Urban Sketching Begins At Home

Early November sometime (dates defeat me these days)

I am down at the quay in Killeenaran, the coast near my home in Galway. I have thrown Reuben the terrier into the basket in the front of my bicycle and cycled to the shore. My intention is to make a little movie about my SketchPocket for YouTube: the bags are due to arrive with me in Ireland at the end of November, and while I am supposed to be promoting them I am doing very little of that. I am not too concerned though (less than I should be, perhaps) because the bags have flown out via pre-order and I am down to just 20 bags in total this side of Christmas…and I fondly think that once people see them in use in public, with their fetching interior design and brilliant utility, they will sell themselves.

I have started a new job in Enniskerry, which I may have already mentioned. After four years teaching sketching online, ten years teaching sketching workshops in Ireland and across Europe, and over twenty years teaching art to children, my new class in Enniskerry represents my very first time having a regular fixture teaching adults. Between you and me, it’s something I have dreamed of for a decade and more. And it is everything I hoped it would be. It is a sheer delight to have the same people before me each week, as I get to know their personalities, their style, their approach and their smiles. I adore my online community, and every now and then, when one of them makes it across the ocean to see me, I put my arms around them and hold them close. Words can’t describe how that feels.

Now, all this time spent commuting and being away from my studio means one thing: I can’t scroll mindlessly on my phone anymore. Gone are the wasted hours looking at nonsense on my phone. I have deleted (and guiltily re-installed) certain apps, and I must delete them again. In fact, unlike the hordes who are deliberately leaving X, I am thrown off for “irrugular behaviour”, a claim that is so outrageous that I counter-storm off in a huff. I say to my family “unless they find not commenting or liking anything at all to be irregular then they’ve made a mistake”. Apparently I can appeal it, but I am damned if I am going to go grovelling to some Big Tech bot – and besides, I need the extra time I now have. (Note to self: misbehave on the other platforms so that I am banned, and get some more time back.)

The above is why I need to sketch. When I get exasperated with the world, it keeps me calm to focus on the subject before me, and race against time to get the outcome I want, as you’ll see in the following sketches. Race against the tide, and the boats starting to float. Race against my mother’s appointment with the eye doctor to be over, and my sketch of the car showroom opposite the clinic to be halted. Race against my desire to gobble up the coffee choux pastry I am sketching before I have captured it on paper. Sounds intense, but it’s more like when you’re sprinting when you were a kid – exhilarating, and leaving no space in your mind for anything else.

If you’d like to see more of that sketch unfolding, you can see it in my YouTube here:https://youtu.be/LNQmROVK904?si=c7t54tnaaAWQUCD0

Early to mid-November

My mum is having her eyes done in a clinic near her home. I’m driving her there and back, and park her tiny blue car in the supermarket car park opposite the clinic.

“Are you going for coffee or something while you wait?” says Mum.

“No,” I say, “I’m going to sketch right here.”

“But you’re facing a garage,” says Mum. “There’s nothing attractive about Castle Motors!”

“Yes, but you see, Castle Motors comes with a story, which my readers will like. It’s where Dad bought me my first car.”

“I see!” says Mum and heads off for her eye appointment. Within a few minutes I am drawing away, podcast on, fielding texts from loved ones, and I could not be happier.

Make Yourself Comfortable: It’s Story Time

It’s 1995 and I am 27 years old, and will soon be starting my PhD in Galway. I am home in Wicklow for the summer.

One day my father comes back from work in Bray with a surprise.

“I’ve bought you a car,” he says. “You’ll need to be able to get around in Galway. I bought it from Castle Motors down the road.”

Outside the factory he runs in Bray is parked a black 2-door Citroên DS. It is diesel and has no seats in the back. I am extremely excited. I love my new (old) car. I drive it to Galway. I start my postgrad degree, and myself and my fellow-postgrad girlfriends take up surfing and kayaking. I drive them to and from fixtures in my little black car. It would be highly illegal now, and probably was then too, but they pile into the back of the Citroên on cushions and we play Spiritually Ibiza ambient music on the stereo as we drive home along the winding country roads in the pitch dark after a wild day on the waves, salty and damp and still a little cold. Those drives are filed in the spot in my brain marked “cosy memories” and “I wish I was still young”.

