Ontario trip

I'm just back from a trip to Ontario and upstate New York.  It was 7 places in 8 days, so more driving than drawing, but I did manage a picture in all but one day.  The first was on the flight there.  Over Minnesota, the pilot came on the intercom saying "There's a big line of thunderstorms, but we see a bit of a gap, so we're going for it."  Fun flying at 35,000 feet with clouds surging above you on both sides, and even more fun drawing them as we bumped and rattled our way through.

The next day we went to our family cottage in Southampton, an old fishing town on Lake Huron.  The town docks were built when the water levels were a lot higher, so the tied-up fishing boats now look like a bit like submarines, with their hulls below the dock.

A storm rolled in the next day, a proper Three-Day Blow, with squalls, big winds and big waves.  The clouds arrived and the rain just started as I finished the increasingly-frenzied half-hour sketch.

I lost a drawing day to the exhaustion of driving back into Toronto's impossible traffic, but then went on to Kingston, where my sister has a little cabin on a lovely piece of lakeside land.

Then we continued around Lake Ontario to Ithaca in upstate New York, home of Cornell and birthplace of my partner.  We stayed at an elegant bed-and-breakfast in a Victorian era mansion (with, spectacularly, a desert buffet in the evening).

From there, on to a wedding in St. Catharines Ontario, with a quick visit to Niagara Falls.  I only had a few minutes, so I drew the falls themselves, but the crowds and a century's worth of tourist attractions would also have been great subjects.

And finally, the old standby, an airport view, this time through the plane window as we awaited diagnosis of a mysterious fluid leaking from the wing.

Burnaby Village Museum

Having cheated by doing a sketch of Burnaby from North Vancouver for an upcoming Burnaby sketching show, I managed to make it across a bridge fairly painlessly to get to the Vancouver urbansketchers meetup at Burnaby Village Museum.  It's a neat place, a little village of relocated historical Burnaby buildings, complete with staff in the clothes of the day.  It's the sort of place I wouldn't even know existed without the meetup group.  I drew the main street of the village while sitting on the boardwalk - an adult sitting on the ground drawing is a guaranteed kid magnet, and there was an encouraging audience of them around me much of the time.  Then I did a quick water-soluble-ink sketch of an old steam donkey, used for cutting lumber before electrical power took over.  But I couldn't capture the best part of the experience - those old-fashioned smells of dry rough-hewn timber buildings, machine oil on the big contraptions, and coal smoke from the blacksmith's shop.

Burnaby cheating

Vancouver UrbanSketchers are organizing a show with the Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby (Sept. 15 - Oct. 19, entries welcome from any sketchers).  The show focuses on sketching in Burnaby.  That's all fine and well, but it simply isn't possible to get to Burnaby from North Vancouver.  This isn't Burnaby's fault - it's all the impassable traffic improvements being made in North Vancouver (mainly to allow the huge daily inflow and outflow of dump trucks, construction workers and contractors for the ubiquitous "development" on the North Shore).  This afternoon, for example, I could only get about three blocks from home in any direction before running into overlapping line-ups for the two North Shore bridges.  So I cheated.  I drew the shore of Burnaby from Maplewood Flats, within comfortable riding distance.  The Burnaby shoreline is a mix of forest, houses and a huge oil tank farm, all in surprisingly close proximity to each other.  Some day, some glorious day, I'll actually make it across a bridge and see it all up close...

Lonsdale and 1st, 26th

Continuing my quest to draw each block on Lonsdale Avenue (in random order), I did the blocks above 26th and above 1st.  This was in the relative cool of the morning, fortunately for riding up, then down, then back up the one big hill that is Lonsdale.  The first drawing at 26th was really only notable for its loudness.  A lot of North Vancouverites drive big pickups, which have never seen a load bigger than golf clubs, and they roar up the hill in them.  I have to add earplugs to my sketching kit.

The block above 1st St used to be funky little shops and old diners.  Now it is another big construction site.  Let me guess ... condominiums?  With a "hair salon" and realtor offices beneath?  Some of the last remaining artists studios are in the building behind - but not for long, I'm sure.  The same thing happened to the next block up the hill, and it's now a soulless, personless block, at least on the condo side of the street.  What will all the new inhabitants do when they want to, for example, eat?  I guess they'll get in their big pickups and roar up the hill to the supermarket.

Caribbean Days parade

Caribbean Days are a big event in North Vancouver, a place that doesn't have many big events.  There aren't many people of Caribbean origin here, but they come from all over the Lower Mainland for the parade and general festivities after, along with many other people.  The parade alternated Caribbean and other groups: Caribbean, Falun Gong, Caribbean, Salvadorean, Caribbean, Turkish(?), Caribbean, ancient Egyptian, and so on.  Drawing the traffic police before the parade was fairly easy.  They don't move much.  But drawing a parade of elaborately costumed people dancing by - not so easy.  They say sketchers need to simplify complex subjects, so I decided to focus on drawing the girls.  It's important to work within a strict set of aesthetic constraints like that.  In the end, I became part of the parade, walking backwards for three blocks while sketching the elaborately costumed soca dancer below (I added the paint later).  I probably would have stood out in the middle of the carefully organized Falun Gong band, but I was just part of the general pandemonium of the soca troop.

Lonsdale: Braemar, 11th

Continuing my series of Lonsdale blocks in random order, I drew block 36, well above 29th Street where the numbers run out.  I left early for the ride up the parabolic hill, beating the heat and most of the huge roaring pick-up trucks that seem to rule that part of the road.  There was already a smell of smoke in the air, from the clouds of it that were about to engulf the city for several days.  The block itself is essentially one big hedge on both sides of the road, but it has a distant view of the ocean and the city.  There were a surprising number of passers-by on the steep hill.  Most looked at me sitting on the sidewalk painting, and decided I was probably harmless but best not to make eye contact.  However, one person watched me for a while, then offered to buy the drawing, which is in an almost-complete sketchbook.  I declined.

Back down at the more civilized - or, at least, less hedgy - end of Lonsdale, I did the 11th block this morning. Confusingly, this is also the eighth and/or tenth block, due to a historical accident in laying out the city's gridded streets - eight and tenth streets intersect nearby. I can just imagine the two survey crews when they met up...  There is a view of the harbour and downtown again here, straight down the hill where the road bends twenty degrees due to the aforementioned historical accident.  People were chattier here, and every one of them said how much they were loving the cool, damp, almost drizzly weather, after two months of hot dry and recently smoky days.  Someone walked by whistling "Walking in a Winter Wonderland", which is taking it a bit too far.

 

End-of-Days, Vancouver

Thick orange, purplish or strangely flesh-toned smoke is hanging over Vancouver, ash is falling from the sky, a hot wind is blowing, and not a single person is mowing their lawn.  It's a day when the word "Armageddon" lurks in the back of your mind.  (Or, if you have a weird cognitive difficulty with polysyllable A-words like I do, you have "Armadillo", "Archipelago" and "Asparagus" lurking, but it's eerie all the same.)  That's the other word of the day - "eerie".  People passing on the sidewalk just shake their heads slowly and say "Eerie".  So, a quick sketch, and now I have to make sure my membership dues are paid up to whatever organization promises to get me the most years off my time in Purgatory.