The 7th Swiss Symposium Of Urban Sketchers, Geneva: Part Two

Thursday morning, 4th September

I teach a workshop in the afternoon, so I head out to the workshop location I’ve been given to suss it out and maybe make an explanatory sketch or two. When I arrive at Place de la Fusterie close to the edge of the lake I am struck by the number of high-end shops on the connecting street. I feel myself recoil at all the consumption but then I remember that I add to it by producing a bag for…consumption.

I sit in front of a fountain and start a value sketch. The water makes a soothing trickling sound. Pigeons take their morning bath. They are chunky and adorable, their feathers wet and ruffled, sticking up in crests on their little heads. A few snooze on a stone ledge above the water. Wooden barrels are planted with begonias and flowers I don’t know the names of. Office workers from the surrounding blocks come out to lean on the fountain and smoke: a man adds a can of Heineken to his morning cigarette break. Looking at the sketch now I see I have forgotten to add the sparkles of water from the jets as they hit the pool. Just imagine them, and while you’re at it add a pleasant soundtrack of trickling, and if you could bathe the whole scene in strong morning sunlight I would be grateful. For the sake of authenticity you could overlay a soundtrack of heavy machinery doing renovation work on the church a few feet to my right, and although they have separated the works from the fountain by hoarding, it really disturbs the tranquility of the little square.

I know that some sketchers struggle to see which areas to leave white, and I have had the idea to get them to make a sketch on tinted paper, adding the whites afterwards, and so I make a second sketch Place de la Fusterie. Or maybe it is the first – there are more pigeons in it, and they like to get on with their day by mid-morning. I have used a black biro (ballpoint / Bic) to get the values of shade in, and I have brought a box of pens with me for the students to use.

Thursday afternoon

There’s a storm forecast for the afternoon, and the workshops are pushed forward a bit to try to avoid it. Not everyone gets the memo though, and my workshop is well underway when a handsome young couple turn up. They are gracious but are clearly disappointed. Note: never change the time of something at the last minute unless you literally have the people involved looking you in the eye, and listening. You don’t know if they’ll see their phone, get the message etc. Besides, the storm arrives a little early and my entire workshop is conducted under the eaves of a Starbucks near the Quai de Bergues. The sketching isn’t ideal – the humid air stops the watercolour and even the ink drying, meaning we struggle to get those deep values. What the workshop lacks in smooth operation is made up for (to my mind) by the light show put on by God; great forks of lightning cut across the big sky over the mountains on the far side of the lake – French mountains, I assume – and rolls of thunder thrill us, or me, anyway. The students are really sweet, and they’re very forgiving of my mistakes in French – this is one of the two workshops I have to give in French – well, most of them. French are gonna French and they can’t resist correcting you mid-spiel. Stop doing that, French people! You think I don’t hear a million mistakes from my non-anglophone friends, when they speak English? If I correct them, which I rarely do, it’s later, and quietly. Okay, that’s my piece said. Back to the afternoon.

One lady smiles hopelessly and says she doesn’t really speak French OR English but we muddle through via drawings. She is a darling. Another lady keeps telling me she signed up because of the drawings of people in the ad for my workshops…I explain to her that it is a values workshop, not a people-drawing workshop, but that she will draw people more beautifully if she learns values. She isn’t having it. Twice more she approaches me to complain about the workshop being different to what she has signed up for. In the end I ask her if she’s read the description. “I glanced at it,” she says. But there’s a happy ending! The next day she comes up to me and says that in the middle of the night she has had a sudden eureka moment about the theme of values I have been trying to convey. Success! And all the sweeter since she is a reluctant convert.

You’ve seen the theory of the workshop in the sketches above. Now it’s time for the reality in that storm and relentless rain. Not a pretty sight!

Friday 5th September

The next morning I check out a local park, decide it is much better, and start more values studies…

As with the previous session, I get them to make a series of little boxes with ever-deepening tones of the same colour, and I show them how to emphasise the difference in value at the borders between fore- and backgrounds.

Things go much better: strong sunshine and another lovely group. We are joined by a group of black young fellas out for a social afternoon. I am not crazy about the horrible smell of weed that wafts over, but their music is just what I listen to in the privacy of my very remote, bucolic studio. Those poor young men would be horrified to know that a middle-aged oul’ wan is loving their beats – or maybe they’d be delighted, and I am maligning them. One of the sketchers and I are enchanted by the style choice of one of the lads: he is very dark-skinned and he wears a lemon yellow tracksuit, top and bottom, with a white t-shirt and white stripes down the sleeves and legs. Stunning. She captures the values opportunity of this admirably.

I pass around black biros and they have fun making scribbly sketches.

One participant isn’t following the brief at all and says to me laconically “I’m not doing that.” Why do they come to a workshop with a theme if they don’t intend to follow it? In the end he does something really beautiful, so I guess he knows more than he lets on. Then he tells me about a famous photographer who spent much of his teaching life explaining values…and I tell him about a course in oil painting I did in July in which the tutor went on at length about – guess what! Values. Did you guess?

Saturday 6th September

The next morning is my third and final workshop. I think it goes best of the three, partly because the sun is lovely and there is no horrible weed smell but I think mostly because this one is officially in English and I am able to do my “schtick” a bit more smoothly. Weave the participants into my web, if you will.

Soon it is time to wrap up the event. I don’t take part in the Sketch Walk because I am in one of my moods, and because I haven’t read the Instagram announcement for the final group photo, I miss it. My mood worsens.

I shall stop there because my train is about to pull into Heuston Station: I will fill you in on the last day in Part 3. It won’t be long, I promise!