(I would not want to leave you with the impression that I was a surfer. I was a faller. Turns out you get most of the good bits of going surfing from falling into the waves and getting rinsed in the churning cold water: occasionally I surfed, and yes, it’s definitely even better than falling.)

In November 1997, in a panic that I am about to turn 30, I meet a tall, dark and handsome Londoner at a Hallowe’en party who asks me to take him surfing. I agree – more in a sense of duty to be hospitable to foreigners than romantic interest, because I am so DONE with men – and we drive to the beach in my new red car, a Nissan Micra. My black Citroên has had an issue with the radiator and while I’ve had it fixed by a local Citroên fanatic and francophile (a Galwayman who smokes Gauloises, wears olive green fine-knit sweaters and wears his white hair slicked back). New friend and I drive home in the dark along winding country roads. Just before we arrive back in Galway my gentleman friend says he’s heard I am trying to sell my Citroên and that he is interested in buying it. He calls to my house a few evenings later and says he would like to take it for a spin. I sit beside him as he drives around the block in the dark.

He leans towards me and looks me right in the eyes. “Now, if there were anything wrong with this car, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you, Róisín?” he says in an extremely direct, and characteristic, way. “Because I like you and I think we’re going to be friends.”

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. “Yes,” I say. The following day I ring my father to ask him if it’s okay to sell a car that’s had a problem with the radiator. He says it’s fine, once you’ve had it fixed. My new friend buys the car. My girlfriends say I am crazy, that I will probably end up going out with this guy or marrying him or something, and that one day I will find myself on the motorway in the car with him and it will break down. I don’t listen: I need to sell the car. My new friend buys it. We exchange paperwork and then there’s no further reason to see each other. A few days later he phones me and asks me to dinner, and within a week the L word has been thrown around. Yes, that one, the one you aren’t supposed to say in the week you start going out with someone.

Six months later I am on the motorway with the tall dark man, who is now my fiancé. The car breaks down: the radiator is in trouble. We limp back to my parents’ house in the Wicklow Mountains, which we’ve left to head back to Galway an hour earlier. It takes us five hours to get back, as we have to keep stopping to let the engine cool down.

“Are you very angry with me?” I ask.

“No,” says my fiancé, “if it were my car that let us down, you’d be within your rights to be very angry with me. This way, you can’t say a word!” He laughs heartily.

The car is fixed. I must be forgiven because a while after the incident on the motorway we get married.

Roll on a year or so. It’s a hot June day, two and a half years since I sold the black Citroên, and my new husband continues to drive it around. I am at home with our first baby, who is about four months old, and my husband has gone into work. He parks the car outside his office in Ballybrit, in Galway’s industrial zone. When he comes back, the car is gone. He thinks it has been stolen. Then he sees it across the road, up a little hill, small flames coming from under the bonnet. The car has started itself, driven itself across the road, come to a halt up the little hill, then burst into flames. It is surrounded by onlookers. The local young guerriers see a car in distress and race to loot what they can from the back, a bit like rats. My husband retrieves his papers from the back before the flames destroy everything, calls the fire brigade and phones me to tell me the story.

(I am just about becoming aware that this is exactly the sort of thing that happens to my husband: the usual ups and downs that happen to all of us happen to Marcel, but only with the addition of the most absurd and cartoonish embellishments. If the occasion arises I will tell you some of these stories. If I did not swear on their veracity, you would say I was making things up.)

We are still married, and we still laugh about that Citroên, but nowadays, now that the first flush of love is past, there is an openly-expressed view that I was wrong and dishonest to sell a bad car to a new friend. This is not incorrect, and I must just live with it. Luckily my memory isn’t what it was, and a lot of time has passed, so I never feel pangs of guilt anymore.

