my sketchbook around but then between my unwillingness to be fast and loose and messy, I couldn’t afford (nor would my family tolerate) camping on a bench for thirty minutes to carefully draw a building or a ride or something. So, I started snapping reference photos and (being that we spent a lot of down time at the hotel) I did lots of painting in the evenings from my phone screen.

    loosy goosy

    where photography is about pixel-perfect capturing a scene, and yes, watercolour can be that too when the mood strikes, there is a dream-like element to the flow of water and pigment that can be embraced if one is willing to step away from the seeking of realism. I have been trying to relax my brain in this regard for years, always in a little lockstep with the photographic mindset. “how will people know what I’m painting if the colours/shapes/outlines don’t match??!!” I am trying now to embrace my loosy goosy period, that effort to evoke a vibe or a mood or a feeling from a painting while leaving the literal behind. A bit of shape. A lot of squiggles. A lot of water. A dab of this and a dob of that and just let physics take over. It takes some chill, but it can work out.

    In 2024, just a week ago as I write this, we went to California to check out Disneyland, and I decided, fresh small-format sketchbook in hand and some ripe thoughts about style, that I would experiment. Fast sketches were on the agenda. No sitting. No parking or camping somewhere to draw. Pull out the book and pen and with a maximum (literally MAX) of five minutes, get as much sense of a scene as I could onto paper and—

    Well, I snapped a pic, too, and did all my painting back at the hotel. I wasn’t exactly going to hold a sketchbook open on a rollercoaster while I waited for my washes to dry.

    I did the math and for about 28 sketches I clocked in about six hours total over the week, sketching & painting, and filled front to back an entire Moleskine “small” 3.5×5.5 watercolor folio. Every page, usually double wide.

    The paintings are messy. Some of them I was a little loose on the detail. Some I was a little heavy on the colours. A few got some leakage through the seams of the paper.

    Had I spent even an hour on each of those pics to, you know, make them neater or give them more detail then I would have spent twenty eight hours—two whole waking days—painting everything I painted. As it is, I got it all in between rides and during some hotel siestas. Isn’t that the best way to art, huh?

  • in a multi-layer circus.

    About a thousand people walked by me as I sat on the ground in Piccadilly Circus on London one afternoon in July and did the sketch for this piece. People stop to take pictures of you while your sketching, look over your shoulder, and generally treat you as just as much part of the chaos of the scene when you’re doing that. To say I was nervous as heck would me an understatement, but that’s half the fun, right?

    We have returned from our travels.

    We spent three weeks visiting three countries in western Europe: England, France and Italy, and at the core of those travels was a wee bit of sketching.

    To say it was the focus of the vacation would be false. It was a family vacation with some sketching squeezing into the gaps when possible, and as such I brought along just enough of my sketching gear to consider it a worthwhile effort. Paints, pens, brushes and just two sketchbooks, one vacation-specific in which I’ll likely not draw anymore and just set it aside as a souvenir, and then also my urban sketches watercolor folio into which I put another ten or so drawings over the course of the three weeks.

    This was one of the latter. A sketch into my general collection of watercolour urban scene sketches, and to make it, yes, I sat down on the concrete at the edge of Piccadilly Circus in London, England, and with my pen in my hand and my book on my lap just started to draw as fast as I could go.

    public performance

    No one wants to make a scene when they are trying to be creative. I mean, no one who isn't literally performing for the crowd.  And I mean no one who is trying to sit at the edge of the action and just quietly be out of the way drawing.  In a crowded place full of action and tourists and a jumble of people and activity, a guy sitting on the ground sketching it all is almost certain to become an object of attention. Me and my sketchbook are one hundred percent in someone's vacation photo collection. People walked over and looked over my shoulder. People stopped to take pictures. People waved their hands at their friends to get them to come look at the guy sitting on the ground sketching. I'm not sure if the distraction made the final result better or what, but it certainly made me work faster and looser and with less attention on some of those things that sometimes cause me to double think and hesitate.  There was no room for any of that, literally or figuratively.

    Of course, I waited until safely back in the hotel to pull out the paints, and flicked open the photos app on my phone to find the reference photo I’d snapped from where I sat (luckily I remembered to do that, what with the circus chaos around me!)

    And the pressure from eyes of the crowd, and the nudging from my family to get up and move along with the vacation, and the pressure from myself to not overthink or overdraw or overwork any of the picture, I stood up after about twenty minutes and tucked my book and pen into my shoulder bag, and we moved along.

    “What was your favorite part of the trip?” People have been asking since we returned.

