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.
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.
11 July 26
On Local Fandom
We have eight days left in the World Cup, and already I am wondering about being bereft of football once it ends. What will I follow to get my footie fix? The end of summer is when professional clubs in many leagues start their season again — should I adopt a club? I did try that after the 2010 World Cup and started casually following Tottenham Hotspur. At the time they were consistently a 5th or 6th place side in the Premier League; since then they’ve gone through many managers (including Mauricio Pochettino, whose future as head coach of the U.S. Men’s National Team is under debate right now) and just had their worst season in a long while, barely escaping relegation.
I am thinking now that trying to be a fan of a side in a top-flight far-off league is just not a good strategy. I don’t have attachments to the places where these sides are located. (Our Davis sketching buddy Pete Scully is a huge Tottenham fan, but that is because he grew up in North London.) What if I find a local team to support? Looking into this matter has just led me into all the swirling discussion and debate over the future of soccer in the United States.
The first team that came to mind was Sacramento Republic FC. They have been around since 2012. I mention this to Pica; she says something about being interested in women’s footie. Well, there’s Bay FC, which was founded in 2023 and plays in the National Women’s Soccer League, the top women’s league in the country. But their stadium is in San Jose, which is too far for me to consider it local. (The identical logic applies to the MLS (Major League Soccer) team the San Jose Earthquakes who play in the same stadium).
I then discover the California Storm. How did I not know about the California Storm? They are an amateur women’s team that play in the Women’s Premier Soccer League. The WPSL was founded in 1998 and is the largest women’s soccer league in the world, with 150 or so teams in it. The California Storm are the winningest team in the league both in terms of number of championships and overall win-loss record. They are based in Davis, California.
But they are not the only WPSL side in Davis. There is also FC Davis. FC Davis is a semi-pro soccer club in Davis founded in 2017 with both men’s and women’s sides. Their founder in 2018 posted a fascinating account of FC Davis came to be. From its introduction:
“Start-up soccer” is a concept gaining momentum around the country as a growing number of communities are looking to break from the current mold of US Soccer and build a more intimate and organic soccer experience in their hometowns.
Due to the constraints of the US soccer pyramid (no promotion/relegation), you don’t start a semi-pro team for money or notoriety. You do it to create a vehicle for helping thousands of players in your community and to provide soccer crazy fans in your local area a team they can call their own.
The article is extremely critical of MLS and its closed system without promotion/relegation. MLS teams only exist where billionaires decide the market is big enough for them.
(Sidenote: Pete Scully has a couple of nicely illustrated blog posts about FC Davis.)
Returning to Sac Republic FC, it turns out they sit at the cusp of the debate over what direction soccer in the United States will go. They play in the USL (United Soccer League) where they have been since they were founded. The intention was that they would build a fan base and join the MLS as an expansion team. This almost came to fruition with Sac Republic FC signing an agreement to join MLS in October 2019, but 16 months later their main investor gets cold feet during the middle of the pandemic and pulls out of the agreement.
But this hasn’t deterred Sac Republic FC from continuing to build their team. They are constructing a new stadium close to downtown, and in November 2024 the Wilton Rancheria located in southern Sacramento County became the majority owner of the team, becoming the first Native American Nation to hold a majority interest in a men’s pro sports team. Meanwhile USL has their own expansion plans, and intends to start a three-tiered promotion/relegation system in 2027.
I very much like the notion of organic bottom-up growth of local teams and regional competition, which is how fandom works across most of the world. Teams remained tied to their community. To take an English example, it is virtually impossible to imagine the Bolton Wanderers up and leaving for Sheffield because they got a better stadium deal there. Relocations happen with major sports franchises in the United States with regularity, which as an East Bay native is something I am bitter about. Oakland no longer has a top-tier professional sports team, with the Oakland Raiders (football) leaving in 2019 and the Oakland Athletics (baseball) leaving in 2024. But they now have a USL team, the Oakland Roots, founded in 2018. The Oakland Roots play Sac Republic FC regularly.
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Addendum. We watched the England-Norway match today over at the Upper Crust Bakery together with a pretty large crowd. Seated in front of us was an older gentleman wearing an Oakland Roots t-shirt.
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.