Early and Mid November

I’m in Heuston Station, where I spend a lot of time these days, commuting back and forth for my new job. I sometimes arrive a little early for my train.

Left: one day I sketch a man playing the piano. He has a sleeping bag in a big bag on the ground by his feet, so I suspect he’s fallen on hard times. He plays Boogie Woogie with great skill and proficiency and for as long as he is tinkling the keys, back hunched, he is in bliss, his woes out of reach. Just like me with sketching.

Right: I am very early for my train. I treat myself to a choux pastry, and the first bite is delicious beyond description. As I sketch I can barely refrain from guzzling the rest, the only thing stopping me the realisation that my sketch won’t be great if I do not have a subject to look at. As soon as I have it in the bag, I dive in to all that coffee fondant, light pastry and whipped cream yumminess. I very quickly realise that it’s more than I can handle, and I start to feel queasy. God be with the days of eating all and sundry with ne’er a care for the fat, nor complaint from the middle region.

I use my amazing transparent-people technique to add the customers, including a burly train station security man whom the staff treat with great warmth. The transparent-people technique, with the background pre-drawn to give a placement reference, is a brilliant technique that works every time, and it’s what I have submitted to teach for USk Poznan…

Mid-November

I gather dead stuff from the hedgerows on my walk home. I think it’ll make a gorgeous bouquet sketch. So it does, but I feel it could be even prettier, so I pre-paint a background and try again…

…which is exactly the look I want. Then I darken up the background around the leaves even more…

and I like it even better! The class I teach really enjoy both techniques. Happy days…even winter ones.

Mid-November

The USk Symposium takes place in Poznan, Poland, next August. I REALLY want to go as an instructor because (a) I simply adore teaching and (b) all your expenses are covered when you are an instructor. I come up with two ideas for proposals.

The first is to explain how light works with watercolour, by using tinted paper and opaque white media first. It’s kinda cool. The second is to share my technique for drawing transparent people on top of a background setting. I buy a Polish croissant, called a St. Martin’s croissant, and sketch that first, then my son Paddy and I eat them (I buy two because I can’t decide which has prettier icing). It is very tasty and has almond paste or something in it. Then I toddle off to a local café and include it as the setting. I get both proposals in on time. Then at the last minute I think I would also like to submit a proposal for a lecture, about how teaching sketching has become an unexpected joy in my life, and has grown far more significant to me than some selfish idea of fame ever could have been. But ten minutes before the deadline my mother phones. She’s taken a spill and hurt her hip, her bad one. The time I spend talking to her takes a few minutes from my scantily-allocated time. Then when I hit Submit it won’t accept my file because it’s a bit too big. I take out a photo from the file. Still too big. I take out another. But now it’s 11.08, eight minutes late for the lecture proposal deadline. I ask the organisers if they’ll make an exception since my mother fell. They say no. I realise that’s fair enough, as everyone would want an exception if one is made (which turns out to be the case: I see requests for exceptions in the ensuing days).

Then I realise that (a) it’s my fault for cutting it so fine – I wouldn’t have made it anyway – and (b) I will now be free to go for a drink or something with my colleagues instead of preparing a lecture, should one of my proposals be accepted.

Point of Disagreement

Before I leave you, I want to share a point of disagreement with you. One of my students kindly shared a BBC Travel article with me entitled “Why Urban Sketching Retreats Are Taking Off”. It was nice to read that folk are loving to sketch, but the author went on to discuss easels, Italian villages and so on and I felt myself bristle. To me, that’s not urban sketching. That’s plein air painting. To me, true urban sketching is slotting it into everyday life, to keep the existential dread from creeping in. Or to strike a lighter note, to capture the everyday beauty that’s all around us. No one has to plan a trip somewhere lovely to reap the joys of urban sketching. What’s right in front of you is enough. But I suppose it’s a travel article so the author had to mention all the cool places she’s sketched. That’s great, but remember the old saying…

Urban sketching begins at home.

See you next time!