As I write this I’m preparing for a little end of summer vacation. We’re jetting off for a week for a family adventure. And I’m bringing my sketchbook, of course.
I came back from Japan last year with a dozen urban sketches in a notebook, and it has become one of my favourite souvenirs. And yet, invariably, when I show anyone their first question is always: how long do these take you?
Sketching isn’t a camera, obviously.
It’s not fast, and so saying that I can draw pretty fast is a relative expression of time investment. I can draw pretty fast, but that means I usually spend less than thirty minutes with my pen sketching out the details of a scene.
Again, it’s not a click and go. It’s find a place to sit, out of the way of the bustle, and then work through the scene, chewing out the shapes and shadows, poking in the details, and trying to get as much as I can before either I attract an audience or annoy my ever-patient wife.
Urban sketching is the opposite of urgency.
I may have enjoyed it in my youth, and maybe even been pretty good at such forms, but I think my patience would have been less available to the pages. Sitting somewhere with no pressure to keep exploring the bigger place but instead soaking in the details of just one spot, one scene, one moment… that’s the persistence of maturity, I think.