works of wanderlust

Category: art & photography

  • Artist in Residence (but just at my own house)

    I have mentioned it a few times over the last year of posts, and I have even posted a few modest samples, but I have a slow burning fascination with sketching that has kindled into something more since I’ve been spending so much time at home longing to travel.

    In particular #urbansketching has wrapped a watercoloured claw around my heart (and jabbed it with a few sharpened pencils for good measure) and I find myself looking for local subjects as much as flipping through old photography looking for buildings, scenes, architecture, and adventure moments to turn into ink and paint doodles.

    Urban sketching is the name of a subset of artistic pursuits usually narrowed to the specific time and attention given to capturing an object or space filled with people and buildings and life and city emotion. It is meant to be quick and rough and in the moment and replace the act of wandering through an urban space clicking countless snapshots into one’s phone with the deliberate action of pausing for long enough to draw a scene with pencil, ink, colour, or one’s medium of choice.

    I try. Frequently. I’m admittedly mediocre.

    But I am working and practicing and thinking the types of thoughts that I hope will come together into being much better.

    What do you want
    to learn in 2022?

    There is a short list of things I need to focus on over the next year as I improve my sketching skillset and move towards the next level of artistic expression. As I see it, these things are:

    1) Finding my own style.

    I actually kinda thought this would come to me as a simple act of rote practice, but not only has a style not found me in my numerous pages of scribbles and sketches, I think the lack of a style is starting to creep into what I have drawn as a kind of looming sloppiness.

    This is not self-depricating criticism. It’s just a trend I’ve noticed. That in the gaps where I don’t know what kind of deliberate line to draw to fill a space, I make something up. A personal style would inform that and steer me clear of the messy scribbles approach.

    Style is a you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing, ineffible but simultanously it jumps off the page when it is done right.

    I need to find mine next year because it doesn’t seem to be looking for me.

    2) Working in partnership with the colours.

    My wife bought me a new set of twenty-four watercolours for my birthday last month and I dug in and was immediately slapping shades onto the page to see how things looked and worked and made the sketch pop with double the number of hues.

    I love the set, but I don’t think it has done me any favours. My sketches have just become a little bit more muddled. Why? Because I’m not painting with the colours that need, want, yearn to be part of the picture. Rather the literal science-technology nerd in me is transcribing the colors of the scene directly into the page.

    I’m neither good at that, nor is that art. It’s this photographer guy trying to replicate something in front of his eyes with a brush and a smattering of pigments.

    I recognize this as a flaw in my approach and that thinking about a cohesive palette that evokes a vibe of the scene or object is far more important that getting the right shade of green for that tree in the background.

    3) Seeing.

    Similarly to how I’ve tended to regard colour, I’ve always thought of myself as a reasonable photographer because I have a well-tuned sense of composition that has aided me in a way that has led to nice pictures.

    I have been working on changing my perspective already, but in 2022 I need to open my eyes a little wider and examine the world like a sketch artist, rather than a guy with a camera lens… at least when I’m attempting to draw that world.

    Composing a sketch on the page is a bit like framing a photograph in the viewfinder, but with a different set of tools and a completely different objective. The point of a photo is often to replicate an object or scene with clear focus, to represent it in a way that is true and clear. Alternatively, the point of sketch is often to create a model of an object or scene by use of abstraction, to use shapes and colour to trick the eye into seeing a re-creation of a simplified essence of that and to convey what the artist wanted to purposefully move from the reality of that object or scene into a feeling of the same upon the page.

    I’m still thinking too much like a photographer.

    4) Letting go of the literal.

    And while that overthinking photographer guy struggles to see the world as a sketchable space, looking for the lines and shapes of reality and unravelling it all, in that effort is also a search for the metaphor of the art.

    I’ve spent too much time enviously looking at “good” art that faithfully represents something, and while skill is a noble purpose and often a milestone towards achieving all these things I’m writing about, it is just one path.

    I don’t know what the alternative path is, but I think it is shaded by experimenting, practice, and dabbling in all these things I’ve been writing about. It’s a mash up of all these points: a style, evoking feelings through colours, and seeing what’s in the scene but also what is inside and through and beyond the scene yet needs to find a way onto the page.

    In 2022 I don’t expect to move from hobbiest suburban sketcher to epic, master artist, but I think I’m at the point in my drawing adventure where I need permission (if only from myself) to let go of the aspriration to draw anything but what makes me happy drawing it.

    Learning, after all, never really ends.

  • Pandemic Puppies

    At least half the dogs in our neighbourhood these days are less than a year and a half old.

    The pandemic puppy phenomenon did not pass us by around here, and every day as we go for our walks in the rain, shine, epic heat or brutal cold, we encounter so many other of these pandemic pups in the park.

    Pups who have neither care nor concern that the very pandemic that forged virtually every aspect of their lives to date still has a lingering subtle effect on their human companion’s day-to-day.

    Some day, maybe even soon, things will go back to normal… ish.

    But maybe not quite yet.

  • Snow Spotting

    It’s hard to say whether dogs are philosophical observers of the universe around them, wondering at the world as it flits past their existential mindset … or if they are simply easily distracted.

    I think I’d like to think it’s the former.

    My dog and I go on three walks a day lately. This time last year, just as the snow was starting to fall, she was a two-month-old puppy and was limited to exploring the world on a short leash in the containment of our backyard.

