Buttnekkiddoodles

 
A bit of a longer post this week. Took a trek to Cleveland to deliver illustrations for a gig I just completed. Rode Amtrak there, and hopped a bus for the return trip.

Ahhhh, public transit. I’m a fan. I’m onboard. I won’t live in a city that doesn’t have a decent functioning mass transit system. I like and applaud municipal, regional and national systems. Buuuut, they are not without some challenges. But then so is sitting a car for hours every week with your hands glued to a steering wheel. Back to some of the challenges about public transit.
Just had a 7 hour overnight ride During which I got 20 minutes of sleep and a very mild case of stiff neck today.
On a packed train I was the lone passenger with an open seat next to me. Shucks! So I turned side-saddle and drew the passenger across the aisle. But when we pulled into South Bend I gained the company of a fellow traveler about 11pm. She came prepared to endure a trek to Buffalo. Told it would be hot on a packed train, she brought a lot of gear, including… a fan she had just bought for $8. That’s her under a blanket with her new fan. Almost felt as if Cousin It from the Adams family was riding shotgun with me.

The above 3 drawings were from the return trip.

Across from the Glidden House where I stayed in Cleveland is Frank Gehry’s exciting 1996 Peter B Lewis building of the Weatherhead School of Management of Case and Western University. Jezusss! Includeding all the vanity naming on buildings is a time suck. A building I’ve draw before a few years back. I’m not a fan of everything Gerry does but he has been bold and this one collided his ideas with such rewarding results. For me the contrasting materials and forms are super playful and unlike the giant and ostentatious Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millenium Park, the Lewis building has far more successful and surprising dovetailing of the complex forms and materials. The Pritzker bandshell has an idyllic setting and can be viewed from so many angles including hundreds of elevated vantage points from the surrounding high rise buildings. And though it had the challenge to be bold and a centerpiece in a large park setting in the midst of the city which features great developments in architecture, American architecture in particular, I find it to be monstrous.

Fun to draw, but an ungainly, megalomaniacal Leviathan with some seriously clunky and uninspired transitions between the stage and surrounding metal structures. Part billowing clouds, part robotic pirate ship, the bulbous metal forms above the stage transition down around the stage as if they were inspired by a PG13 sci-fi movie about an anthrophillic alien sent here to save and protect humans from rogue robots from a warlord world somewhere in a faraway galaxy.
OK, so my imagination has much to do with my distaste for the Millennium Park monster by Gerry. But I find none of those visual and structural incitements in the Lewis building.

I do find a wealth of architectonic language and interplay and immensely more satisfying resolutions in his mashup of structure and form.
I’ve included a grisaille study of the Pritzker Pavilion from several years ago. Now the Lewis building was designed at least 3-4 years prior to the Pritzker Pavilion and 4-5 years following the design of Gehry’s stunning Bilbao Guggenheim Museum which rocked the world when came to be. So perhaps Gehry felt a need to make another big statement and there’s no reason a building, or art for that mater, cannot be both beauty and beast. The signature metal shingling often employed in Gehry’s oeuvre was inspired by among other things fish scales, and is visually dazzling. Perhaps, at times even blinding as can be seen by some of the photos I took of the Lewis building just this week. Gehry uses handsome materials and loves surface and contrast. Witness the choice of brick on the Lewis building. Relatively simple if not plain at first glance, the modest brick is well suited to the austere surface he creates on the masonry walls with unadorned windows meant to enhance the smooth flow of the walls as they arc, curve and bend to dance if not mimic the metal forms. Nice. Metal, born of heat, is known for retaining a sense of its liquid state. Brick, also a material that evolves from dry to wet to dry metamorphosis, often conveys a rigidness but in Gehry’s design is supple and smoothly muscular. Up close, the brick surface displays subtle indentations as if erosion and spalling have begun the demise of the buildings skin. Not so. Those features do however give further surface interest when viewed during the moments the passing sun cast a raking light on the building. That combined with the reflective metal skin mean the skin of the building is constantly changing as light conditions and weather alter the surface of Gehry’s work. It breathes. On one side he utilizes the razzle dazzle of the orchestration of swirling metal, brick and glass features, however, on the opposite side, with close proximity to the dark and heavily shadowed Ben C Green Law Library, a thick Brutalist building, Gehry provides counterpoint with a light brick building that has both delicacy, calm yet flair with equal assurance as it flirts with its knotted brow neighbor.
One review I read about the Lewis building talks of how it’s radical presence has segued to an everyday familiarity with passers by now used to it in a University Circle neighborhood that features a wonderful collection of distinct architecture from many styles. In part, the reviewer argues because it is embedded within Case Western’s urban campus and surrounded in close proximity by many buildings and well developed trees. But if you walk around the building you notice that you can experience this still dramatic structure from close, where it’s interplay and details thoroughly delight in its sculptural wit and sensuality. You can also appreciate it from afar as the landscaping on the Case and Western campus and the nearby museum campus afford great views from more than a couple hundred yards.
I’m a fan.

Fountain pens and Pitt Artist Pens on Clairefontaine Rhodia unlined notebook.

