Yiuming Temple, Alexandria NSW 2015

Some thumbnails preparatory to some on-site sketching.

I’m familiar with the back of this building complex, peeping above its high grey walls, its distinct red and green tilework at odds with its surroundings. It sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in Regent Street. Residential high-rise has been replacing the old factories in this part of Sydney over the last two decades; where horse knackeries once stood, now sit apartment blocks and luxury car showrooms.  The temple, with its accommodation for retired Chinese, has been here since the 1880s. With Chinese New Year growing in importance every year in Sydney, this temple opens its doors briefly to the public at that time. I understand the wonderful figurework at the roofline of the temple are characters from Chinese opera.

There is another similar temple/temple complex in Glebe of similar vintage.

Frazer Mausoleum – Rookwood Cemetery preparatory

More thumbnails from photos of Rookwood Cemetery, getting a handle on some of the historic architecture in particular, prior to an on-site visit. I don’t often get inside the buildings I sketch, especially to get a “mirror image” inside of how they look on the outside. The three I’ve sketched this week will all be open to the public on the upcoming Rookwood Cemetery Open Day, so I look forward to that.

Today’s is another building/monument from the north-west corner of the 700 acres which seems to have eluded me in the past. It’s a mausoleum though the family members buried there have long gone; the family kindly denoted the building to the Cemetery Trust for use as  a bird sanctuary but not long after the windows were closed up again, presumably because of pigeons.

The dome at the top is not spherical but more ovoid. From the photos it seems to be covered in slate, though it resembles the copper domes of the Queen Victoria Building which I suspect is roughly its contemporary. Like the QVB, it has a Venetian-Byzantine feel about it, though the fenestration in the four towers is very English. Not obvious in my thumbnails is the fact that at the ends of the roof gables there is free sculpture (?vegetation) on the sandstone which I find unusual since it is not ‘framed’ or ‘contained’ in any way. I wonder if it isn’t the funereal ivy common to tombs. At the base of the fenestrated towers is a gargoyle.

Anglican Rest House – Rookwood Cemetery preparatory

A rest house built in the Anglican section (NW corner) for mourners who made the long journey out from Sydney, in the early days by train to one of the cemetery’s railway stations from the Regent Street Mortuary Station near Central. It was later named the Ornamental Rest House and later still (because someone thought it had Indian features), the Elephant House. Personally, I wonder if it didn’t resemble the Indian Elephant House in the early days of Taronga Zoo – an Indian temple-like affair; George McRae designed the elaborate Zoo house for elephants and the Zoo’s south entrance in 1916. I gather it dates from 1901 which is justified by the roof ventilation opening and the gable ridge tiles in terracotta. Like any pavillion, it has no doors as such. The outside terracotta brickwork around the windows is repeated on he inside walls. Despite it being used as an office by the Anglican Trust for a time, most of the original floor tiles seem to be in tact; they may have been responsible for the bricking up of the southern windows, presumably to keep the worst of the weather out. This part of Sydney gets the fiercest wind gales sometimes. I wonder if the windows ever had glass installed. I gather it was being restored earlier this year; some photos feature pine trees having been planted around it, close to the walls, obscuring it somewhat. It’s had a new lease of life in recent years thanks to the annual ‘Living with Our Dead’ events acknowledging in a public way the death of loved ones separate from funerals.

I’m looking forward to seeing this building when the Sydney Sketch Club meetup visits to take in this year’s “Hidden” art installations. What I’m most curious about is to see how “red” and how “yellow” the brickwork really is, considering how these colours have been vamped up by photographers with lens filters. I suspect it is in fact the red-white-and-blue of English/Anglican colours. The blue tinge to some of the brickwork reminds me of the Ecuadorian Embassy building in London with its over-the-top white-painted stucco contrasting with red bricks and blue tuckpointed mortar.

