Solstice+2

The sun is heading back this way, ever so slightly, day-by-day, following winter solstice.  Yesterday it set just south of the chimney on the school in the next block, from the vantage of our back deck - definitely on the "S"-for-South side of the school's old weathervane.  I'm waiting to see when the sun lines up exactly with the dome, which will undoubtedly be a moment of immense cosmic significance - why else would our deck and their dome have been built in exactly those locations?

Flower shop at Lonsdale Quay

Lots of flowers were being sold this afternoon at the flower shop at Lonsdale Quay, but not the poinsettias or big purple orchids that were displayed so prominently.  Which made me wonder what happens to all those expensive flowers if they aren't sold for Christmas.  Hopefully they get sent to a nice poinsettia-and-orchid retirement home somewhere in the tropics.

33 Acres brewery

33 Acres is one of the newer entrants in the burgeoning microbrewery scene in Vancouver.  You can tell they are new, because the brewer's beard isn't very bushy at all.  Long-established brewers have really really bushy beards.  Twenty of us met there to draw-drink their two brews - a WCPA (West Coast version of an IPA) and a California common, which I had to Google to find that it is a dark "steamed" lager, meaning that it is brewed with lager yeast but at higher ale temperatures.  Both were very tasty, and came in small enough glasses that my perspective was only slightly messed up in the sketch.  More importantly, the common was a nice, very paintable red-amber shade of brown.  I contrast this with a "Belgian black ale" that I recently drew-drank - a cooler, much greyer hue of brown.  Maybe I should start a website combining RateBeer and UrbanSketchers --> SketchBeer? 

Vancouver library atrium

The urban sketchers met in the atrium of the Vancouver library, a good choice on a below-freezing day - cold enough in the unheated space that I felt tough drawing there, but not so cold that my paint froze.  The building is in the ruined-coliseum style.  The curving walls in the atrium between the main library and the outer part of the building, and the reflecting glass, made for challenging draftsmanship, but it was a cheerful scene with the office building glowing in the sun against the Vancouver-blue sky through the glass roof.  A book sale in the atrium was drawing a crowd, with popular favourites like An Economic Analysis of the Coal Industry in Victorian England.  There were a number of interesting characters in the area, and not just the sketchers...

Ariel Helvetica at Dr Sketchy's

About ten people from the Urban Sketchers meet-up group went to Dr. Sketchy's on Sunday, where Ariel Helvetica was the model.  She started out with quite a few serifs, but ended up mainly sans.

     The drawing with Christmas baubles won the competition for the coveted Dr. Sketchy pencil prize.  Now I can have an "Awards" section on my artistic CV.

Charles Edenshaw and Kimsooja at VAG

I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery last Saturday by accident - or, more precisely, to avoid an accident.  I was riding home from Granville Island, rapidly, in the (awesome) dedicated bike lane on Hornby St, when two city workers carefully looked at me approaching, then stepped right in front of me with a traffic barricade.  I swerved to avoid crashing through them, then swerved to avoid a pedestrian, and ended up pretty much at the gallery entrance.  Figuring that it wasn't safe to cycle in Vancouver at that moment, in I went.  I hadn't been inspired enough by the publicity for the current exhibitions to bother going before, but I'm glad I did.

The main exhibit was work by Charles Edenshaw, a Haida carver from the turn of the previous century.  We see a lot of coastal native wood-carving here, and it is all so well done that we get a bit blase.  But his work really stood out for the fine detail of the work, and the variety of media - some wood, but lots of argyllite (a fine-textured ebony black claystone), silver, gold and ivory, as well as paintings and drawings on paper and woven hats and baskets.  It's powerful to see the various Haida motifs repeated in the different media.  It was really an excellent exhibit, and worth a repeat visit.

The other exhibit I saw was by Kimsooja, a contemporary Korean artist, who works with textiles and video.  Normally, neither would be high on my favourites list, but the textile work was appealing at first because of its exuberance, and then because it was thought-provoking in subtle ways.  But it was her large-scale, multi-screen videos that were most entrancing - again, worth the price of admission (especially if you have a membership and it's free).

I like to draw in galleries, because it makes me look at a few works carefully and makes a much richer experience.  Sometimes I feel like a bit of a lunatic, sketching in front of one piece for several minutes, while everyone else spends their average 3.5 seconds and rushes on (now that I think about it, that was a theme in Kimsooja's video installations).  But this Saturday there was a huge crowd of fellow sketching lunatics.  It was Family Day so admittedly all the other sketchers were knee-high, but sometimes it's good to just be the biggest lunatic, not the only one.

Granville Island

Urban Sketchers met at Granville Island on one of those clear cold days when you understand why people worship the sun.  Unfortunately aesthetic pickiness overruled thermoregulatory common-sense for me, so I sat in the shade to draw.  I'm sure my extremities will thaw in the spring.
In the first view, the composition of the dock and pilings, and the background were the attraction.  The Vancouver "City of Glass" sometimes seems like the architectural equivalent of a monoculture, but today the blue glass against the blue sky had more of a feel of an airy mythical city in the sky.  The second little vignette is the buffer to stop boats from running into the base of the Granville Street bridge.  It has a definite jerry-built look to it.  It was catching a stray sunbeam that navigated through various structures to get there, illuminating the plants and algae that have colonized the structure.