Japanese Garden Festival

...is an annual fall event at Descanso Gardens in La Canada...I went to a beautiful kimono show put on by the Los Angeles Kimono Club, and learned a few things about kimono dressing.  Sensei Fumi Akutagawa, a master of many traditional Japanese arts introduced the show by saying "kimono dressing is a learned art".  I sketched some of her students of all ages...boys and girls, Japanese and non-Japanese as they paraded across an outdoor stage under the oak trees, wishing I could capture more  of the detail!

I returned the next day to see the Kishin Daiko Japanese Drumming Group performing under the oaks...

 I was really struck by the joyous expressions of the performers, especially Paige, the leader at left...

Kids were invited out of the audience to get a quick lesson in drumming...

A Month of Drawing in LA...

October was a month of many drawing events going on all over Los Angeles.  I sketched The Big Draw event at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles hosted by Ryman Arts (all the turquoise t-shirts!).  I learned a lot more about this great program.  Ryman Arts offers free studio classes to talented high school students from all over Los Angeles, where many of the public schools unfortunately offer little access to art.

At Grand Park, long scrolls of paper are rolled out to create giant murals...

The Gallery Girls modeled in costume for some young artists...

Rolling up at the end...

















The following week, The Big Draw met the Worldwide Sketchcrawl as the LA Sketchcrawl group met at City Hall in Pasadena...

 I always wanted to draw the Robinson Memorial that sits across
from City Hall, and the Sketchcrawl was the perfect opportunity! Jackie and Mack Robinson were outstanding high school athletes in Pasadena, and both went on to stellar careers.  Mack won the silver medal for the 200-meter dash in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Jackie Robinson famously broke the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Both of the brothers went on to be leaders in their communities.  The positioning of the heads is interesting--Mack stayed in Pasadena, and his portrait faces City Hall, while Jackie faces east, towards Brooklyn, NY.  The artists were Ralph Helmick, John Outterbridge and Stuart Schechter.

Some quick sketching at Descanso Gardens

...thinking again about the meat and potatoes of sketching...some quick studies in line and tone...

...before moving on to some color...the range between a warm yellow and deep Indranthene blue...

...and then more recently a large study of light and shade in a favorite spot, the Japanese Garden...

...and a few more studies in black and white...on the road to Santa Barbara...

 ...and from a cafe window in Pasadena...

Back at Echo Park...

...and some other stops around Los Angeles and the east end of Sunset Blvd...

When I last visited Echo Park, I was delighted to discover that the paddle boats have returned to the lake!  These are not the funky old boats I remember from years ago, but sleek new shiny "rubber duck" yellow!  They've made an instant hit, and the park is very busy on the weekends now...

Just east of Echo Park on Sunset Blvd. is a little gem of restaurant, Guisado's, that makes great little tacos of all kinds.  It seems to be a favorite lunchtime oasis for nearby downtown office workers...

It was great to have a late summer reunion at a favorite L.A. location, Olvera Street, with friends I sketched with in Barcelona--Shiho, Chris and John.  So much fun to talk about that fantastic experience, and get in a bit of sketching too.  Olvera Street is the oldest part of Los Angeles--I've loved it since I was a child...

Back home sketching...

The best way to come home was of
course to get out and sketch some more!  Here are a few around the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles...


A hazy summer afternoon on Los Feliz Blvd....


















Still in a traveling frame of mind, I visited the wonderful India Sweets & Spices store and vegetarian restaurant--a world of spices and other treats...

 Those Bollywood musicals are hypnotically addictive...















I love this place...their menu says they are the biggest Indian grocery store in Southern California...the beneficent face of Yogananda smiles from a picture behind the counter, and a grandmother sits and watches all that happens....

sketching my colorful lunch... 

More summer travels...to LACMA (sketching the monumental Rodin heads perched enigmatically on the staircase leaving the museum), and to the Getty Center...

A Last Look at Barcelona...

Stretching it out a bit, I suppose, so that the feeling of being there lasts a very long time!  What a truly amazing and beautiful city--I dreamed of visiting Barcelona for many years to see Antoni Gaudi's work, but discovered so much more.  And of course, so much more to return to see!

The most well-known of Gaudi's buildings is La Sagrada Familia, the great cathedral that has been a work in progress for 131 years, being entirely built from donations...
I was so fortunate to get a free ticket to the Sunday afternoon International Mass from my hotel--I came in expecting to sit in the back to sketch, but was instead kindly ushered up to the front!  This is an indescribably moving place--a church of nature unlike anything else...

Gaudi's Park Guell is an enchanted world...a place where I could spend many days.  Musicians are playing all over the park, which adds to its magic.  I sat for a long in the shade of the rocky colonnade listening to the hypnotic sound of a "hang", which looks and sounds a bit like a Caribbean steel drum...

Gaudi lived in the house at right from 1906 to 1926, on the left is one of the delightful "gingerbread" houses at the entrance to Park Guell, sketched from the outdoor cafe...

Gaudi's Casa Batllo, sketched as day turned into night, so its iridescent beauty became even more shadowy and mysterious...































                                           



The day after the Symposium, some of my fellow sketchers and I set off at a more relaxed pace to the Parc del Laberint d'Horta--the Labyrinth Park, a historical garden with a maze, palace and pavilions--lovely!  (Made me think a bit of a more exotic Huntington Gardens...)






















And a couple of quick evening sketches...a view at dusk from Montjuic of the city below and La Sagrada Familia, and the Moorish fortress on Montjuic lit up at night...

Sketching in Barcelona

I was so happy to take part in the most recent Urban Sketchers Symposium in Barcelona as a workshop instructor.  I can hardly describe how wonderful it was to meet so many of my fellow sketchers whose work I've followed for years, with a feeling of familiarity--and even better to finally meet face to face, however briefly!  Besides teaching 3 sessions of my workshop "Panorama in Light and Shade", I had the great opportunity to take workshops from 2 artists I admire very much, Melanie Reim of New York and Luis Ruiz of Malaga, Spain.  So great to see how other artists work and try new ways of seeing...the spirit of experimentation was everywhere!

From Melanie's workshop, "Channeling Picasso"...quick sketching what appeared about to be a police action on busy Las Ramblas with brush and ink...














Some sketches from Luis Ruiz's workshop "Actors and Stage", in a slightly quieter part of the city, lovely Pla dels Angels...

As afternoon turned into evening after my workshop, I took some time to work a bit more on a demo sketch I'd started, and mostly just soak up the fact that I was there in this lovely place, at the harbor of Barcelona.  My workshop focused on creating patterns of light and dark values across the page--starting with a monochrome palette, and then making the transition to color by observing warm and cool colors--and the effects of atmosphere in the landscape.  Here I'm working with a split complementary palette--blues and warm earth colors...

There were nightly sessions of "drink and draw"...with company in which it was polite to stop talking and just sketch!

...experimenting with some of the 
great "giveaways", like brush pens...



...even drawing my food, something I don't usually have the patience to do, but couldn't resist the array of fresh grilled vegetables!  This was at a tapas bar in the wonderful marketplace La Boqueria...

...and another sketch at La Boqueria...

...waiting in line at the Picasso Museum, in a narrow street in Barri Gotic, the ancient city center, and sketching fellow sketchers at our "base camp", the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona...
More of Barcelona later on...