Following up on the last post, here are a couple more sketches from my summer travels in 1965. The above is a view of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris; below is Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France.
I still remember how I had to press while drawing with the fountain pen because the stub nib restricted the ink flow. This resulted in the relatively dark feel of the sketches.
Rummaging around some old stuff stored in the basement, I came across more drawings that I did while traveling around Europe after spending the summer as an intern with Wilson & Womersley, an architectural and town planning firm in London. Above is a drawing of Piazza San Marco in Venice, done with a stub nibbed pen in 1965. Below is a similar view done with a fine-tipped nib in 1995. Prior to this, I had believed the only drawing that survived was one done of the Spanish Steps in Rome.
I will be posting a few more over the next couple of weeks.
San Miguel Arcángel was built in the late 17th century in the colonial Baroque style, but in the 19th century, a local builder Zeferino Gutiérrez Muñoz was asked to rebuild the towers and facade that had suffered substantial cracking over the years. He was a bricklayer by profession and so he relied on a postcard of Cologne Cathedral in Germany for inspiration. The result is a massive pseudo-Gothic structure that has become the iconic emblem of San Miguel de Allende, 50 miles west of Querétaro.
This sketch, done quickly as a demo, is an example of how it is possible not to complete every detail or part of a scene, especially when drawing symmetrical compositions. It is often enough to merely suggest one part and then let the imagination of the viewer complete the view.
The Lahaina Jodo Mission is a Buddhist temple founded in 1912 by Gendo Saito with the support of the Japanese immigrants working in the island’s sugar and pineapple plantations. The three-tiered pagoda serves as a columbarium and contains the urns of deceased members.
The celestial buddha, 12 feet high and weighing 3 1/2 tons, was installed in June 1968. On a nearby plaque is inscribed the following: “This image of Amitabha-Buddha was erected here at the picturesque seashore of Lahaina, the capital of the ancient Hawaiian Dynasty, in celebration of the centennial anniversary of Japanese immigration to the Hawaii (sic) Islands…”
Front Street is the main thoroughfare through Lahaina. Now lined with tourist shops, galleries, and restaurants, the street retains the wooden facades and balconies from the mid-19th century, when Lahaina was a thriving whaling port and a hub of Maui’s sugar and pineapple industries.
Just a block away from the Pioneer Inn is the Old Court & Customs House, which was built in the late 1850s on the site of the Old Fort in Lahaina. It opened in 1860 to serve as both a center for governmental and court affairs and a customs house for whaling and trading ships during the Monarchy period. Originally sporting a wood facade, the structure was renovated in 1925 in the Greek Revival style. Behind is the courthouse plaza, dominated by one of the largest banyan trees in the U.S.
The Pioneer Inn, built in 1901, is the oldest hotel on Maui and the oldest in continuous operation in the state of Hawaii. It is situated in the National Historic district of Lahaina, once the whaling capital of the Pacific and in antiquity the royal capital of Maui Loa.
Another set of demonstration sketches from my recent workshop with Monterrey Tec students in Querétaro. It is always enlightening to stand or sit with individual students, view a scene together, and demonstrate the process of developing the basic structure of a drawing.
Spending the week working with students from Tecnologico de Monterrey, drawing in the beautiful historic center of Santiago de Querétaro, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here are a couple of pages of demos I drew today—quick sketches establishing the underlying structure of a view.
In my very first post on this site in February 2012, I showed a composite of two sketches I had done of the Spanish Steps in Rome. Here I am posting the full views of each drawing.
The first is from the summer of 1965, when I was fortunate to have had, through an ACSA exchange program, an internship with Wilson & Womersley, an architectural and town planning firm with offices on Bedford Square in London. At the end of the summer, armed with a Eurail Pass, I traveled around Europe for a couple of weeks. I did a few sketches on site, but not as many as I would have liked. The only one I still have in my possession is this view of the Spanish Steps in Rome, drawn with a fountain pen with a stub nib.
This is another drawing of the same site from 2000, the first time I had the privilege of teaching in the University of Washington’s Architecture in Rome program. Similar viewpoints but drawn 35 years apart with different nibs and separated by a lifetime of experiences.