 
A sketch from last Tuesday at a favorite haunt of mine in Evanston. They are allowed to have a limited number of customers in now. Some places in Evanston have recently given up and closed. One is the Davis Cinema which has about 15 screens and will be sorely missed. People are exhausted from observing the restrictions and masks requirements, that of course excludes the idiots fighting these preventative measures, but the longer this is dragged out, the more chances new variants have to mutate, i.e. evolve for those numbskulls still resisting that overwhelming evidence. Drawn with fountain pen and Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens on Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolour sketchbook. #draw #urbansketching #puttartistpens #fabercastellusa #clairefontaine #goldlinesketchbook

Latest installment from the graphic novella The Java Knot. “So, it’s more than a habit… this pull to draw out in public. I don’t bring a book to read, I’m too fidgety for that. I’d rather check out my surroundings. Mostly, if honesty overtakes me, I prefer to watch people. Closely. Some would call it staring. But that sounds too passive to me. I go over them like an eagle casing the river below, looking for movement beneath the surface. Trying at times to understand the substructure of cheek bones, jaw muscles, the coordination of a hand’s architecture as it returns coffee cup to saucer then glides to flip the page of a book. But I also watch, as if, like the eagle’s penetrating glare beneath the waves, I can sense a current of thought. Knit brows, pinching lips, the coordinated grip of the masseter and temporalis muscles setting molars firmly into their opposing cousins. Frustration? Displeasure? Disapproval? Disgust? And will my drawings capture a fleeting moment of unguarded commentary, which, if elusive to presumptuous certainty, feels as though I’m now driving the streets of that someone’s neighborhood.
I sauntered to my recently favored cafe to find an interesting looking gent, with long uncoiling ringlets of Grey hair, seated curbside at a table, both hands occupied, one with coffee, the other with cellphone. I seated myself at an adjacent table such that we were facing each other, if obliquely. He no sooner placed his cup, empty, upon the table than the waitress appeared from within the shop and replaced the depleted cup with a full one. ‘Keep ‘em coming?’ she asked. ‘Keep ‘em coming’, he said. She turned directly to me, and asked my pleasure as I pulled sketchbook and pens from my satchel. Hot cocoa, bitter, no whip.
About then, a bicyclist coming up the street, glided along side the curb, slowed, nearly stopping beside the gent working his second cup, deftly laying an envelop on the table before him, and continued on. No exchange of words, nor looks. No nod. As I opened my sketchbook to a fresh page with little fanfare, the envelope slid into his jacket in like fashion with the hand returning to cradle the cup. His heavy lidded eyes never wandered from the cell’s screen.
I had payed little attention to the parking meter directly behind him, but as I began laying in the preliminary lines of his head, torso, the table and meter, I was amused to see the words PAY HERE backing his right arm. The very arm which had retrieved the envelope as if an extension of the meter.”

Drawn with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens and fountain pen on Stillman & Birn Beta Series sketchbook.

 
“Dogged pursuit. A month ago, I caught him, crouched over the shadowed keyboard and sunken screen. Same kiosk. Just as focused in the same gathered one-size-fits-all ball cap and banker’s bold pinstripes. Posture alternating between ankles crossed beneath the chair seat or stretched out before him. The library can be a noisy place with the self obsessed soliloquies, tutoring sessions, snoring, and phone calls but no distractions, no matter how grating or abrupt, pulled his jowly face from feasting on the grey-blue screen. And there’s a certain disinterestedness to these large rooms that excepting the acknowledging pinched grins of the passing regulars, allows for the in and out of the anonymous. Your business remains your business. Except these and those I chose to make my business.
And this guy, the crouching tiger in banker’s black’n’blue stripes, tracking something over the internet savanna, had come to my attention several times over the course of many months. But it was just last month, at the same booth, in the familiar attire and riveted posture, that I had inked his memory into my library. He really was a calm study. Little changing as I drew. The right mitt releasing the trapped mouse to tap the keys beneath his chin. The left mostly at rest on the desk yet dropping to tap at the keyboard or rising to knead his forehead.
Focus. No sign of fatigue, or boredom. No calls interrupting that steady gaze. Was he lying in wait, or had he already sunk his teeth in? Was this a cat-n-mouse game of gaining info and ground on the game while yielding as little of his position to the digital predation of marketers and hackers? To bring home the bacon without being lured into a poacher’s snare.” A snippet from the amorphous online graphic novella, The Java Knot.

Drawn with a Faber-Castell Essentio Black Leather fountain pen and Pitt Artist Pens

 
 
I was at the Evanston Farmers Market early Saturday morning sketching Nice Guy Nick at Henry’s Organic Farm stall when I heard whooping and the sound of a large party hitting stride. A PA system started playing Ring Of Fire by Johnny Cash very loud. I had an inkling but asked Nice Guy Nick what the commotion was about. He only said “Well, given the current situation…”pulled out his cell and sure enough, Biden had just been declared the winner. The jubilant sounds spread, cars started honking in all directions. On the way back to my apartment a car eased by horn a-honking with the American flag held aloft from one window and the flag of Chicago out the other. Rode the train downtown to Giamila’s and the celebration continues. Now, waiting till the keys to the White House are handed over.

Drawn with Faber-Castell Essentio Black Leather fountain pen and Pitt Artist Pens on Stillman & Birn Gamma Series sketchbook.