Rookwood Cemetery, Lidcombe NSW 2141 – preparatory

5-min thumbnails of the St Michael the Archangel Anglican Church, Rookwood Cemetery. I am doing preparatory work on the left-hand page of the sketchbook, leaving the right hand page free for on location sketching. Not sure how this system will work. There is a Spanish-looking belltower above the chancel (not unlike that of the Santo Domingo cathedral) and a porch/steps (not unlike those at Fortalezza Ozama, Santo Domingo), which justifies time spent on Santo Domingo buildings recently. I thought that architecture so outside my personal experience that I’d never see the likes of it again – but here it is! These small churches are useful as practice-runs for larger Gothic and Baroque churches and cathedrals. The thing now is to find other churches done in the same style, presumably English circa 1880s.

I first got serious about perspective at Rookwood Cemetery last year sketching rows of graves, so I’m keen to re-visit the area for a scheduled Sydney Sketch Club meetup.

The place conjures up the Necropolis Railway, so a visit to the Regent Street Mortuary Station (designed by James Barnet of the Sydney GPO, Australian Museum and Customs House fame) in the city is overdue (it has been under renovation). Photos exist of the 1869 mortuary station at Rookwood made of splendid Pyrmont sandstone (this No.1 of four stations has since been transplanted to Ainslie ACT) but there are no station buildings left at the cemetery, the railway and stations having been closed in 1948 given the increase of transport by automobile.

I’m aware of parts of the cemetery, but not all of it. Like its namesake, Brookwood in Surrey England, it’s vast – 700 acres – and is now the largest Victorian era cemetery in the world. It’s almost the oldest in Australia, with nearly a million people having been buried there. The setting of the crematorium is positively Tuscan, for example – its Italianate tower set amongst pine trees. There are two substantial buildings in the English Victorian 19th-century style:  the St Michael the Archangel Church (1886) and the Elephant House (the Anglican Rest House). For botanical artists, there is the lure of remnants of original, indigenous vegetation as well as fully-developed trees (they used to be labelled for the education of the public) and lots of rose bushes. There are lots of shrines and memorials (e.g. the 1877 Chinese one), many of which would be good drawing practice for my anticipated series on Sydney’s Bandstands & Rotundas. If I was drawing people, I’d be on the lookout for sandstone sculpture atop graves. For bridges and water, see the recently-restored Serpentine Canal. Over the last few years, an annual art installation event, “Hidden”, has been organised. Police have been known to be brought in to sort out traffic jams on the cemetery’s streets on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

•  Two indispensable pieces of preparation: the Wikipedia website (with photos) and the map on the Rookwood Cemetery website.
• Additional contextual stuff, apart from the Regent Street mortuary station at Redfern/Central: Larcombe’s Stonemasonry in Lidcombe (Larcombe was one of two mayors, with Lidbury, whose names came to form the name of the cemetery’s suburb, “Lidcombe“).
• There is no sketching or drawing guide to Rookwood.
• See the work of industrial heritage artist, Jane Bennett at http://janebennettartist.blogspot.com.au/
• Of interest to sketchers: see Hubert Chalker’s drawings from 1970 of the Mortuary Station transplanted to Ainslie ACT as the All Saints‘ Anglican Church (ACT Public Library).  

The Russell Hotel, Sydney – preparatory

5B graphite pencil, with added colour pencil in the three primary colours (red, ochre yellow and sky blue), 5-minute compositional thumbnails so I don’t get bogged down in detail – the whole page is 8×11″.

Some preparation prior to drawing it on-site; there is public seating on the footpath opposite. I want to tie this in with the Museum of Contemporary Art building (Art Deco 1930s) across the road and its recent extension.

There’s nothing like a corner block to do some architectural showing-off. The Federation Queen Anne tower is the main feature; in the restoration of this boutique hotel in The Rocks district, the red door has become a focal point. The building at 143-143a George Street dates from 1887. 

For an aerial view (accommodating the chimney next to the tower in particular), I ought to check out the pedestrian walkway of the Cahill Expressway.

Sketching People in Public

I’m sitting up the back of the bus (second last seat) these days. My interest seems to be moving from perspective to people.

The last four seats are set higher over the back wheels – the bus floor is on three levels (the higher levels past the side exit door of the bus). The heads in the seat in front loom too large to draw properly. People at right angles to me draw attention to my sketching so I notice the greatest potential is for people sitting in front of me, some distance away and roughly 30-45 degrees in my field of vision.

