Old Town Stockholm, Drawing in the Street

Old Town Stockholm, Drawing in the Street. Cold. I was hanging out with Julie in Old Town. We had been walking for hours, so I begged to take a break and make a drawing of some buildings in a particularly picturesque old town plaza. Which meant sitting on the street. Which was cold. Ice cold.

My use of the word picturesque is a bit of a play on words.... only later did I realize that every painting, photography, and postcard shop in Stockholm has their own version of exactly the same buildings. It is impossible that I had not seen those pictures earlier in the day... We were scavenging through shops looking for the perfect viking t-shirt.

Which begs the question: Was I compelled to draw these buildings because they had an original glow? Or, was the glow a consequence of my seeing all the other pictures of the same four colorful buildings in old town Stockholm?

Women Watering Plants

Women Watering Plants. A women watering plants. North London, late-July, 2008.

I'm in Sweden right now.

Black Lamp on the Southbank of the Thames

Black Lamp on the South bank of the Thames. Today was beautiful. Sunday, 21st September. 2008.
Blue skies and happy people walking along the river Thames.
I've decided to focus on some of the non-ubiquitous iconic Londonesque imagery...
... like this black lamp from the South bank of the Thames river. There are the most amazing fish at the bottom of each lamp.

Incidentally, this is what I was watching just before I decided to draw...

Purple Flowers Waving in the Wind

Purple Flowers Waving in the Wind. Imagine an outline of every purple flower that this plant has ever produced. Place each outline on top of one another. Every new flower would add another iteration, eventually approximating an ideal shape.

Picture that shape.

(Did you catch the Yoko Ono allusion?)

Katerina in the Park

Katerina in the Park. Hampstead. July, 2008. A sunny day. We had an orange blanket which we used to push down the wildlife long enough to make some drawings.

Circles are my favourite shapes.

Notice the use of symbols to approximate form. This is my favourite drawing with Katerina.

The Beach and the Sea

The Beach and the Sea. No greater textural contrast than a rolling ocean meeting some salty sand.

The Gnarly Tree

The Gnarly Tree. Notice the approach.

An alley in Richmond, Virginia. One sunny day in August.
This tree eats things. One of its' trunks is hollow to the bottom.
But, at least this particular gnarly tree is nice enough to return objects once it's done devouring them.

A Shed and the Back of a House

A Shed and the Back of a House. I don't often paint an undercoat of yellow. In fact, I painted this undercoat ages ago. About a month, actually. That's when I started on this drawing of a shed and the back of my neighbor's house.

Here, you can see the actual back of a house, the house that was the subject of this pencil drawing, the house that is currently the subject of an as-yet-unfinished oil painting.

The problem: Paintings started on a sunny day don't tend to get finished. There's just too much competition.

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paintings.drawings.arithmetic.

The Square Tree, an Approximation in Green Park

The Square Tree, an Approximation in Green Park. Last weekend, May Day bank holiday, and I was in Green Park with my friend Bettina from Barcelona. Sometimes people look at my paintings and wonder where all the shapes come from.

Sure, there's always a choice in what you see, but my mind can be quite persuasive.

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paintings.drawings.arithmetic.

Voyage Countdown Video Trailer

Voyage Countdown Video Trailer. Contains absolutely no drawings from London. Instead, a collection of thoughts, phrases, pictures, and places from the spring and summer of 2006. New York, Washington DC, friends, enemies, bottles, whirlwinds, the list of people to whom I gave over 200 paintings at my going away party... I drew numbers from a top hat (so as not to introduce favorites) to decide who would choose when... It's fascinating to compare the order of the draw (and more interestingly, the order of the choose) with my own estimations of a paintings strength...

Richard in Noodjwick

Richard in Noodjwick. I know that I'm in the middle of the Lost Summer Sketchbook series, but Richard just sent me this picture. I had forgotten what it looked like. And honestly, the story is just too crazy to pass up.

It was April, 2007. I hadn't talked to anyone in three dark London months. So, when spring came, back to Amsterdam I went. Actually, Amsterdam was just an aside for a few days until I caught a plane to Barcelona. Or so I thought...

Let's just say that:
a) I never went to Barcelona. Instead, I spent two weeks chillin on the back porch of a surf spot in Noodjwick talking to some of the coolest people ever (all detailed in my sketchbook, "The Necklace"). One of whom was Richard. Don't ask about the night Richard, Buddy (the only nineteen year old fisherman from Alazka I've ever met), and I had our own collectively seperate adventures...
b) From New Zealand, Richard just happened to be walking down the street in Cheshunt a few weeks later, the very same night I met Maria. He had just moved to London. Needless to say, several adventures ensued (including my introduction to Mexico City).
c) As I just re-discovered this drawing, I just happened to be listening to the Manu Chao song that kept playing over and over during the entire two weeks.

