Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
By now you've probably heard about or seen the changes down at the Wynyard Quarter on Auckland's revitalised waterfront which officially opened on Saturday morning. There is so much fantastic new stuff to check out down there I guarantee I'll be back with more sketches of the area soon.
Something that's interesting though is the amount of old stuff that's part of the development. For a start there are the trams that return after an absence of over 50 years, they look great in 'carnation red', apparently the colour of our original trams, I got a sketch as they left their shed on Packenham Street first thing yesterday...
Other old stuff includes Silo park comprising the historic silos on the western end of Jellicoe Street (apparently kept as a nod to the areas industrial past). If you got a chance to climb to the top on opening day you would have had a spectacular view of the whole area including the old sheds (redeveloped as funky restaurants and bars), Michio Ihara's reinstated Wind Tree sculpture, and old fishing bouys repainted and arranged jauntily about the place.
Something that's interesting though is the amount of old stuff that's part of the development. For a start there are the trams that return after an absence of over 50 years, they look great in 'carnation red', apparently the colour of our original trams, I got a sketch as they left their shed on Packenham Street first thing yesterday...
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Thanks.
PS From your sketch of the canoes I've learned that a blog friend has family connections to the Great Voyage. Thanks again.