Tis The Season To Be Jolly?

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Bah! Humbug! – Ebeneezer Scrooge

When I was a kid the best part about Christmas was that my train got set up under the Christmas tree.  Well, that was the second best thing.  The best thing was that, back then, the icicles we put on the tree were made from aluminum, not plastic like they are now and, if you laid one across the rails of my train tracks, you could make sparks.  Yeah…THAT was the best part about Christmas.

But these days? Am I really suppose to be ‘jolly’?  Are you kidding me?  Modern Christmas seems to be one painful experience after another – like shopping.

I was Christmas shopping the other day.  I hate crowds so you can imagine the thrill this was for me.  Aside from not being able to find what I was looking for, a woman ran into me and almost knocked me down.  She said she didn’t see me (I am only 6-feet tall after all).  I spent half an hour wandering around without finding anything on my ‘to buy’ list.  No, that’s not correct.  I found scotch tape.

2013-12-11LampFleurd'lysBeing frustrated I sat down in the mall.  Sitting felt good and very soon I had my notebook in hand and I sketched a lamp post and associated thingies (technical term meaning “I don’t know what they are”).

I was trying my new Pilot Penmanship which is the finest-writing fountain pen I’ve ever experienced.  It was not pleased by the el cheapo paper in my dollar store notebook (3×5) and kept picking up paper fibers.  Nevertheless, it was good therapy and I even smiled when the guy who was watching me told me it was a good sketch.

So…I went back into the fray.  I decided try the new French store, Target.  We’re just starting to get them here.  Wander…wander…wander.  Ah…score…I found the battery we need for the door chime and one of the items on the gift list.  Only a little… some… a lot more to do.  Sigh… guys are not designed for this shopping stuff.  We have insufficient stamina.  Frustration is back.  Time for tea.

2013-12-09McDo 2013-12-10PeopleAt the food court, sipping tea I got from Tim Horton’s.  They’re better at coffee.  Notebook is out again and I quick-sketched people who, like me, are sitting around, wishing they were somewhere else.  You can see the frustration on their faces… nobody is jolly.  Or maybe I was jnust projecting.  Oh how I long for the days of aluminum icicles on railroad tracks.

Sketching At Chez Temporel

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I first came to Quebec City to do a post-doctoral fellowship.  That was to last two years and it did, and I left as I took a research position in Ontario.  More significant, though, was that during that period I met my wife.

I knew nothing of Quebec and even less French than I know now.  You can’t do much with a vocabulary that consists of bonjour, champagne and pamplemousse.  Why I knew the word for grapefruit is still a mystery to me.  If you’ve ever been in a city where you don’t speak the language, you know that sticking to tourist areas and shopping where prices are clearly marked is a survival skill.  I ate at McDonalds a lot because I could order by number.  And so life was for me.  Many parts of the city were off limits to me.

When I started dating my wife, she took me places I’d never been.  One of those places was Chez Temporel, a small cafe off the main streets.  Its facade would not be out of place in Paris and, at the time, the inside could easily have been a place where writers and artists went to talk and philosophize.  In fact, according to history, Chez Temporel hosted poetry readings and folk music on its second floor.

I discovered bol du cafe au lait (bowl of coffee with milk).  I’d never heard of drinking coffee from a bowl and, typically, I put nothing in my coffee.  But I LIKED this stuff, particularly the large volume of it that came in the bowl.  My remembrance of that first bol might be sweetened by the memories of a budding love affair but that’s another story, for another time.

Today I’m reporting on a more recent trip to Chez Temporel, this time with sketching buddy Claudette.  We arrived at 9:30 which, on a Monday, is a great time to go there to sketch there if you want to sketch the restaurant itself.  Not so much if you want to sketch people as this is their lull period.  We had a great time.  Claudette did sketch the few people who were eating.  I sketched this:

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4x6), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4×6), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black

On The Dark Side

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I was at the Musée de la Civilisation with Yvan on Sunday.  We were sketching.  We had decided, at the last minute, to meet there and we had a great time.  I suppose it’s somewhat redundant to say we were sketching and we having a good time as one thing means the other to me.  Nevertheless, we were sketching and having fun.