I’m doomed to keep making the same mistakes unless I take stock and take a different tack. The main problems I’m encountering with sketching people in public are as follows:

• I end up drawing lots of backs of skulls.
• My seated poses look awkward.
• Their messiness looks ‘bad’ in my sketchbook.

Backs of skulls.

It’s in the nature of sketching commuters that one ends up drawing lots of backs-of-skulls and becomes highly efficient at drawing backs of collars. I just need to get over it. Backs of skulls really require context (otherwise they are just bubbles on a page): they must be attached to a neck (the indent where the clavicles meet is always down a third the size of the skull) and to the two clavicles (the shoulder is three heads wide). A skull only looks convincing thanks to several “tricks” played by the sketcher on the viewer: even if they’re not visible (covered up by clothes), the sketcher needs to include the following to ‘fool’ the viewer into ‘registering’ it as a head: the bump of the seventh verterbra, the slope downwards of the trapezius, the ends of the shoulders and where the boney bit of clavicle comes to the surface at the shoulder.

Note-to-self:

At home. Practice sketching quickly from photos and from my imagination skulls leaning forward (as in commuters reading or checking their smartphones).

On location. Focus not on muscles or clothes, but on the skeleton: draw not what you see, but the skull and backbone and clavicles underneath. Only when the skeleton looks okay/accurate, move to muscles and then move to drapery/clothes.

Seated poses.

On public transport, one key issue is the three-quarter seated pose seen from behind. Another issue is crossed arms. Another is the obscuring of part of the pose by seats and by other people.

Note-to-self:

At home. Analyse seated poses recalled from bus trips. Practice sketching these and similar by inventing the figure. If I can draw them accurately from memory and/or imagination, then the process should get easier to sketch on location.

On my next bus trip. Regardless of surroundings (e.g. bus windows, etc.), try and focus on at least one seated ¾ pose during the bus journey. Persist with the one figure, remembering that most people adopt two or perhaps three ‘set’ positions when seated in public. The aim is to get the proportions right and the pose looking accurate; don’t focus on details.

‘Messiness’ in my sketchbook.

I used to have separate sketchbooks for Figure Drawing and Other Drawing (object drawing, architecture, landscape, still life). My figure work was so dodgy, that sketchbook never left the house. Recently I hit upon the idea of devoting the right-hand page to Buildings and the left-hand page to People, forcing me to sketch people and buildings in equal amounts. Drawing people in public means I have to have an A5 or A6 sketchbook; an A4 is out of the question – it’s simply too large. Because people come and go so quickly, pages fill up with squiggles very quickly.

The experience of others. It’s curious to note that the Urban Sketchers Singapore book is largely devoid of people, but they are documenting a city in a state of rapid change. Some architects resort to stylized figures largely to indicate scale. I’ve noticed other urban sketchers are able to draw really quite complete figures (they say they’ve been done on location, but they feature lots of detail and post-production retouching/addition of details/colour work; they say they’re 60sec sketches; they often work out at 5 or 6 figures per 5×8” page) – they look to me like ‘drawings’ rather than ‘sketches’. To make them look ‘good’ in a sketchbook, it’s possible to provide continuity by adding an abstract background colour linking the figures. Or abstract shapes in the same one or two colours. Other sketchers insist on contextualising figures with street scapes/buildings.

Options. I don’t want to relegate figure drawing to single sheets of paper (though I can always bind them into a book later on). Equally not hugely happy about wandering around with two sketchbooks – one for buildings/street scapes and one for people. The paper size has to be smaller (5×8” or A5/A6); because they will be drawn with pencil or pen (addition of colour unlikely, except for tonal value studies of drapery), paper need only be 80-90g. There probably has to be scope for gestural on-location squiggles combined with more considered sketches from the squiggles worked on at home – combined in the same sketchbook? Leave every LH side page blank for notes/re-statements at home?

Circular Quay, Sydney NSW 2000

5×8″ sketchbook, double-spread, 50mins, midday late Winter.

Originally intended to do some thumbnails of the Russell Hotel, George St The Rocks and also of the new extension to the Museum of Contemporary Art, but at midday today the crowds were too heavy in around the start of the parade of the Australian Olympic athletes through Sydney. I opted instead for the Cahill Expressway pedestrian footway, in the style of Italian urban sketchers specialising in panoramas.

