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...
Just back from a few crisp days in Napier, in fact the first few days were more than crisp I discovered while trying to sketch the old Hotel Central on Emerson Street (right and window detail below). The southerly was screaming through and my soft Aucklander fingers weren't coping so well!
Recovery from the cold came thanks to the excellent Mister D's further along Tennyson street for coffee and doughnuts. These doughnuts, which incidentally, don't quite look like a kumara as in my sketch above, and come with a choice of hyperdermics - very strange - but once my quince jelly was injected into the doughnut it was great.
Recovery from the cold came thanks to the excellent Mister D's further along Tennyson street for coffee and doughnuts. These doughnuts, which incidentally, don't quite look like a kumara as in my sketch above, and come with a choice of hyperdermics - very strange - but once my quince jelly was injected into the doughnut it was great.
One of Napier's most underrated attractions would have to be the Faraday Centre (above and right), a science and technology museum that is totally hands-on. The kids had a ball working the old phone exchange, typing out morse code, playing the Pianola, sitting in the 1903 Rover, trying the railway jigger, learning about hot type printing, spooked out by the iron lung, etc. They also got totally terrified by the Tesla Coil in action (me too - it's bloody loud).
It was the Winter Art Deco weekend too, so I got into the spirit capturing some of the architectural details including the maori kowhaiwhai influenced friezes on the ASB building above. A couple and some store mannequins with in 30's costume, two '32 fords in front of the T&G Building on Marine Parade.
Vessels on the dry at Ahuriri, sketched just on sunset and Westshore sketches at bottom...
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