DryStoneGarden

‘I never liked color.’ Wilfred Thesiger

I’ve been watercoloring quite a few of my evenings lately. It’s been fun; there’s improvement, though watercolor’s definitely one of those things that takes a minute to learn and a lot more than twelve weeks to master. The sketch above is from the class field trip to the Legion of Honor Museum. We were there to draw from the artwork, but I thought the building itself was impressive, like it was waiting for Stanley Kubrick to come do one of his slow tracking shots through the halls. I’m learning watercolor for on-site sketching and possibly for the drawings we do for clients, but much of what I did in the class was working off black and white photos.

The ones below are all copied from photos by Wilfred Thesiger. A little random, but I had to do something, but I’ve loved his photos for years. He was the last of the old-school desert explorers and one of the all-time great travelers. Arabian Sands about his explorations of the Empty Quarter of Saudia Arabia is one of the great books of travel literature, The Marsh Arabs, about his years living in the marshes of Iraq is also great, and the compilation, The Last Nomad, is one of my favorite books. His writing describes the landscapes and cultures with an amazing clarity, and the photos certainly don’t need any coloring efforts by me. There’s a selection of photos here, but really his work is best appreciated in an old-fashioned book with text and images together. Both the photos and the writing have a stark black and white expressiveness that I fascinates me. They aren’t gardening or design books, but there’s a lot of good stuff about landscape in them.

I don’t know a whole lot about the photos I was copying. The town above is named Shibam, in Yemen. Below is Liwa Oasis, showing that ‘oasis’ is very much a relative term.

The others are scenes from the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert in the world.

The masked woman is from Oman. The last one below is from the marshes of Iraq, more of a drawing than a watercolor painting. We’ll see how much watercolor I do going forward. I did feel like it got its hooks into me, so these probably won’t be my last.

I mentioned that posting has been slow because this is a busy time of the year for me. Besides working and moving ahead on our garden shed/office project, I’m also taking a class in watercolor, which has kept me busy in the evenings, trying to get the hang of that rather beguiling and frustrating medium. This is the best of my efforts so far, a view of the entry drive to the house where I’m working right now. The sketch below is from last fall while I was walking around getting a sense of the property; the watercolor is from this past week when I was assigned a ‘landscape featuring trees.’ In real life the oaks are even more impressive than I managed to show on paper.

I’ve seen this video, Keep Drawing, a few times and, beyond just how cool it is to watch, I’m always impressed at the sheer number of drawings in it. It takes me diligence just to complete a single drawing, let alone an animation full of them. But I’m hoping to be good about drawing this year. I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but, if I did, keep drawing would probably be one of them.

Or my resolution could just be to complete my unfinished sketches. It usually only takes a little more drawing and a few minutes to scan them into the computer. I did these at Joshua Tree in the Hall of Horrors area. The one above is probably abandoned rather than finished; the one below I just darkened some lines and called it done.

This view is from a ledge up on the Old Woman formation at Hidden Valley. I liked how the boulder pattern seemed to casually enclose the space the way a freestanding wall might have done. The first sketch wasn’t showing that, so I redrew it at home; I’d do better if I tried a third time. As the title says, keep drawing.

Fort Cronkhite, Marin Headlands

I spent this past weekend out at Fort Cronkhite in the Marin Headlands renewing my Wilderness First Responder (first aid) certification. I needed the certification while I was leading trail crews. I probably don’t need to stay certified now, but I’m afraid to let it expire. It’s not the most enjoyable class. It tends to make me relive every past illness, injury, and other bodily misfortune, but it’s good stuff to know and it was great doing it out at the Headlands. Classic foggy California landscape goodness.

Le Conte Memorial Building

These are my other two drawings from my trips to Yosemite, sketches of two stone buildings,the Le Conte Memorial Building and the Ahwahnee Hotel. The Le Conte was built in honor of geologist Joseph Le Conte, one of the founders of the Sierra Club. The park’s first visitor center, it was designed by Bernard Maybeck’s brother-in-law and built with granite dressed to a rough, blocky ashlar set in regular courses. The Sierra Club now runs it as a children’s library.

Ahwahnee Hotel

The Ahwahnee got listed 26th on the list of America’s Favorite Architecture. It was built in 1927 with 5,000 tons of granite, 1,000 tons of steel, and 30,000 feet of timber. Beautiful on the outside, I’ve heard that the rooms have all the chic of a 1970′s Radisson. I got some of the proportions wrong when I was working out the perspective, but what can I say, Anita and I design gardens rather than buildings.

Yosemite Falls

Along with the north coast, I went to Yosemite several times in the last couple months. Absolutely amazing place, as the millions of people who visit all know. I used to be bothered by the crowds, but I’ve learned to navigate the park and appreciate it without feeling bothered by the crowds. Bringing my bicycle with me has helped immeasurably. It’s a beautiful, flat place to ride around in, and the bicycle is the key to avoiding the daily traffic jams. (The park service really needs to figure out a way to get people parking outside the valley and just using bikes and shuttle buses inside. I’m skeptical it will ever happen, but I can dream, right?) Climbing has also helped me love the valley. Obviously because the climbing is so incredible, but also because I’ve ended up spending longer periods of time sitting and staring at specific views. And not just on the climbs. Most days I would meet up with my climbing partner at the bicycle parking at Lower Yosemite Falls, and I started to really appreciate the effect that the view of the the falls has for people.

Yosemite Falls

It’s the tallest falls in North America, 2,425 feet, and probably the most viewed and photographed. Lawrence Halprin redesigned the approach trail and picnic area a few years ago, and there is a lot of stonework done by the same company that did all the stonework at Stern Grove. I don’t really remember what the approach was like before the redesign and I couldn’t find any before photos of the project online. I remember a parking lot and a lot of crumbling asphalt; I’m pretty sure the almost French-style view of the falls was already cleared. The redesign took out the parking area, made the trail into a loop, and rehabbed a lot of degraded habitat areas. The park service has a summary of the project. I like that it’s a constructed view. That part of the valley is filled with people, so it works well to have this spot designed for maximum effect. I can’t count how many times I heard people say, ‘Wow.’

Yosemite Falls

There’s a photo of the approach here. Below is a photo from the other side of the valley.

View from 4 Mile Trail