5/4/2004 My friend CT and my brother both stopped in for a couple nights last week. My days off weren't particularly notable or productive so I will skip over them for the most part. Dory was traveling for most of the week so on Wednesday night I went to the meeting of a different bonsai club in a neighboring area. I saw this guy there with a sketchbook doing a drawing in pencil of the tree that was being worked on. I was so impressed that I came home, pulled out my little notebook and started doodling. CT designs and sells clothes for a living...currently mostly t-shirts; he is a much better doodler than I am since he has been doing it constantly since he was very young. So, on Friday night (which for me is basically a middle of the workweek night,) I made him sit down and give me a little drawing lesson. I can't say that he was particularly helpful, although he did give me a couple of tips...but I am proceeding despite him.
This morning I went up to Santa Rosa to go to the dentist. Now, some of you don't know where Santa Rosa is; It's over an hour's drive north of the Golden Gate Bridge (which I recently learned is a prime example of Art Deco design.) I can't really say why I continue to drive over an hour to go to a dentist when there are many qualified ones within a few miles of my house...it does seem silly. The one thing it does do is jolt me out of my daily routine. The appointment was at 9am so I had to leave the house early. I was done at the dentist by around 10:30 so I proceed west toward the coast until I ran into Highway 1 and then turned south. It's a slow trip back to the city this way but I had a reason.
I only just became aware of the size and scope of the Point Reyes National Seashore. It is easily the closest large wildland area to San Francisco that I have found. I took a long hike, about 9 miles in all. I was a little worried about getting a sunburn but happy to get out on such a nice day. The main attraction for me was the presence of a relatively rare tree. The Bishop Pine grows only in small areas near the coast from Mendocino county south to San Luis Obispo. In 1995 there was a massive wildfire that swept through the area that I was hiking in. The ecology of Bishop pines is such that their regeneration depends on the occasional fire. The cones are sealed shut and remain firmly attached to the trunk or branches for many years after they are mature until a fire heats them up sufficiently to melt the resin that binds them closed. The seeds are released to fall onto the newly cleaned forest floor and sprout when it begins to rain again. There was a spooky feeling among the hundreds of snags, beneath which stood in stark contrast a crop of ten-year old saplings creeping their way skyward.
Near the beginning of the hike I stopped in an interesting forested area and sat down to do a little sketch. It took me almost twenty minutes to complete the sketch to my satisfaction. I could have spent much longer but decided to get moving again. When you photograph something you don't really have to think about how complex the composition is, but when you are drawing something it becomes very apparent how many elements there are in a scene. I was drawing the path going through a dark wooded area. There were probably sixty trees within the area that I wanted to draw, each of them with hundreds of branches and thousands of twigs.
5/4/2004 My friend CT and my brother both stopped in for a couple nights last week. My days off weren't particularly notable or productive so I will skip over them for the most part. Dory was traveling for most of the week so on Wednesday night I went to the meeting of a different bonsai club in a neighboring area. I saw this guy there with a sketchbook doing a drawing in pencil of the tree that was being worked on. I was so impressed that I came home, pulled out my little notebook and started doodling. CT designs and sells clothes for a living...currently mostly t-shirts; he is a much better doodler than I am since he has been doing it constantly since he was very young. So, on Friday night (which for me is basically a middle of the workweek night,) I made him sit down and give me a little drawing lesson. I can't say that he was particularly helpful, although he did give me a couple of tips...but I am proceeding despite him.