15 September 06

A Fortnight-long Sketchcrawl

Sketching in Eksjö Going to Europe—including a wedding—with no camera raised a few eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic. But sketching our way around Madrid, Segovia, from trains, from benches in three countries allowed both of us to connect with our surroundings in a different way than a digital camera would have.

sketching at the Alcazar For a start, anything’s fair game, subjects that would not have been “worth” photographing. My new shoes. The top of the head of the balding man in the seat in front of me on the plane. The half-drunk glass of sangria on a table, an old wooden door, Jennifer and Harald’s boots. Sure, we did sketch the grandiose—I did two sketches of the aqueduct in Segovia, for instance—but there is much pleasure to be had in tracing lines that outline the simple, the mundane.

Sketching at Barajas Airport Blogging for us grew out of our log book, a journal with pen and a few sketches about our dwelling-place. Sketching for me at least has in turn been influenced by blogging, in that I chose where to go in, say, London, in part by what sketching opportunities might be had.

Sketching on Parliament Hill: thanks Jean (I should probably fess up at this point that I did shell out an enormous sum to go up the London Eye precisely for this reason, only to succumb to vertigo and possibly regret, but then I made up for it in far more prosaic settings along the South Bank, such as the kid who was bungee-trampolining with a grin on his face almost the size of the pods revolving slowly above and to his right.)

sketching at the Alcazar in Segovia We had different trajectories, Numenius and I. We mostly sketched independently. And, at night, we’d look at each other’s books and get peeks into each other’s days and glimpse alternate universes and our courtship from years ago, a slowly unfolding narrative conducted at a slight remove of time and a considerable remove of space…

Try it, I urged a Canadian tourist whose brother-in-law had invited me over to their table across from the Museum of Garden History, having caught a glimpse of the fish-lampost I’d just rendered quickly in pen and ink. Your life will be changed.

She did, right away. She drew a sketch of me. It was rudimentary and she was embarrassed but I urged her on, because this is important.

I really do believe that.

[Postscript: Doc Rock’s comment reminds me that I should add a link to Danny Gregory’s site and urge readers who’d like to find out more about this kind of thing to see his books, Everyday Matters and Creative License. I certainly did end up telling quite a few people about Danny’s books while I was away.]

peeking through seats on the way to Copenhagen

Posted by at 05:59 PM in Design Arts | Link |
  1. Have you in some way made sure Danny will see this? He has it coming, he’s earned it, bless him.

    Seldom or possibly never has anything I’ve read/seen made me happier, more at peace. Thank you.
    — Doc Rock    15. September 2006, 19:52    Link
  2. I think what you both have done is so very inspiring! By sketching you have had to slow down and see details that might be missed otherwise, even with a camera. And you have met people at a different kind of level and shared your love of drawing. Those memories must be precious to you!
    — Marja-Leena Rathje    15. September 2006, 22:30    Link
  3. I’m not sure what it is about sketching that so engrosses me, in a way that a camera never quite matches, though I do get lost in the world of the camera when I’m out there. But sketching forces you to lose yourself in the world around you, and by activating your hand-eye connection allows you to comprehend what you are looking; after all you can’t draw what you don’t understand. A camera can just snap away and you might never see what it is that you are looking at. When I was a boy I learned about animals because I stalked them, picked them up, interacted with them, and drew pictures of them. Taking photos of them never helped me understand such things as the hardness and curve of a praying mantis’ thorax, the smell of a hedgehog, or the secret of a gecko’s hiding place. Sketching zeros in on those things. And skecthing forces you to pare away the unessential so that you can get it down on paper. A great drawing is always spare and suggestive, capturing the intention of your mind coupled with the dexterity and control of the fingers. ANd I think all people, especially children, intuitively understand this.
    — butuki    15. September 2006, 23:24    Link
  4. Thank you, all. Doc, I’m glad this made you happy and I’ll drop a line to Danny Gregory, but he does hear about this stuff all the time—it’s no longer news to him, that he started a cascading worldwide sketching movement. (I might wait until I’ve finished posting a bunch of sketches, though, rather than photos of us taken by others in the act of.)

    Marja-Leena, you’re right about meeting people. Another a huge benefit is that you can sketch in most places where taking photos is forbidden! (The British Museum was not one of those, and the memory of a hundred flashes simultaneously pounding the Rosetta Stone at 10:00:03 last Monday morning is not one of my better ones.)

    Butuki, I am so in awe of your photos (that last batch is still sitting with me, particularly the lizard) but what you say here is resonating strongly with me. I know photographers can get lost in the same way, but I, as a photographer, can’t. I never knew this about myself until I started sketching.
    — Pica    16. September 2006, 05:25    Link
  5. PS: Butuki, what on earth does a hedgehog smell like???
    — Pica    16. September 2006, 05:26    Link
  6. Pica, I echo all that Butuki said and what everyone said. Having been privileged to actually hold your sketchbooks in my hands, I can appreciate all the more what you and Numenius saw and uniquely recorded. I hope you’re going to be able to post at least some of your pages here. Btw, I also love the pic of you sitting on the steps with the little girl observing you so intently. No doubt she’ll have been inspired to draw too.
    — Natalie    16. September 2006, 08:11    Link
  7. Natalie: the little girl is Linda, my god-daughter. She has indeed been inspired to sketch. She kept remarking that I was “drawing, again” to her mother!
    — Pica    16. September 2006, 08:43    Link
  8. “PS: Butuki, what on earth does a hedgehog smell like???”

    Now that is an assignment worth visiting Europe for, don’t you think? I can just picture you and Numenius picking up hedgehogs along the roadside, smelling them! Just have to cross your fingers you don’t get any representative from the SPCA meandering by!

    Actually they have a really comforting, slightly musky odor, just like their mild personalities. Sometimes I think hedgehogs were put on Earth to remind us that cute and peaceable can really exist in the wild. They just don’t seem like creatures from our world.
    — butuki    16. September 2006, 10:41    Link
  9. It was serious fun looking at both your sketchbooks simultaneously, like brain-stereo. All that AND lunch! Thank you!

    And here’s one for free: Porcupines smell like old sweatsocks. And crested auklets supposedly smell like tangerines, though I can’t vouch for that firsthand. Hey wait, that was two. Well, no charge for the mere hearsay.

    We had a great time. Well worth driving a bit, and 80 was unusually easy.
    — Ron Sullivan    16. September 2006, 18:33    Link
  10. Alison, these pictures and sketches are so inspiring!
    I was going to ask about the little girl, soooo cute, but already read she is Linda! :-)

    hugs!
    — Fer    18. September 2006, 15:20    Link

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