GRIZZLY PEAR
Monday was crazy so first thing Tuesday is to catch up on yesterday’s figure. Maybe I’ll get a second round in this afternoon.
(I threw in some architectural scalies for fun.)
I’m reusing my notepad with sketches for the 6 of Swords….and this is now my desk pad so the rest of the white space will eventually get filled in (and green highlighted when completed).
Let’s repeat my first video artist for #MondayNightMusic by celebrating the vernal equinox and the advent of Spring!
I’m a huge fan of Stephen Malinowski. He’s posted an immense amount of music animations on his YouTube channel. It’s an amazing library of visual explorations around those odd sequence of sounds that we find so appealing as a species.
If the start of the Gregorian calendar did not go well, I wish you all the best as we enter a new season. Let’s make this an awesome new year!
Three years after our country shut down, we went on our first vacation, for a week out in San Diego.
Finally getting out of Nevada made me a little sad about the time lost. But I was also grateful for the massive privilege to take a week off and not have to worry about it.
One big mental shift on this trip was my constant worry about time. Trying to optimize a trip is madness but I couldn’t help myself. I’m not sure what happened to the young man who spent a lovely spring afternoon on the Seine just reading Raymond Chandler. Maybe he’ll return one day.
Legoland
San Diego Safari Park
San Diego Zoo
La Jolla
COVID-19
Detour Home
With the free admission day in Legoland, we’re now pondering a summer visit. Might as well revisit the beach and Zoo. Add one day at Balboa Park and a visit to the New Children’s Museum (which we loved in 2019) and we’re back for another full week.
Some bureaucrat at the California Office of Tourism just earned her wings.
At the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego I contemplated my recent decision to draw more (than nothing everyday). One gallery had paintings with several highly stylized figures. I committed the classic response to modern art.
I could do that!
Spoiler alert: I can’t.
This idea pushed me to finally attack the white whale of drawing figures. I’m so bad, even my architectural scalies look awful. This is way out of my comfort zone but it’s time to attack the issue in a concentrated fashion.
I’m calling this Figure 8’s . The series is to draw a human figure for +/- 8 minutes, for x8 days.
At least for 08 days to go with the 8 brocades, maybe up to 78 (tarot deck) or 18, 28, 68, or 88 (for good luck).
Yesterday, I started with image of a guy stretching upward. I didn’t use a reference and …. umm yeah … this makes my scalies look like palatable.
The drawing today was from the cover of my exercise book, the second callisthenic shooting an arrow. I’ll do exercises 3-8 from the book before I venture back out into my imagination.
The girl got a good laugh when she saw these drawings, she even got her brother upstairs to join in the fun. It may be good for them to see dad fail miserably…and hopefully get better by the end. Given how quickly she picks things up in school, I worry she has developed a fear of failure. So hopefully this will encourage her to take some risks and fail graciously a few times before the stakes get too high in life.
Wow.
I stumbled across a childhood friend at LegoLand. I’ve known him since from church before elementary school and we went to Berkeley together.
He’s one of the two guys I still talk regularly to from college. This is the first time I got to see his two kids.
One helluva way to start our first vacation three years into the pandemic.
I took my first studio in the spring of 1998. More than architecture, ED11A was about drawing and seeing.
This was the big midterm assignment.
It also coincided with the clock change, and we bemoaned the loss of an hour to complete this drawing.
It turned out that I didn’t need that extra hour. I finally got an “A” on this drawing. It was a brutal studio (architecture studios are half hazing), but something clicked on this drawing.
I expended an intense amount of effort on this piece, but one must also credit Fortuna, since nothing is guaranteed with art.
It’s been a quarter century since that long week in concrete caverns of Wurster Hall. Things that seemed cataclysmic are mere whispers in our memory.
Maybe I’ll return to this level artistry one day. More importantly, I hope my kids will push themselves to discover their art — my daughter is less than a decade away from her freshman year in college.
The graduate assistant for our section was Noga Wizansky who still makes great art. During my time at Berkeley, I developed close relationships with the professors Chip Sullivan and Joe Slusky in future studios. I loved their omnivorous approach to everything. It’s a shame that the Architecture program has become focused on architecture. There’s plenty of time for that silliness after college.
Three years ago, the pandemic landed on our shores.
We were living with our in-laws, but the tenant in their rental house had just left. That gave me a place exile myself since I was still going to the office before the shutdowns were announced.
Even after the shutdowns, I was still conducting a variety of site visits between construction projects and budgeting investigations. So I spent a long spring as a bachelor, until work slowed down and I stopped running around town.
It was a trying time (we celebrated my boy’s second birthday in the backyard) but it was also a cushy middle class sacrifice that pales in comparison to the loss that so many others experienced.
During those long days as a loner, I would take a 40 minute walk every morning, listening to this CD by Seamus Egan, which he has now released as a live performance on Youtube.
Late last year, I started drawing a little. I had joined Post.news and wanted to see more art in my feed. I decided that I had to make some of my own in order to manifest this desire into reality.
The drawings are nothing special, but it was good to start moving my hand again.
Hands are a rich subject. They are very hard to perfectly, but they are quite forgiving to make decent. It’s just a matter of breathing slowly and taking your time.
This exercise is highly recommended for anyone that wants to get out of the digital vortex of the 21st century.
This time last year, I was listening to “War Pigs” on repeat.
It’s depressing that it’s still relevant for the foreseeable future.
The video is perfect. No need to embellish Ruthie Foster’s powerful performance of this Black Sabbath classic.
I have a perverse desire to so the unglamorous side of my profession, and without something flashier at the top of my mind, let’s do it again!
Five years ago, my neighbors mentioned that they were taking over an old shop on Fremont Street to create a wedding chapel. They were planning on a minimalist buildout, but still needed an architect to analyze the conversion from a Business Occupancy to an Assembly Occupancy. Such a change increases the risk of the space since cramming a bunch of people into a room is is inherently more dangerous than stocking merchandise.
My boss was kind enough to write up a simple hourly proposal for a basic code analysis. I set up shop at the PublicUs coffeeshop around the corner, field verified the space, hyper caffeinated to save my neighbors on fee, and banged this out in a day.
The clients did all the work from there — I take zero credit for their enormous investment of sweat equity for the buildout.
In the past few years, I changed jobs, we moved, a pandemic happened, and they moved. I never got to see the place in action, but their original partner is still running the place so if you want a cool spot to get married (or elope!) check out Flora Pop and her Sure Thing Chapel in Downtown Las Vegas.
