I NEVER LEAVE the house without a sketchbook. Mostly, I’m drawn to sketching the urban landscape. I’ve found over the years that sketching helps me acclimatize to my surroundings. When travelling, it helps me get a fuller picture of a place, in a much more nutritious way then snapping photos. (Which of course I do as well :) When I move to a new town or city, it helps to explore it, and when I’m exploring, it helps to sketch it, which allows my experience to sink in that much more deeply.

When I’m sketching, I get to know the surrounding landscape, a street, or a structure rather deeply… I am very present and in the moment, my senses are on alert, and I’m seeing and hearing everything, I’m a recording device! I’m not trying to get every detail, that way lies madness. I’m trying to simplify, edit, and tease out the essence of the structure, and in this way capture it’s personality. 

When I look back at my sketches later on, my memory of the event snaps into focus, the landscape, the house or structure, the weather, the sun or wind on my skin, the colors and smells, even the people who stopped to look at what I was doing, or who glared at me from the front steps of the house I was drawing, as if I may be a threat of some sort! (Happens all the time).

I think houses and buildings, and neighborhoods have personalities, we coexist with them, we feel them, and we feel the space between us. In recent years, I’ve developed a fascination with the often shimmering quality of space between things. Christopher Alexander writes in ‘A Pattern Language;

“there is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named, and a strong reciprocal relationship exists between environments and their inhabitants, and that places which exhibit this quality will awaken it in people, and people who have found the quality will embed it into the places they help to create.”

I had a secret desire to be an architect when I went to art school as an undergrad, but I was intimidated by the “bigness” of it, and got a degree in illustration instead. However, urban sketching has remained a constant and dedicated friend to me ever since. Now as a fine artist, architecture still has an important place in my toolbox, as I draw upon my reservoir of observed architectural lines, forms, and shapes, and the feeling of the senses reacting to my surroundings. All of which informs my art practice, and indeed, my life.