27 June 26
Urban Tree Sketching
Perhaps I should focus my weekend urban sketches on trees in the urban environment. This sketch is of a couple of trees on the west side of A Street in Davis, drawn from near the Senior Center.
25 June 26
Sister States
There is a story on the front page of yesterday’s Davis Enterprise with the headline “Catalonia, UC sign agreement on research”. The first sentence of the story reads “In 1986 the Spanish region of Catalonia and the state of California fostered the first agreement between the regions as sister states, recognizing the long relationships of culture, geography and climate that exist between the two regions”.
The story describes a memorandum of understanding between University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Catalan Institute of Water Research (Institut Català de Recerca de l’Aigua) to collaborate on research on sustainable water resource management. The president of the government of Catalonia, Salvador Illa, visited California in May and came to the UC ANR offices in Davis to sign the agreement, which incidentally is where Pica used to work.
I’ve known about the sister state relationship for a while now, and as a Californian this story makes me feel validated to be delving a bit into Catalan culture from afar. Coming in August we will be taking a trip to the region and I will learn much more in person.
It is not too widely known but many of the 18th century Spanish explorers and settlers of California were Catalan. Some of these people include Gaspar de Portolá (from Os de Balaguer — my junior high school was named after him) , Father Junipero Serra (from Mallorca), Juan Crespi (also from Mallorca), Pedro Fages (the first European to climb Mt. Diablo, born in Guissona in Lleida Province), and Pedro Font (drew one of the first maps of San Francisco Bay, born in Girona).
21 June 26
The Day In Its Color
While browsing in the public library several days ago I ran across a photography book from 2012 entitled The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America by Eric Sandweiss, a historian at Indiana University. This book describes a remarkable collection of photographs taken between 1938 and 1969 by an amateur photographer named Charles Cushman. The title of the book comes from a line in a poem by Wallace Stevens; the collection consists of 14,500 Kodachrome slides of Cushman’s travels across the United States and a bit abroad. Cushman was a businessman with a lot of opportunity to travel, and he meticulously documented his journeys with his Contax II A rangefinder camera loaded with Kodachrome. This was a time period when most professional and much amateur photography was done in black and white, and color documentary photography was pretty rare then. As such, the collection provides an unusual glimpse in full color of the vernacular landscape of the United States at mid-century. Cushman showed little or no interest in fine art photography, but he had a good eye for composition.
Charles Cushman was an alum of Indiana University, and several years before he died in 1972 he arranged to have his photography collection together with his thorough notes (he recorded the subject and exposure details for every slide he took) donated to the archives at the university. There they sat until 1999 when an archivist unearthed them and realized their value to documentary history. The library got funding to digitize the collection, and all 14,500 slides are available to browse online. Cushman moved to San Francisco in 1953, and I have found it fun to search in the collection for slides of places I know in California.
19 June 26
Out of Gamut
Today Ryan Moulton posted a good article about the colors your screen cannot show you and where to find them in the real world. Computer screens mix colors from red, green, and blue primaries but there are many colors the eye can discern on the color chromaticity diagram that fall outside the triangle defined by the three primaries. Mostly these are greens and cyans.
Moulton provides a guide to where to find these colors in the outdoors. Looking up at the leaves in a deciduous forest glowing in sunlight is one place. The light passing repeatedly through the leaves has the red and blue wavelengths filtered out leaving a pure spectral green at a wavelength of around 550 nm.
Another place is sunlight through depths of pure water. Water rapidly absorbs reds, and if sunlight passes through a few meters of water the color shifts outside of any screen gamut. These colors can be seen from shore when the light reflects off of light sand on the bottom, or from underwater.
Birds and butterflies famously can have intense iridescent colors thanks to the structure of their feathers and wing scales which can have elements that have the same length scale as wavelengths of visible light. Examples of these include peacock tail feathers and butterflies in the genus Morpho.
One needn’t visit nature to find colors that cannot be displayed on a screen. Green traffic lights have a color that falls mostly outside of displayable gamuts. This color has been chosen so as to provide the biggest discernment from red for viewers who are red-green colorblind. Traffic lights nowadays use LEDs which can have quite pure spectral colors.
(Thanks to MetaFilter for the link to the article.)