Palmetto Building, Columbia, SC

Big Apple Ballroom in Columbia, SC

The Big Apple Ballroom, drawn at lunch on a near 100 degree day. 

Piano Lesson

Piano lesson with Mrs. Marian Stanley Tucker.   

Upon a solo debut at Carnegie Hall in 1948, The New York Herald Tribune described her as "...quite a pianist in the grand manner... an astonishing technique and tone, and a fine sense of poetry and romance."  

Her home is as fascinating as she is.  Pope John Paul II once sat in an antique armchair she owns, the back of which is in the center of the picture.   

This is the second sketch I've done while waiting on the lessons.  The kids can only handle short bursts, so we're in and out in about 30 minutes.

Easter at Mimi's

My son reading in the room that has seen so many hours of me and my siblings reading, playing games, listening to music, and playing music.  We had a great time with many young cousins doing the same.  The same old wooden blocks we played with can be seen in the foreground.  Also, multiple Easter egg hunts in the yard. 

In the Board Room

Sketches during meetings with materials at hand: scratch paper, pen, and highlighter   

Across the street

Lunchtime sketch looking out from the 7th floor.  The downtown Marriott and Palmetto Center looming to the right, Sylvan Brothers in the middle with Blue Sky's sculpture installation "Neverbust" chaining it across the alleyway to the old Kress store.

Why I was late this morning . . .

To Tahoe and Back

A few weeks ago we went out west with kids, in-laws, nieces and nephews.  The kids all got up on skis, even if just for a little while.  Not much time for sketching except during our layover in Salt Lake City on the return home.

Drypoint

Yesterday I had the chance to sit in on an etching workshop taught by Steven Chapp.  I used a sketch I'd done at lunch the day before.  The technique is known as "drypoint intaglio," a fancy way to describe tracing our image onto plexiglass, inking it, and running it through a press.  Cool process, and educational.  It was held at if Art Gallery in Columbia, where an exhibit of Chapp's work can be seen.  

Walker O. Cain

While at my mother's over the holidays, I came across these Christmas cards from an architect friend of my grandparents.  Walker O. Cain worked for the firm McKim, Mead and White in New York, and later headed the firm in its last iteration, Walker O. Cain Associates.  I remember seeing these growing up, but never put together who had done them.  They remain inspirational pieces:  

Kirkin' o' the Tartan

Quite the cultural gamut today as we visited the First Presbyterian Church for the Kirkin' o' the Tartan and thence to Beth Shalom Synagogue for Bubbie's Brisket and Bakery.  A great display of unabashedly garish plaids with the skirl of bagpipes.  And the knishes were great.

DC

I was in Washington, D.C. back in September and made the following sketches:

The Old Patent Office, now the National Portrait Gallery, was designed by fellow Carolinian Robert Mills and completed in 1842.  One of my favorite buildings in the Federal City, it's almost an abstraction of classicism with its severe Doric details.  I ate in a restaurant across the street and above the International Spy Museum and caught the South facade as the sun was setting.  Each block of the honey-colored masonry is a different hue, giving a blockiness that adds to the severity.    

Union Station

Waiting for the Metro.

Lunchtime sketch

 Jason's Deli in the Vista

Living in Cola

A few weekends ago our neighborhood park hosted a film and tribute to one of our famous neighbors.  Stanley Donen grew up a block from the park and went on to direct several memorable movies with Gene Kelly, Cary Grant, and Audrey Hepburn.  Singin' in the Rain was shown on an inflatable screen.  About 200 people from all over town gathered on the lawn to watch.  I thought my kids wouldn't get into the dated film, but they loved it.  They particularly enjoyed Donald O'Connor's "Make 'em Laugh."

I work across the street from St. Peter's Cathedral in Columbia and took my lunch to the courtyard there to sketch.

Daughter

This week we celebrated my daughter's 4th birthday.  Incredible how time hurls by.  I came across a few sketches I did on that hurried day four years ago.  We were so fortunate to have the care we did, and to have an uncomplicated delivery.  The first sketch below shows the complicated equipment needed for such a normal birth.  The caregivers made it look effortless, as they came and went, but it was still an amazing thing.

Waiting and looking out the window:

Villa Savoye, sort of . . .

My kids gave me a Lego set of the Villa Savoye for Father's Day this year.  I had seen this series of Architectural Legos at conferences and in trade journals, but they were too pricey and kind of gimmicky.  A gift is another thing altogether, though.  This was an excuse to get back into Legos with my kids.  Not shown are Merida's castle from Brave and various Chima vehicles and forts.

Below is the nearly finished model.  This thing is crazy cool.  You really have to walk yourself through the building.  My daughter once again pointed out my poor use of color.

