Lonsdale - Upper Levels Highway

With a couple hours free on a lovely early fall afternoon, I finally returned to my project to draw all the blocks on Lonsdale.  My random number generator sent me to the block where Lonsdale passes over the Upper Levels Highway, so I was able to capture one of the great cultural treasures of North Vancouver - the hours-long traffic jam that extends across the whole city every day as people try to get to the Second Narrows Bridge.  It was a fairly intense drawing experience on the bridge, with traffic roaring up Lonsdale behind me, and traffic going nowhere beneath me.  I did remember one essential drawing tool - noise-cancelling headphones.  That made it quite bearable, and I was thankful that I didn't have to draw that block on a rainy evening in November.

Spare moments

Motivated by starting a new mini-sketchbook, I found some good sketching moments on this week's work trip to Edmonton.  It seems there's a lot more time for drawing than you would think, if you don't do silly things like work all the time...

Fun challenge - try to find Satan in the drawings below.  Hint: He's playing a stringed instrument.  He actually seemed to be a cheerful fellow, but pens slip sometimes.  Or maybe the Guinness let me see through to his true nature?

Flamenco opening tonight

A group show of flamenco-themed art "Arte y Pasion" is opening tonight at Basic Inquiry - 1011 Main Street, Vancouver (across the street and just north of the Via and Greyhound station).  Everyone is invited to the opening, 7-10pm.  It should be exciting - there are 80 works from 27 artists plus unframed sketches, and there will be flamenco guitar music and dancing courtesy of Flamenco Roasario.  I have 4 pictures in the show and a handful of sketches.

An eve with Adam

Adam was our model at Simply Drawing on Thursday evening.  (As an unfigleafed model, he's probably a bit tired of the Garden of Eden allusions, but I couldn't resist).  Having done a fair amount of life drawing, there's some trepidation walking into a session, knowing that it's going to be three hours of struggle.  So it's a relief to see a model with features that make the drawing easier - wrinkles, ample curves, well-defined muscles, quirky faces, or ... dreadlocks!  Lots of big dreadlocks!  And a dreadbeard!  (If that's a thing.)  Adam was a joy to draw, especially when I remembered wise words that Shari Blaukopf said in a workshop "You can make your lines and washes accurate or not - that's up to you.  But you have to make them interesting."  Drawing or painting every dreadstrand was out of the question, so I worked on interesting, or at least fun.

As an aside, I've been busy with work recently, mostly pushing artistic endeavours aside.  But tonight I saw a picture on the internet painted in 1943, an urban-sketch of Marakesh.  It was by an amateur artist, name of Winston Churchill.  I understand that he too had a pressing day-job at the time.  But he didn't let it get completely in the way of what was important...

 

Dr Tiki

Dr Sketchy returned to a cafe, after the no-fun-loving City of Vancouver shut down the show at the Wallflower Cafe - some licence technicality about not allowing women on stage where good food is served and no gang members are present.  A venue up the street - which should probably remain nameless, because you never know when a Vancouver municipal employee might read my blog - hosted the event, with Lydia deCarlo as Cheeky Tiki.  She had the '60's housewife "exotica" look down pat, with the yellow dress, the hair, and, of course, the leopard-print underwear.  And the cool music to go with it all.  I forgot how much I missed Dr Sketchy nights.  I'll be following it around to its future clandestine locations - until the City of Vancouver shuts it down again, for illegal use of a giant clam shell or simply for being too much fun.

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.