I decided to do something very different, at least for me, but first a bit of back story.  Albert Laliberté was a Québec sculptor who, like many Quebec artists at the time, headed to France to lead the Bohemian life and bask in the glow of the great French masters, and consume large quantities of wine.   While he was there, Albert attended the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he developed his skills.  One of the things I love about his work is that he sculpting people working with their hands, so he has created bronzes of blacksmiths, cobblers, and even painters.

What has this to do with Sunday sketching at the Musée de la Civilisation?  Well, as it happens, the Paris on Stage exhibit has a room devoted to Québec artists who went to Paris and then returned to have significant art careers, like good old Albert Laliberté and several of his bronzes are on display in that room.

From the “I’d like to draw that” point of view, however, the museum’s multiple light sources and always from above, make it difficult to sketch the details of the pieces as they are often in very dark shadow.   I thought this might be an opportunity to try something different, for me, and so I launched myself into high contrast mode, concentrating on the shadows as the major source for shape and relegating outline to a more minor role than most of my sketches.

As a first attempt, I was fairly satisfied with the result.  I still have much to learn about drawing and I’m REALLY a rookie when it comes to this approach.  But, here is Laliberté’s Paysagist (landscape artist).  Apologies to Monsieur Laliberté.

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6x9), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black, Tombow brush pens

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black, Tombow brush pens

Sketching the Past – episode 2

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Recently I posted a sketch I’d done of a caboose, done from a photograph taken when cabooses were part of our landscape.  In that post I floated the idea that if I was going to be forced to sketch from photos by winter, that maybe I should sketch things that used to be part of our landscape but that have largely disappeared.

Well, never say stuff if you don’t mean it.  My sketching buddies, Fernande and Claudette picked up on the idea and said, “You should sketch a bee-douze“, and I said, “Huh?”

They were surprised that I didn’t know what a “bee-douze” was even though they know my French isn’t very good.  It wasn’t a French problem, however.  “Bee-douze” is simply “B-twelve” in English but I still had no idea what they were talking about and I don’t think a lot of Francophones would know either.  But Fernande and Claudette both grew up in a part of Quebec called “La Gaspesie”, a rural part of the province.  They were taken to school in a “bee-douze” when winter snows prevented alternative transportation.

And you know what?  The B-12 is an important part of our technological history as it was a big money-maker for a company called Bombardier who invented snowmobiles and who are now one of the world’s largest suppliers of modern passenger train cars and executive jets.  Oh, and they still make snowmobiles via their recreational vehicle division called Ski-Doo.  Maybe you’ve heard of it.

The B12 gets its name from the fact that it could zip along above the snow, carrying 12 people.  Not the prettiest vehicle ever built, it gets high marks for its unique, almost Flash-Gordon-like round windows and teardrop shape.  I had fun drawing this one.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (9x6), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon ink

Stillman & Birn Alpha (9×6), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon ink

From Oil Painting To Sketch

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I’ve discovered something new to do – to practice my eye.  Being driven into museums by our cold weather, I’ve been staring at a bunch of oil paintings.  I tried sketching from them, trying to grasp the artist’s intent.  I’m not good at it and maybe it’s not even desirable to do so.

But I wondered what would happen if I didn’t try.  Instead, what would happen if I tried to look at the painting and “convert” it to my sketching style.  What would I learn?  I wish I could tell you what the answer is but I don’t really know yet, but I felt something while doing the following sketch.  I don’t know what it was but I think repeated treatments may change my sketching style, maybe even improve it.

Stillman & Birn (6x9) Zeta, TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black

Stillman & Birn (6×9) Zeta, TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black