As an architectural grad student I visited the real thing just outside of Paris.  I recall not wanting to sketch any views that had been overly documented, a rationale I regret today.  That left the more utilitarian spaces, and so I sketched the entry lavatory off of the garage (left) and the kitchen (right). Letters from Le Corbusier's clients on display when I visited complain of how uninhabitable the place was.  Drafty and leaky, the Savoyes ultimately abandoned the "machine for living" a few short years after it was completed in 1931.  Seas of ink have been spilled over this building.  It remains today an amazing piece of sculpture and a museum for the architect's Five Points of Architecture.

July 4th, 2014

July 4th at the beach

All five siblings with spouses and children, our parents, and more cousins in two houses.  Wonderful to see all the young cousins growing up together.  Somehow I snatched a few minutes to do the below sketches.  My sketchbook spent most of its time in the hands of my daughter and her cousins, and their contributions to it deserve their own post.  Forthcoming . . . 

 An over-sized chess set was a hit.

 From the upstairs porch of the Floramay I.

Creeping in to the right of the below image is my daughter's impression of Hurricane Arthur, just passed through the day before. 

More from Kenya '99

Mount Kenya

In July we headed to Mount Kenya, driving from Nairobi at 5,450 feet above sea level and then over fairly flat terrain.  We didn't gain much altitude until we reached the base of the mountain.

Our first night was spent at Old Camp Moses, 11,155 feet above sea level. (two scenes below)



The second night we stayed at Shipton's Camp (13,898 feet).

We woke up well before sunrise on July 4th to begin our scramble up Point Lenana (16,355 feet), the highest peak.  We reached the peak and rested on ice-covered rocks just as the sun rose over a blanket of clouds.  While we watched, the clouds burned away to reveal the valley and plains below.  It was a breathtaking site, no doubt, and a great spot to celebrate the 4th.

After our scramble to the peak we hiked down the west side of the mountain through the Teleki Valley along the Naro Maru Route and to MacKinder Camp (13,780 feet).

The below sketch was done soon after we arrived at MacKinder Lodge.  I showed it to one of the guides who commented on the disorder of our packs and boots and how he would've arranged them more carefully.

Our last stop was at the Summit View Pub near the Naro Maru Youth Hostel, where we waited for our van.  The hostel was an old brick farmhouse from the British colonial period.  Stories of the Mau Mau rebellion and its final days when the rebels sought refuge in the forest around the mountain made us consider the poverty and crippling kleptocracy under which Kenya strains and from which we were so heavily insulated.

Below, Guides and other patrons of the Summit View Pub

   

           

My Old School

Davidson College

Back to dear ol' Alma Mater for our 15th college reunion.  I had a chance to sketch a few familiar scenes.

Chambers Building

Built in 1929 to replace A.J. Davis' original Chambers Building of 1855.  The Greek Cross drum, Diocletian windows and stepped dome borrow heavily from McKim Meade and White's Low Library at Columbia University of 1895.  The McKissick Building at the Universitry of South Carolina was built about ten years after Chambers and contains several identical exterior elements, including the shrouded maidens flanking the shield with the college seal.  Since my time this building has been thoroughly renovated, bereft of the battered wooden double hung windows and their rattling counterweights so easily thrown open when you'd hole-up in a classroom to cram for an exam.  Nary a chalkboard in sight these days.  All Smart Boards and carpeted rooms with tiered seating.



Oak Row

These wonderful slate-roofed rows were the original dormitories in the nineteenth century and today house state-of-the-art recording and rehearsal spaces for music majors, or at least they did when I was a student. Cunningham Fine Arts Building peaks out to the right and up the hill.  Neither were my typical haunts, but they present an idyllic scene and it was a great spot to sit.

Africa: Kikuyu & Mombasa, Summer of 1999

My first sketchbook.

In the summer of '99, after graduating from college, I went to Kenya with five classmates to work at a mission hospital in Kikuyu, near Nairobi.  Before I left, a friend gave me a large black sketchbook.

We brought donated medical supplies with us, shadowed physicians during rounds and procedures, and helped with clerical work around the hospital.  We were there for six weeks and were able to travel around the country, as well.

The Green House, a prefab metal clad structure brought over by Scottish Presbyterians around 1910, was the men's residence where three friends and I stayed.

Guard's house behind the Green House

Inside the Green House.





Porch of the Green House.

Van ride back from our photo safari in the Masai Mara and Serengeti.

In mid June we took a train from Nairobi to Mombasa on the coast.  On the 14-hour trip I read The Man-eaters of Tsavo.  Written in the Victorian era, it tells the story of lion attacks on the worker camps during the rail's construction.

We stayed in a beachfront resort in Mombasa for a few days.  Most of the tourists were European, and of them most were German.

Camels for hire, and an ever-present and watchful policeman.

Entrepreneurs on the beach.  Men selling everything from boat-rides to photographs and trinkets.  Anyone of them could speak a handful of languages, and would try them out on you until they got it right.  German was usually their first try, and English came in second or third.  I showed this sketch to a few of them, and they appreciated the policeman with his back turned.