    “Oh, the food and sights.” I reply, because its relatable and mostly true. “I did some sketching, too.” I add. And as understated as I make it seem now, yeah, those moments because of the adrenaline rush of the crazy vibe swirling around and through my pen, I somehow think those moments will stick in my brain for a long, long time.

  • on a winter getaway.

    It’s a long weekend in Canada and so with neither work nor school for anyone on Monday we skipped off to the mountains for some nordic-style fun in the alpine climate.

    We travel out there quite often. To that point, I had bought a “travel” sketchbook that I’d intended to be for travel sketching but after the fifth time I brought it to the local mountains and drew pictures of wildlife, flora, waterfalls, pine trees, and (of course) mountains, I officially called that book my “mountain sketching” book and am now intent on filling it up with the same.

    This past weekend was no exception.

    Except.

    Except it was winter, and I’ve written in the past about my lack of patience for drawing in the snow. So, instead I was back to drawing from my day’s photos from a table in our hotel room.

    messy

    Splats. Dribbles. Drips. And spatter. There is something to be said for the abstraction that evolves from a carefree mashing of paints onto paper. I took another online course in February where the instructor emphasized this particular style. She didn't teach it, per se, but rather she left it hanging there in between the lines, so to speak. She alluded to it as a technique that she enjoyed, a carefreeness of paint upon the page that was as much deliberate and purposeful as it was accidental.  Messy does not mean random. Messy does not imply carelessness. Messy is as much about painting with physics and chaos as it is about painting outside the lines.

    One of our weekend activities was a mountain hike.

    We walked up through a frozen creek bed, between towering rock cliffs cut into the side of a mountain, bracing against the cold and occasional gusts of wind. We walked nearly four klicks up and then the same back down. I took lots of video and a few photos, and warm and dry and full of supper that night I pulled out my watercolours and tried to evoke the mountains as much as the feeling of the mountain hike, blustery, chaotic, and busy with life and people and shifting weather.

    The result was painting outside of the lines, and a bit of chaotic physics.

    I have a lot of learning to do about this style, and while I’m not ready to declare a victory here, also I’m not sad about the result for my first attempt.

  • from the big city.

    I alluded in my previous post that November had us primed for some travel afar and away, and in as much I had picked up a new sketchbook for that specific purpose.

    Over the recent long weekend, the family and I flew across the continent from our frozen little Canadian city, to the big city, the big apple, Manhattan in New York. It was a weekend filled with adventure, food, walking, Broadway shows, museums, more food, parks, and tall buildings. Five days of urban vacation fun, punctuated by no less than seven sketches by yours truly.

    I tried to be bold when I sketched, too.

    On the Sunday morning, while the family was still snoozing away the early hours, I packed up my gear and walked the few blocks north of the hotel and into Central Park.

    Over the course of three hours on my own, I found breakfast, drank a coffee, and stopped three times to pull my sketchbook and pen from my pack and draw what I saw.

    The last of these, the feature image of this post, was drawn while sitting on a bench around Central Park West and 66th Street, a long street running along the west edge of the park and lined across the avenue with beautiful and expensive condominiums. Literal million dollar views.

    pens and ink

    I've been reluctant to dive in headlong with ink-only sketches, almost always warming up my blank page with at least a few pencil shapes to build some confidence for those more permanent lines. That was a luxury I didn't give myself on vacation, tho, whether because I often had a family sitting nearby waiting on my art or just because I was trying to fill the page in the minimum of time for a dozen other reasons. I had thought such haste would leave me unhappy with the final results, but I have been finding a new confidence in ink-only drawings and a life and vibrance that is emerging on accident of only having a single chance to draw the scene rather than tracing over my pencil lines. And I like it, and think I will do more of it.

    My bench wasn’t worth nearly so much, but it proved a creatively fertile outpost.

    Given another hour, a day, a lifetime it felt like something I could have sketched in the most brilliant of detail and complexity. But I sat down for a mere thirty minutes, give or take, and quickly tried to capture the late-autumn scene. Shapes. Lines. Feeling. Warmth. Movement of the hundred or so people who walked by me, many looking down at my page and a few stopping to ask for directions that I was scantly able to provide. My pen moved as fast as it could across my sketchbook resting on my lap, trying to store that moment into a few lines of ink on paper.

    In my little city home there are a million scenes that could be sketched, but being somewhere new and vibrant and alive in a way that New York is just so unlike where I live, it was gnawing and crunching as creative fire.

    Travel was my muse for five days, and more than once lit something inside that I think I’ll find hard to rekindle at home… especially with half a meter of snow on the ground.