25 July 26
Boxcars
. There is a line of the California Northern Railroad that runs north-south behind the Davis Food Co-op near our house. I often like photographing the freight cars that are parked on this line. For my urban sketch today I drew two of the boxcars linked together and parked near the food co-op.
23 July 26
Scallions For Stirfry
At some point I learned that the combination of scallions, ginger, and garlic is considered the holy trinity of Chinese cooking. Maybe that is so — at any rate it is a key part of a favorite dish of ours that I made for lunch today, called deliciously spicy tofu. The recipe is from Madhur Jaffrey’s Eastern Vegetarian Cooking book (page 201): basically one takes the ginger, garlic, and scallions and stirfry them, adds tofu, and mix in a chili-bean sauce.
As a bonus, scallions, ginger, and garlic are all fun to sketch.
21 July 26
The Old Church
I didn’t get a chance to do my urban sketch on Sunday until after the World Cup final. It was hot and I did not want to wander too far so I sketched the old Newman Catholic Center church at C and 5th. This church was declared structurally unsafe a few years ago and is unused; the congregants meet in newer buildings on the same grounds.
It was advantageous to sketch the church in the late afternoon because I had shade while I was sitting on my stool in a parking lot across the street. I think this is my favorite sketch I’ve done of the church.
17 July 26
(Not) Sharing The Grapes
Grapevines overhang the path on the south side of the house, and Pica today noticed a rat raiding the grapes outside the kitchen window. This was not to be allowed, so I collected a grape bunch and later drew it as my sketch of the day.
16 July 26
Graphic Medicine Conference
The Graphic Medicine Conference takes place next week in Baltimore. My colleagues at VEOLI (Visualizing End of Life Issues) will be in attendance. We’re all making zines that will be available to participants. I’ve made three: one on Medical Aid in Dying (pictured at right); one on Advance Care Planning; and one on environmental costs of body disposition after death.
15 July 26
Cat Grass
There’s no more footie for several days, it is too hot to sketch outside, and I don’t feel like discussing the latest evil machinations of the Heritage Foundation, so here is my sketch of the day. We like to provide wheatgrass for our kitties, and pick up some from the produce section of the co-op every couple of weeks. Winston especially likes to graze on it.
10 July 26
Stylist to the Stars
My niece’s ex-boyfriend’s mother was a hair stylist, who said that the major trends in men’s hairstyles are always set by futbolistas. This makes sense: these people have money, sometimes a great deal of it, and an image to project well beyond the confines of a football pitch. Many if not most have Instagram accounts. The fact that football is international with men of all races playing the sport, who often need a new look every season — has brought us to this World Cup, where a short-back-and-sides has evolved into a reverse widow’s peak for white and brown men and breathtakingly sculpted cuts and braids for African and Afro-Caribbean players.
My sister drew my attention to this article about a London hair stylist who has been traveling with the England team but who knows absolutely nothing about football. Her first ever match was seeing England play Mexico at the Azteca last weekend. (She left before the end because it was too loud and drinks were getting spilled all over the place.) Her simplicity is delightful: she asked Jordan Henderson to help her with her bags because she didn’t know he was a player. Nor did she know Lamine Yamal was, but she had a nice time hanging out with his mum…
(Spain won today. It was a good match against a worthy opponent. Tomorrow, England face Norway and Argentina face Switzerland. This will all be over soon.)
5 July 26
Sketching the Criterium
As previously noted there is a bicycle criterium downtown every year here on the Fourth of July. This year I ventured downtown intending to do an urban sketch of some aspect of the criterium and ended up drawing one of the corner marshals.
1 July 26
Local Color
A while back I picked up a copy of the book Local Color: Seeing Place Through Watercolor, by Point Reyes artist Mimi Robinson. The book describes a practice for developing observational skills in landscape art. Robinson’s idea is to paint in watercolor a swatch chart of the key colors seen at a locality. These color palettes can be simply be a visual record of place, or serve as a starting point for a subsequent painting.
Or perhaps they can be used in photography? One of the things I have become sensitive to after years of practice in mixing watercolors is how inaccurate photographs can be in illustrating the colors of the lightfield at a scene. Sometimes this is a result of colors being out of gamut, but more often this is because the photograph’s color rendering is emphasizing the wrong combination of hues with respect to what catches one’s eye. A usual workflow in art is to take a photograph of a scene to use as a reference for a painting. I’m imagining the opposite workflow — paint a local color palette while at the scene, and then use that palette as a guide to color grading the photograph in editing.
A common practice in editing a photograph is to adjust the colors of the image until it is aesthetically pleasing. But if this is done at some remove from when the photograph was taken, it is easy to forget what the scene felt like visually. The paradox is that the photograph itself does not supply enough information to interpret the color relationships during the editing.
At left is a page from my nature journal from yesterday, where I am starting to explore this concept. At this time of year in our neighborhood, the dominant colors are the intense cobalt blue of the sky, and the yellow greens of the urban forest canopy, primarily sycamores.
29 June 26
Backyard Bougainvillea
This sketch is of a small portion of the bougainvillea that is growing on the wall of the garage that borders our backyard. Right next to it is a desert willow that is also in flower; the bougainvillea flowers out-saturate the desert willow ones, though they are about the same hue.