In 2023, my wife and I, along with friends, embarked on a 4-day trek through the Cotswalds. These two pages document our daily journeys, using a roughly drawn map of the paths we took from village to village as a base for annotating and recording the sights and sounds we experienced along the way.
It was interesting to compare the “quaint” villages and picturesque countryside one sees in the movies and on TV with the real-world counterparts, which took a little bit of the shine off of the former. But, overall, we enjoyed the “charming” places we visited.
Union Station in Portland, Oregon, became a familiar sight as I traveled back and forth between Seattle and Portland via Amtrak for two eye surgeries in 2022. Designed by Van Brunt & Howe, the station began construction in 1890 and opened in 1896. The signature piece of the station is the 150-foot-tall Romanesque Revival clock tower featuring an 1898 Seth Thomas pendulum clock on its four faces. The station was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
William J. Samford Hall houses Auburn University’s administration, planning, and public relations offices. Built in 1888 after a fire destroyed “Old Main” on the present site, the structure, with its iconic clock tower, is now part of the Auburn University Historic District.
As with the previous post, there are two images above. On the left is my first attempt at blocking out Samford Hall. You can see how the structure fills the page and the top of the clock tower appears to be cut off. Note also how the dark figures establish the scale of the forecourt.
To give the structure more breathing space, I moved back to allow the engraved Auburn University sign to frame the scene in the foreground and also enable the entire clock tower to be included.
Another lesson in composing, framing, and providing context.
After a few years’ absence, with only a smattering of postings to celebrate Lunar New Years, mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of my teaching career, and mourn the losses caused by the devastating fire in Lahaina in 2023, I will again be posting drawings occasionally as time permits.
This first set are drawings of a stave church built in the early 13th century. While I usually advocate for including context in a scene, here I omitted the surroundings as the church was moved from Gol, Norway, to the Norsk Folkemuseum outside of Oslo, where it now resides as a set piece.
What you see on the left is my first attempt, which illustrates a common error made when beginning a drawing—that of working from the top down. Beginning with the topmost pyramidal tier and tentatively blocking out the lower tiers, I soon realized that I wouldn’t have enough room to complete the structure with the proper proportions. Rather than squeeze the structure in by distorting the proportional relationships, I began anew with the right-hand drawing.
Here, I followed an important principle—work from the whole to the parts, to keep everything in proportion and still maintain an image that will fit the page. Working this way, one first fits the overall height on the page, and then carefully subdivide the proper number of tiers. Whether beginning with the overall height of a subject, as in this case, or the overall size of a vertical plane, it is almost always a good idea to begin with as large an element in the composition as possible to ensure the subject and its context will fit the page.
This a line drawing of the Danube, one of the Four River Gods in Bernini’s fountain in Rome’s Piazza Navona. The line is the quintessential element of drawing, able to convey to the mind’s eye three-dimensional forms in space, often not by its presence but rather by its absence—where we decide to stop a contour…and pick it up again.
These cropped enlargements of the original drawing use areas of black to emphasize the negative spaces of the drawing and the white of the sculpture. This brings to mind notan, the Japanese term for “light dark;” some translate it as “light dark harmony.” It is a concept revolving around the placement and interplay of light and dark elements in the composition of a collage, drawing, or painting. It is valued as a way to study possible compositions without the distractions of color, texture, or details.
From a Rome journal, two pages of sketches drawn during a teaching session. The first page contains explanatory sketches accompanied by bits of concise text: “Pay attention to profiles”…“Suggest details within shadows”…“Visualize shape of curves.”
The second page illustrates how to estimate proportional heights above and below an imagined horizon line.
Around ten years ago, I posted a few drawings from a journal I kept during a month’s stay in Japan in 1990. Wiley subsequently published a facsimile in 2000, Sketches from Japan, which is now out-of-print. Here are a few more pages from that journal, all drawn with a Mont Blanc fountain pen and using a contour line approach to the subject matter. The page above contains details that caught my eye as I walked the streets of O-Okayama. Below are a couple more street scenes of O-Okayama, a suburb of Tokyo where the Tokyo Institute of Technology is located.
This is the main entrance to Powell’s City of Books, the venerable bookstore in Portland, Oregon, founded in 1971 by Walter Powell. Billing itself as the world’s largest independent bookstore, it occupies an entire city block and contains over a million volumes of new and used books over 68,000 square feet of floor area.
Looking back at sketches done ten years ago, during visits to Naples, Delft, and Mexico City. Unlike the first two experiential views, the last is conceptual in its attempt to imagine how the architect Luis Barragán fit the program for the Capilla de las Capuchinas into a tight midblock site in the historic area of Tlalpan in Mexico City.
Continuing a look back over the years, these two spreads contain sketches drawn during a trip to Sicily in 2006 with my wife Deb. The first contains views of Palermo the day after our arrival; the second is of Cefalú Cathedral and a map documenting a day-trip drive with our friends Margie and Jim to the hilltowns above Cefalú.
