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...
We took 3 car loads of screaming 13 and 14 year olds to the Paradice Ice Skating Rink at Aotea Square on Saturday. It's the pop-up version of their big rink out at Avondale that returns each winter. It's a great place for the kids to have a blast on a typically wet and miserable Auckland July school holidays and ensures parents pockets are completely empty by the time the kids go back to school.
The birthday revelers had a ball of course a few crashed here and there, nothing too serious, and I got to grab a couple of sketches.
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