    A year later, and we’re touring the neighbourhood by foot with regularity, often meeting new people and new dogs, stopping to sniff virtually anything … well, she does most of the sniffing.

    I’m not oblivious to the world around me, but after forty-five years something as mundane as a patch of grass sticking from the snow or a blue jay sitting on the branch of a tree is ordinary enough that I think my brain just naturally tunes it all out.

    But not her.

    Everything is a curiosity. Everything is worth stopping and savouring. If that’s not the definition of existential delight at the world … and if we can’t learn a even just little bit from that .. I don’t know what else there is to say.

  • Houseguests & Hobbled Pursuits

    Long-time friends travelled from a neighbouring province this past weekend and used our basement guest room as a free hotel suite while they were attending their son’s sport tournament in our city.

    Six hours of driving from their house to ours has not been a particularly restrictive barrier for more routine visits previously so much as a global pandemic gave everyone pause for such travel over the last two years. But as the outbreak wanes (even temporarily maybe) and as such things go, our little bubble grew to six people and two dogs for four days, and glimpses of normal peeked back into our lives, however briefly.

    Much conversation happened. And as he is a creative-minded soul, much of that much conversation swirled around our respective creative pursuits both planned and paused.

    I’ve been drawing. A little. Not so much as I used to, but a little.

    For those who have dug deeper into the archives of this site and clues bread-crumbed throughout, it may come as no surprise to learn that for three years prior to this blog I drew a small web comic chronicling the based-on-real-life adventures of a dad and his pre-teen daughter. A weekly comic peppered with kids-say-goofball-things and bad-dad-puns swirled around a stick of light-hearted family humour.

    Our houseguest was one of my fans, and since we’d last spent any quantity of time in the same room two things have happened:

    a) I’ve stopped drawing said comic, and

    b) he’s started writing (but not yet drawing) his own.

    “I was hoping you could walk me through how you make one.” He asked over dinner the first night. “For example, show me how you put a comic strip together and publish it online.”

    “Yeah, sure.” I agreed, stuffing another mouthful in between thoughts. “I mean, I can’t teach you how to draw in a weekend, but I can walk you through my workflow. Sure.”

    Putting together something as complex as a web comic series isn’t a single skill after all. Ideas turn into stories. Stories are mapped out against art. Art is compiled and refined into panels and spreads, which themselves are output as files. Files are posted and promoted and shared and enjoyed. And every one of those steps breaks down into fifteen, twenty, or maybe five-hundred individual steps and skills and practiced abilities that have been honed over decades and are yet are somehow still too rudimentary to be called expertise.

    “How do you know all this stuff?” He asked as I later walked him through the multitude of files on my computer, whizzed through the act of compiling a simple strip and exporting it as a web-friendly file. “And why did you stop?” he added, mostly pondering aloud why someone who could, no longer did, while he who yet couldn’t, struggled to begin.

    “Time.” I offered. “Inspiration. Priorities. Hobbled motivation.” It all rolled off the tongue far too easily. “Honestly, I don’t know.” I said conclusively. “Sometimes you just lose momentum, I guess.”

    “You shouldn’t have stopped.” He shrugged. “You’re so good at this.”

    And I, being terrible at taking a complement, merely laughed awkwardly and continued the tour of the comic strip factory on my computer.

    Sometimes, perhaps, maybe, hopefully even… it takes a detour through an old, familiar neighbourhood, like spending the weekend with old friends, to bump one out of a rut. I don’t know if I have been yet, but …

  • Creative Outlets

    It’s November.

    Every November for the last couple years I’ve hunkered down in front of my computer keyboard and started writing … occasionally finished writing … a novel.

    There is an online writing event called NaNoWriMo wherein those so inclined to put pen to paper (or more likely, fingers to keyboard) can launch through a month-long inspirational, deadline-based effort to scrawl out fifty-thousand words around a singular cohesive plot in one month.

    I’m skipping a year.

    It’s not that I didn’t think about it.

    A lot.

    Heck, I even roughed out a basic plot outline and started naming characters.

    Rather, it’s that I have a bunch of other projects, other creative outlets that I’ve decided to make a priority … keep a priority.

    This blog, for one, is among a small set of projects that have gnawed into my free time and tempted my distractibility to it’s frayed ends. And entering the eleventh month on the homestretch to the one year anniversary of this site, I’ve liked how it’s going and am happy with the results of the effort so far.

    I’ve also been doing a lot of drawing. The prospect of actually travelling again next year has me excited about bringing an art set on vacation and doing a lot more urban sketching. I think I’ve written about this before, but I’ve been an avid photographer for decades, and the next step for me seems to translate that compositional eye I’ve developed into something slower and more deliberate, like watercolours and sketching. That does mean that I’ve been using the free time I could have been writing a novel, and instead practicing my art skills, bringing them up to a stronger space worthy of capturing travel scenes. And while one might think a little bit of drawing practice would be quick and simple, even a basic sketch (like the one above) can consume about ninety minutes of my Sunday afternoon.

    In short, time for creative outlets is precious and limited. A new project would detract from all projects.

    Between blogging, nabbing photos for the site, doodling, and of course poking through various cookbooks trying to foster that more delicious side of my creative urge … a novel is not in the cards this November.

    My priorities are set, at least for a little while. So, thanks for reading this one.