Quebec City, particularly the older parts of the city, has many street scenes that are worthy of a sketcher’s time. Often the streets are narrow and the buildings are connected to one another.
These form great urban scenes and the only thing that limits a sketcher is time and the place to sit while doing the sketch. Time, scene and place to sit came together and I sketched this autumn scene.
Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9); Pilot Prera w/Platinum Carbon Black ink
These lyrics, sung long ago by Johnny Horton, tell of the final battle of the War of 1812 where Americans defeated a British invasion force. The song was a big hit when I was a kid and every time I head to Quebec’s Ile d’Orleans that song rattles around in my brain. Truth is, the French had their own battle against a British invasion and Wolfe, the leader of that invasion force, nearly died when his ship ran aground just off the coast of the island, and within cannon distance of the French forces.
But war is not the topic of today’s post. Rather, it is about a trip I took recently to Ile d’Orleans to sketch. I use ‘trip’ loosely as it takes all of fifteen minutes to get there as you can see Ile d’Orleans from Quebec City and vice versa. Going to the mall takes longer.
Ile d’Orleans is a big island in the St. Lawrence River, just as it widens from its narrowest point, at Quebec City, on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. There are six municipalities on the island, though I have a hard time determining where one begins and another ends. What I know is that the island is gorgeous and I love my time there. A lot of vegetable and fruit growing goes on, and it’s a very popular tourist location.
I’ve sketched on the island but I’ve never gone there alone, with the singular goal of sketching. This day, I was on a mission. The sun was out, I had sketchbooks a plenty, and I’d arranged to have our car for the day. I arrived on the island about 8:45 and drove to the backside of the island to a pier that juts out into the St. Lawrence. I discovered it when I was with my buddy Nicolas and we were like a couple kids, chasing the Queen Elizabeth II as she passed along the southern coast of the island on her approach to Quebec City.
Moleskine watercolor (3×5), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon Black
I walked out onto the pier, set up my stool and began sketching. You know what? Sun doesn’t help much when there’s a 20-30km/h wind blowing across a large body of water and its hyper-cooled air is cutting you in half. I was COLD!!! At one point I went back and sat in the car for a while to warm up but, finally I finished the sketch. I was a bit too much in a hurry, do you blame me, and ended up with some paint blooms in the foliage because my previous wash wasn’t yet dry, but them’s the breaks.
I was really cold when I finished and so headed for a place I knew that serves wonderful brioche and good, hot coffee. Unfortunately, the winds had blown out their electricity – no coffee. So, I bought a brioche and sat in the car, with the heater running, to warm up.
Stillman & Birn Zeta (5×8), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon Black
Across the street from the café is a church and a cemetery. I keep telling myself that I should draw more in cemeteries as I love the shapes of the grave stones and their helter-skelter orientations, probably caused by the annual freezing and thawing of the ground. I found a view I liked, went back to the car to get my stuff and I was soon sitting in the cemetery sketching. This was a little better as there was a stone wall around the area that broke some of the wind. I was only semi-frozen when I finished this one.
I was getting ready to leave. Actually I was turning around in the church parking lot when my eye caught a “Privé” sign and a lamp post. I love to have such things in my sketches and so I decided to sketch this scene. Once again, however, I would be fully-exposed to that darn wind coming off the St. Lawrence. I am old but even I can learn new tricks. I positioned the car so I could sketch while sitting inside. About halfway through I was wishing I had a hacksaw to eliminate the steering wheel but it worked out ok once I got the hang of it.
Stillman & Birn Zeta (5×8), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon Black
There’s so much to sketch on the island that I could go there every day and not get bored. In another couple weeks the trees should be putting on their annual ‘fall colors’ light show and I’m going back ‘real soon.’
Sometimes it seems there is a gap between the art world and the exploding popularity occurring in the sketching world. Regularly we hear people define ‘sketch’ as an ‘unfinished work’, a definition that might have been fine when Monet was noodling his ideas about lily pads. But this is not what modern nature sketchers, urban sketchers, travel journalists, etc. are doing. Our sketches are finished works and they’re ending up on stamps and in books. They’re being sold, either as originals or as prints.
Sketching has become a representational art form unto itself. There are new books on sketching or containing sketches being released so regularly that it’s hard to keep up with them. Typically modern sketches are done in sketchbooks, in limited periods of time. Often the artist is sitting on a tripod stool, on location, possibly chatting with passers-by. For most sketchers, their emphasis has shifted from the creation of art to hang on walls to simply enjoying the process of art. Some sketch with precision. Others sketch in very loose fashion. Some border on doing caricatures of their world. Somehow, in spite of these different approaches, there is a unity in what sketchers do, mostly related to the process of doing.