Hmm. Coincidence? Or, a confluence of events that makes me shudder in the shadow of it's significance...

Fountain Park, Bishops Stortford

Fountain Park, Bishops Stortford. Fast forward past Coopers, and it was late afternoon on Saturday, August 11th 2007. Mel and I were once again looking for a place to draw. We found a park, complete with a massive skateboard ramp. Under a willow tree, we sat down and began to draw in Fountain Park, Bishops Stortford. It was a very peaceful time. I had been living with Mel and Sarah for about ten days. Without them, I would have been sleeping in Hyde Park. And it was a very cold summer.

The sun had a way of finding me those two weeks, shining in exactly when I needed it to. There's nothing like sunshine to make you feel like everything's going to be ok. I had no money, nowhere to live, and no one to wonder where I was. But the warmth of the sun brought me safe, everytime.

Mel moved back to Australia today, back to the sunshine.

Page 10 from the Lost Summer sketchbook.

Coopers of Stortford

Coopers of Stortford. We were on a mission, Sarah, Mel and I, to find a place to draw. Well, two of us were looking for a place to draw. Sarah was looking for a place to read.

So, we wandered around Bishops Stortford. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon. Finally, I spotted it. Coopers of Stortford, a garden supply center.

And it only took me four tries to get the orange garden pots the way I wanted them.

Page 9 from the Lost Summer sketchbook.

Market Square and Potter Street, Bishops Stortford

Market Square and Potter Street, Bishops Stortford. My first experience with gouche in seven years. Recently landed and living by the grace of two nice Australians, it was August 4th. I had just come back to England from visiting Germany and the Netherlands. For all those people who were wondering, this drawing begins the "Lost Summer" sketchbook...

Murals for St. Christopher's Inn (video)

Murals for St. Christopher's Inn (video). A brief approximation of the experience of rotating slowly in the center of the room while standing with one leg planted solidly on the ground. The other leg? That's the one contorted in a dire need-to-maintain-balance position, in choreographed slow-motion tiptoe between bed, bedpost, and floor. "peaceful" was the word most often heard as a description to the room once I had finished. Funny, given that my use of aerosol varnish set off the fire alarm. The entire room was thick with haze and post aerosol fume, but I didn't get it until several dirty looks and one really loud alarm later. But, I digress... Eventually, I had to cut open two onions, leaving one piece in each corner of the room, to get rid of the tremendous smell...

Murals for St. Christopher's Inn (Part IV)

Murals for St. Christopher's Inn (Part IV). Henry Moore currently has 28 sculptures on display at the Kew Botanical Gardens. So, of course I went. A month ago, in fact... and, of course I was inspired to draw some of the gardens... I transferred my watercolor and pencil sketch to the wall, but enlarged a horizontal length of 30cm to 250 cm. This wall provided blank space for the largest painting I have ever painted. Yet.

The Red Light District at Night

The Red Light District at Night. It was one of my last drawings from 2006, a day before the new year. I was laying in my bed, peaking out the window at 3am. Last night, I was having dinner with three Romanians. One is an air-traffic controller who lives in the Netherlands, and he was telling stories of the red light district...

It's funny how two people can see different views of the same thing.

Ocean Village at Dawn

Ocean Village at Dawn. A landscape, transformed by the new light of the sunrise... What is visible to the eye is just a small portion of existence. Reality is often just a product of perception.

Ocean Waves II

Ocean Waves II. Just before the new year, a beach in Maryland in late 2005... I had just come back from Prague and was seeing things in a new way. Overlapping dimensions intersecting different planes of reality, particles of light and energy floating between them all, the waves in the Atlantic ocean were revealing a new insight. Crazy me, I didn't even realize that I was drawing in the same sketchbook as I had drawn in two years before. I found the first drawing ("Ocean Waves I") later on that night...

Ocean Waves I

Ocean Waves I. It was just before the new year, late 2003. I was in Nags Head, North Carolina and had just re-discovered colored pens. This drawing of the ocean waves crashing on the shore pre-dates my other pen and line drawings by a good two-and-a-half years... Something about the Outer Banks of North Carolina makes me relax as soon as I cross the bridge...