I happened to be in Salt Lake City for a conference and found myself surrounded by streaming crowds of Mormons who were also there for "Conference." The Temple area is beautiful.

I did this sketch just inside the gate to the garden, just south of the Temple. There are several graceful old plane trees there, and the sight of the sunlit building through their branches is what made me stop and spend an hour.

In other settings I would have people of all ages and backgrounds looking over my shoulder and commenting, but here only children struck up conversations with me. Parents sometimes joined in after their children started it, but even then, the parents did not encourage the conversations, or add anything to them. It gave me a polite taste of what it feels like to be an outsider - something I'm not used to.

Click for much larger image. This is 9 x 12, done in pencil, then inked with prismacolor pens (which don't run when wet) and other pens (which do run when wet) and watercolor crayons. Water was added with a Niji water brush. Then the pencil was all erased. The Temple has windows all the way to the ground, but I felt the incomplete lower section of the sketch made the building seem taller - which it certainly is.

Today after breakfast I attempted to unstick the disposal flywheel with a broomstick, as recommended on the Internet. It beats putting your hand in the unit... (It's like Nathan Lane's / Zero Mostel's rule from "The Producers" - "Never put your own money in the show!!")

It had been humming when we flip the switch, with no other action, which research indicated was likely due to a stuck flywheel. Moving the flywheel took some force, and did not seem to be leading to free motion, which did not give me a good feeling.

Well the whole thing popped off the bottom of the sink. After I got over the shocking view of daylight shining up through the drain, I actually chuckled. I had figured I would end up replacing the unit, and with it already partially disconnected, I decided to finish the job this evening. I got a new, significantly better model on my lunch hour, after checking reviews and the amperage, and installed it this evening in about an hour with no real mishaps. It's quieter, and the flywheel is stainless steel, instead of the alloy which had rusted out on our old one. (My sons and I have a hard time understanding why any task which mixes metal and water leads an engineer to choose ordinary steel - like AC condensate pans, or garbage disposal flywheels. The three of us look at each other, raise our eyebrows, and tip our heads to the side in that facial expression our family uses to signal an encounter with a form of insanity.)

But the person I most wanted to call and compare notes with, the person I wanted to boast to about my little plumbing and electrical job, the person who would have gotten the biggest kick out of the story of the unit popping off under the pressure of my broomstick, was my Dad. I'll have to hope he's watching and listening somehow, but I sure do miss getting to tell him and hearing his laugh.

I have two stories to tell from my travels these last 24 hours. No pictures because while I do have a sketch to show for one, I dropped my camera and can't upload pictures right now.

First, I had the privilege of attending a Braves / Marlins baseball game in Atlanta last night. It's the first time I've been to a big stadium (I've been to Durham Bulls games, but that's a small stadium). I did a sketch during the fourth inning. I was struck by an amazing contrast. On the one hand you have the state-of-the-art video wrapping the entire structure, synchronized over dozens of huge monitors up several stories, enabling the display of an enormous fluttering virtual American flag during the national anthem, and showing stats and scores throughout the game. You also have the stadium itself, with tier upon tier of cantilevered banks of seats, sophisticated lighting that made it as bright as day, and a sound system that could probably be heard a mile away. On the other hand you have the gem in the center of this amazing twentyfirst century setting - a dirt diamond in a field of grass where men run in circles and hit a leather ball with a stick. Don't get me wrong - I love the subtlety and craft that is the American game of Baseball - but the game could have been played in regulation style in the stone age, because there is nothing modern about the materials of the game itself. So the contrast with the stadium was epic, to me.

Somewhere in the bottom of the eighth, with the game pretty much a foregone conclusion (Braves winning by a handsome lead after two home runs with two RBIs each), I looked up to notice that the huge column of light rising from the immense bowl of stadium had attracted a circling swarm of high flying night birds, with shapes unfamiliar to me, eating the swarms of insects drawn to all those stray photons. This is in downtown Atlanta, with miles of concrete, stone, asphalt and brick on all sides - where did the insects and birds come from?

Second, on my way through security in the Atlanta aiport today I was behind a woman in her forties with intriguing boots. They took a deal of unlacing and I made a joke about it (I'm the sort to lighten moments in line with strangers...). This led to a conversation because they were boots for motorcycling. She was recently returned from motorcycling through the Alps, and was on her way to Salt Lake City to rent a Honda motorcyle and drive to Seattle in ten days, via Jackson Hole, Yellowstone, etc. I looked at her carefully, because it takes some muscle to handle a motorcycle, and she probably weighed under 100 pounds. She went on to say that she also danced ballroom, and had her ballroom costume/shoes and her watercolor materials packed, and not much else, because she planned to do ALL of it on this trip. I asked where the ballroom would be done, "Surely not Jackson Hole," and she grinned and told me that was precisely where she would be dancing. We fell to discussing her art materials (very simple - pens, watercolor pad, and just one color of liquid watercolor, a blue).