While different from studio art, sketching nevertheless shares many aspects with it and I sometimes lament the fact that so many artists don’t understand, or even know of in this growing part of the art world. But something happened in Quebec City last week that was one of those “we’ve come a long way baby” moments.
It came in the form of a book launch for a wonderful book titled Le Carnet Des Escaliers De Québec. The book was a collaborative effort organized by Natalie St-Pierre. It contains 180 pages of great sketches that represent the majority of the staircases that exist in Quebec City. As an aside, we have a LOT of them because of the nature of the city, including several containing hundreds of steps. The artists involved were, Natalie, Hugette Asselin, Guylaine Côté, Louise Denault, Magelline Gagnon, Louise Grenier, Sylvie Riverin, Monique Rousseau and Pierre Toupin, the token male in the group. Marie Dagenais wrote the text for the book.
The book is not just a great compilation of sketches, however. It’s truly a tourist guide to the stairways. Maps, beautiful sketches themselves, locate all of the stairways ane descriptions and histories of each stairway provide insights into Quebec and its development.
The quality of the book is sufficient reason to write this post but the book launch says something about just how far the sketching world has come. This launch was held at City Hall. It was an invitation only event and was hosted by the mayor. Now if you live in a small town, you might expect a mayor to host a book launch by a group of locals. But Quebec City has 700,000 people in it; our mayor is a busy guy and yet he spent an hour at the book launch. Roughly 100 people were in attendance and we were served amazing hors d’ouevres and wine, along with great conversations. It was truly an inspired and inspiring gathering.
I’d arranged to meet sketching buddy Claudette downtown and so it wasn’t completely nuts when I started walking in that direction in spite of the fact that I was walking in a cloud. It wasn’t raining but a mist was collecting on my glasses and clothes. Walking fast beat the cold away, though.
When I met Claudette we sort of looked at each other and both of us were disappointed with the morning. We decided to walk through the old port area looking for something to draw but I think neither of us had our hearts in it. It was pretty miserable, depressing weather and we ended up ready to cancel completely.
Claudette spotted a cast lion that was part of the entrance to a building and as we looked at it we both decided it would be worthy of a sketch. What I saw was how we humans have lost site of esthetics in favor of convenience and modernity, or whatever word you want to use. Someone had destroyed much of the beauty of the lion casting by installing a large electrical plug below it and wrapping a wire up around it. A real artist would probably have drawn the lion, leaving the plug out and ‘improving’ their drawing. I’m more about documenting city life and thought this debauched piece of art could be the subject itself.
I did make the mistake of doing it in too small a format for a shaded pen drawing like this and both the lion and plug suffered from a lack of space for proper shading. Nevertheless, here’s the 3×4 sketch, done in a Moleskine watercolor book. I used my Pilot Prera and Platinum Carbon Black.
To both of you who follow this blog, I apologize for my absence. It’s embarrassing to admit but without my laptop I’m dead in the water, and I had a hard drive crash late last week. I got the problem diagnosed by Friday night and then began waiting for a hard drive to arrive in the mail. This is not something you want to be doing as the weekend is just beginning.
So, I scuttled around in my basement and, using ancient computer parts, cobbled together something that looked like a computer and ran almost as fast as an abacus. But it did get me email and limited web access. The drive arrived on Tuesday and I’m now back in business Thank goodness for backups as not much was lost except for a lot of time.
3×5 – Pilot Prera w/Lex Gray ink
During that time I went for a long sketching walk. First stop was to do a quick sketch of sailboats in the harbor. Me and sailboats don’t get along well, mostly because I don’t know much about the rigging and doo-dads that encrust the top surface of sailboats and, from my distant vantage point, these things are hard to make out. But I continue to try and this sketch consumed ten minutes of my time. The fact that I was standing up didn’t help much. I do wish I could get better at sketching while standing 🙁
I wandered around downtown for a while and then got the notion to head to Levis as the sun was out and I always look for an excuse to ride the ferry. On my way over I recalled a small, but rather ornate house I’d seen while I was in Levis sketching with fellow sketcher, Yvan. This is it. The people got sort of faked in using people who were walking by. I ran out of room while adding the woman and I’m not sure she has a left arm. If she does, it’s somewhere in the guy’s right side (grin).
Stillman & Birn Zeta (5×8), Pilot Prera w/ Platinum Carbon Black ink