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...
Here are some old cottage sketches from our Akaroa trip over Easter - if it's one thing Akaroa does well it's old houses! This first house below - the Langlois-Eteveneux cottage is one of the original French cottages and was pre-fabricated in France then shipped out. It certainly does have a slightly different look and construction to most of the other cottages in town.
This cottage below got the better of my landscape sketchbook - I had to crop the roof off so it could fit nicely. The street names are a legacy of the early French settlement in Akaroa, this one is on Rue Jolie...
Obviously the building below isn't a cottage at all! Pretty neat though. It's the Old Shipping Office (presumably that means there's a new one somewhere?) and like a lot of early NZ commercial buildings it's constructed of timber to look like stone even down to the turned balustrades and wooden keystone at the top.
This one at the top of Rue Jolie has flowering nikau palms and awesome harbour views...
This one is on the not so French sounding William Street...
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