At this point we were putting our bags on the conveyor and concentrated on the task before us. She went through the scanner before me wearing a thin cotton shirt and a light vest of some space-age material (she had said her clothing was minimal and all chosen for the ability to wash, wring, and dry in minutes). The TSA agent on the other side felt the need to pat her down, and poked her in the sternum as part of checking the vest. This apparently hurt, and the woman poked the TSA agent back, in exactly the same manner, telling her that it hurt and that she was getting her fingers caught on the front of her bra. The TSA agent remained professional, but I winced, because a law enforcement officer is a law enforcement officer, and they can't be handled that way. She made the woman come back through the scanner and place her vest on the conveyor. For a moment it looked like the woman was going to resist, but then she came back through and did as she was told. When she passed back through I could hear the TSA agent taking her and her bags aside and quietly lecturing her on what she had done (laid hands on an officer without permission or warning) and that this was not acceptable. When I had reassembled my own clothes, shoes, and bags I looked back and saw the woman seated in the TSA security area, still getting a lecture...

I had noticed well prior to our turn that TSA was in a physical mode today. I have passed through these check points dozens of times in the last year, and have only seen one or two pat-downs. Today, on the other hand, they were touching nearly everybody. They squeezed the fat braids of two traditionally dressed Indian ladies ahead of us, wanded and patted down a young African American man next, then the woman I had been talking to, and then I even got patted on the chest and shoulders (first time I can recall that), possibly they thought I was with the woman who was making trouble. It was interesting, a bit disturbing, and I understood both sides (as I often do) which did nothing to make me more comfortable.

I just looked up ballroom in Jackson Hole and there is a place called the Snow King Center Ballroom... Do they dance there? Was she for real?

The fun thing about drawing in public is the conversations. While I sat in the hot son and laid out this sketch, I had to repeatedly sight (with my pencil held up or sideways) the locations of different window lines or the proportions and arrangement of objects. It was a challenging subject to get correct - I wanted to be sure to position the stories correctly, and have the right number, etc. The perspective, as the building rose before me, demanded a gradual shrinking of the height of each layer. As it is, I still didn't get the sides correct - compare to photo below.


A group of elderly ladies and gentlemen were congregated in the shade across the street, talking and having coffee. One crossed the street, came up behind me, and asked, "What exactly is it you're doing when you hold up your pencil like that?" It was an intelligent question, and not one I've been asked before. I described how artists neep to map what's before them onto the two dimensional surface, and they use their thumb or drawing tool to compare proportions, or find half and quarter points, to position things correctly. I showed her some tiny hash marks on my paper, which were dividing the space into quarters, and pointed out that the pencil helped me find which line on the building was half way up, and then a quarter of the way up, and then how many lines of windows and dividers were in between, etc. - so I would get them right. She said that made sense, and she thanked me for the answer.


I only did the pencil work on this one while in the sun. I walked to a table in the shade to ink it in, and then did the watercolor from memory several days later, in a hotel room. I had taken several photos (pasted together here - and taken from not the same spot where I did the sketch, hence the changes in angles) to use as reference for the painting, but I didn't need it. I found I could vividly recall the colors I wanted.


This sketch will also appear on our Durham blog, of course. Top of the Triangle. The bilding is the Suntrust Bank building, one of the older landmarks and taller buildings in downtown Durham. The bull is a big, nearly life size bronze set in a small park across the street.

Oui, c'est moi. It has been a long while since my last posting. Etienne has been hogging the keyboard, oui? Of course in the pond we do not use expressions with pigs; one who is taking more than one's portion is as a bullfrog. But he has been tres busy and the drawings have come more rapidly than in the past, so he has had more to show.

I painted this back in May, but didn't get around to posting it until now. We have the theater bug bad in our house, with four out of five of us (I'm the lone holdout) in a musical that is running four nights right now, and it's been pretty exhausting living theater hours in the night, and getting up early for work. So not much painting or drawing happened this week other than figure drawing Tuesday.

This is a house which was moved to Hillsborough, to become the historic district's visitor center. A major Civil War surrender took place in this house, but I love it for the simple lines and proportions. The gardens outside are nearly limited to plants which would have been in cultivation at that time in America - larkspur, simple roses, nicotiana, nandina, rose campion, Virginia spiderwort, herbs, hollies, silver bell tree, jasmine... This was done in my watercolor sketch pad - 10 x 12, ink and watercolor, sketching with Oldest (he was on the other side of the house, sketching the porch on that side, and leaves from a brown turkey fig tree).