When I started painting I was into painting barns. OK, being from Wisconsin might be one of the reasons, barns and farms being as numerous in Wisconsin as bad advice from a barstool. But I think it had more to do with me working in my safe zone. Barns are straight lines and right angles and never complain that you make them look fat in your rendition. Having an industrial background, organized lines and angles were very comfortable to me. Easy. Well, it got boring, so I moved on to still life, cows, horses, animals, landscape, and finally people. For years I wasn’t very good at any of it, but over time I became an average amateur watercolorist. Which for me is just fine.
During that time I got better at drawing. In watercolor it is common to make a detail sketch in pencil and then paint over it. Sometimes the pencil lines show through, but more often than not those marks disappear under layers of water and paint. I would often find myself, having made what I felt was a pretty awesome sketch, hesitant to start painting. The knowledge that I would be “ruining” my sketch, that it would be gone forever, well that can be hard. Okay, I was going to say it’s like sending your kid off to college, but that might be a bit of a stretch. Anyway, you get the idea.
Enter my pen and wash phase. With pen and watercolor wash the line remains a vital part of the drawing. The best of both worlds. You get to keep your precious line, and you get to throw down paint. It’s for the most part quick work, but you still need stuff to sketch and paint. With standard watercolor, a painting can take days or weeks to complete, usually using photographic references. With pen and wash they are usually complete in one sitting, an hour or two. So you run out of reference photos, of inspiration. You start painting anything in the studio, chairs, art supplies, jars of paint brushes. You troll images on Google, but after a while that all feels wildly unoriginal.
So for me the likely answer to “why urban sketch” seemed simple. There are an unlimited number of scenes in a city to paint, where even the same building can be approached from multiple perspectives. And you are no longer a slave to “realism.” You can interpret the scene in whatever way suits your mood, through creative use of line, perspective, vanishing point, focus, white space, and color. If you look at the plethora of urban sketching photos online you can see the incredible talent and creativity of some of these artists. I’m not that good at it, but I get better each time I go out, and it is fun.
But the likely answer is not always the real answer. To me, the real answer to “why” this kind of art is the connections. I’ve met some really nice people who have been gracious enough to sit with me; to sketch and paint and chat about our lives. Without this hobby we might have never crossed paths. That would have been a shame.
Last week I was out sketching on Broadway in Billings with Annie, a nice lady whose path I crossed on Facebook as I was searching for urban sketching “buddies”. After we had finished painting, and she packed up her things and left, a guy came up to look at my sketch and complimented it. I’m pretty sure he was homeless. He’d been hanging around the area since we’d shown up, but not in a creepy way. I got the feeling that on our little corner where we set up to sketch and paint we were sort of like visitors in his house.
He had with him a plastic shopping bag and inside a pair of women's shoes. He asked me if I wanted to buy them for my “lady,” ten bucks is what he asked. I told him that Annie was just a friend, and that she was not my “lady.” I told him that my “lady” passed away almost two years ago. When I told him that he looked saddened. He offered his condolences. “That must have been hard,” he said, and he told me he’d pray for me. I was touched. I asked him what church he prayed in, and he said he didn’t belong to a church and just prayed on the street. I told him that the God I know doesn’t care much about buildings anyway, so thanked him and told him that would be nice. He said “I know a little bit about “loss” myself,” and proceeded to tell me that he lost his own son some years ago in a traffic accident, and that the boy died in his arms. We talked together then a little bit about loss. As I packed up to leave I handed him some money and told him I didn’t need the shoes.
A few years earlier, a few months earlier, even a few days earlier I might have driven past this guy and looked down my nose at him. Now I wonder how many of us, at some point in our lives, might have been just one or two strokes of bad luck, or one or two bad choices away from where he is right now. Had I not been sitting out on that corner, had I not had the chance to interact with this man, I would have missed a very meaningful connection with a fellow human being, a fellow traveler on this journey we call a life.
In urban sketching they say that the act of sitting with the scene, being part of it and paying attention to the surroundings, the weather, the sounds, the wind, the people, provides a more meaningful connection than the quarter second snap of a camera shutter. I don’t think I’ll ever look back at this sketch, or drive by that corner, without thinking of that guy cradling his dying son. A total stranger took the time to connect with me, to share our losses, to share some comfort, and to offer the gift of prayer.
If that isn’t enough incentive to keep doing this thing, I don’t know what is.
