Friday 30 March 2012

What happened to March?

Time is going so fast now it's almost a blur. I've hardly got any drawing done the last couple of weeks as I've been so busy. But don't ask me what I've been doing - I can't tell you...I don't know! I've not even been procrastinating (hardly), I've just been keeping on top of all the day-to-day stuff and am genuinely perplexed when I look at my watch and it's already midnight.


Last Tuesday I thought I better get out of the house and attempt to draw something other than my baby. So I parked the pram and plonked myself on a bench in what I fruitlessly hoped was an inconspicuous part of the town square. I really admire people who draw openly in a public place and can deal with curious passer-bys. I look less an artist and more a furtive scribbling weirdo. And if I'm trying to draw people then I probably resemble a furtive staring pervert. So, doing my best to ignore the dubious characters drinking out of beer bottles two benches down, I decided to concentrate on a building, the Rathaus (town hall).


I find architecture a struggle at the best of times and true to form the interruptions started almost immediately. Three minutes in, two young, good-looking men came up and asked... no, not to see my etchings and no, not for my phone number...they wanted to know where the next butcher's was located. After dealing with this rather random request I returned to my subject only to find the view blocked by a woman with pram. These self-absorbed mothers! Tchaah! She toddled on eventually and I was just starting to concentrate when a voice right in my ear asked if I was concerned with the state of our society full of drugs and crimes. Feeling tempted to commit a criminal act myself at this point, I turned and...yes...it was a Jehovah's Witness. She had sneaked up silently from behind on her mobility scooter. A mobility scooter! That's just not cricket, is it? I doubted I could outrun her with the baby in tow. And using my only daughter's pram to ram her would just be wrong - it was an expensive pram and I wouldn't like to damage the chassis. So I braced myself. Actually she was a nice lady, albeit a rubbish evangelist. She quickly agreed that it wasn't be worth taking a magazine if I wasn't actually going to read it and moved swiftly to a topic closer to her heart - her granddaughter in Canada. I started to wonder if she actually was a Jehovah's Witness; maybe she just used that as a ploy to launch herself on potential listeners. Fortunately a prior acquaintance/victim came along and she turned her full attention to him. Just as well as I had started to slump and drool.
I turned, without much hope, back to my sketchbook. Sure enough, I have bared wiped off the dribble when Elaine decided she'd had enough of this nonsense and it was time to go. 


So it was a pretty hopeless sketch which I attempted to improve with a bit of watercolour at home.
Kempten Rathaus (the thing in the foreground is a fountain, still boarded over for winter)
Even if a sketch doesn't work out, it helps you see more. For example, the second, lower, round disc is not another numeric clock, as I always assumed but shows the astrological signs. The Rathaus has been restored at some point in the fairly recent past. I don't know if it had bomb damage from the war or maybe it was just in need of age-related restoration. Here's how it looked in 1929 (from a postcard image):
I wasn't too lazy to draw the windows - they don't exist anymore - and the steps are different too.

This week I only got this naptime drawing done (photo's not the best unfortunately) of Elaine entangled with her bear:


It's now 12:45 am (how did that happen?!) so I'm off to bed.

2 comments:

  1. It's late. I need to go to bed.
    but want to say I like the building I can see and saw the baby on TMC and commented there. Hug her for me please.
    I'll come back to read the rest tomorrow.

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