I was unprepared for the ‘marker’s on the horizon: the flag mast of Observatory Hill, the Sydney Harbour Maritime Control Tower and the clock tower of The Rocks shopping centre. The south face of the MCA is currently under wraps, Christo-like, for renovation.

What I find I’ve inadvertently drawn  is the “Highgate Line”, an imaginary line traversing Sydney from east to west, in front of which no tall buildings are, by mutual consent between government and developers, to be built, thus protecting views to Sydney Harbour. Regardless of the fact that buildings in Macquarie Street near the Opera House already break the unwritten rule of the Highgate Line, there is debate about whether or not new high-rise in Barangaroo should follow suit. Just as commercial interests pressed for ‘The Toaster’ to be built (admittedly on the basis that previous buildings were already that high), I imagine State government approval will be given to high-rise development in Barangaroo in due course, affording uninterrupted views to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Opera House down Sydney Harbour east to the Heads. Money always speaks louder than aesthetics and quality of life for the common good in Sydney; inferior urban planning and dysfunctional buildings are the dregs left over for Sydney’s residents once the rich have made their money and moved on.

St Peters NSW 2044

Looking north along Unwins Bridge Road; the Town and Country Hotel and neighbouring “Narara”, Victorian terraces in cream and Brunswick green.

why this kolaveri di

Mid-week, 12.30pm.  Cnr King & George Street, Sydney NSW 2000.

Overcast weather = can sketch as slow as I like; sunny weather = need to sketch fast (because the shadows change).

Why this kolaveri di? is my personal soundtrack these days: a brilliant song with brilliant lyrics. It (and the global phenomenon it created last year) is impossible to explain, but English-speakers need to get a translation of the lyrics (it’s in Tanglish, half-Tamil half-English) and the best version (in terms of tempo) is the film soundtrack. I came upon it searching around the Net for Sydney architecture photography and found a flashmob event in Pitt Street Mall using this song (another flashmob event in Central Station looked like fun as well); I’m not aware of anyone having sketched a flashmob dance event in progress(1).

I decided to check out this iconic Darrell Lea chocolate shop today, having done some preliminary work at home with photos. The photos certainly diminish the complexity of traffic lights, light poles and other street furniture; most ‘moody’ photographic shots come across as portraits-of-buildings rather than focussing on people. The shop is something of an anachronism because it’s been relatively untouched for decades: only a chocolate shop can get away with baby blue and bright gold in the corporate real estate market of Sydney’s mid-town. I can’t imagine the colour scheme when it was a pub; that was before colour photography was invented.

Today’s involved two stretches of 20minutes standing up; I might try a sitting position in the tiny space between Rebel Sports’ escalators and the Apple building (see RH page). This particular view takes in another corner block historic building, the one with the dark red domed roof on the NE corner of King and Castlereagh Streets. I was sure the focal point of any sketch would have to be the people under the shop awning, but the historic buildng up the street is my focal point today via the over-the-top ornamentation of the shop’s facade.

Sitting is out of the question on the other two street corners. I crossed the road and found I could stand reasonably okay outside the Louis Vuitton shop in George Street. I wanted to try and capture how small the shop is and how overbearing the modern skyscrapers around it are. This led my eye down to the Sydney Arcade building (now refurbished) in King St (built in 1881). 

I like the marks made by the pencil so much, I’ve decided against any post-production doctoring. I’d prefer to draw additional sketches rather than mutilate these ones (I’ve never been happy about scanners dictating what my work ends up looking like).

There’s a City of Sydney Development Application proposal stuck to the Darrell Lea shop so I suspect the building’s days are numbered.

I hope you’ve all seen the 2nd architectural post on http://scratchyas.wordpress.com – the ink sketches are spectacular! I’m taken with the idea of preparing washes in advance at home (based on studio work with photos and thumbnails from photos) and taking the pages into the field for on-location contour work (especially where sunny weather and sharp shadows militate against prolonged drying time for colour washes). 

Notes. (1) Probably Veronica Lawlor’s method, as used by her in sketching the Tour de France cyclists in Paris, is the way to go – spend 30mins drawing the flashmob dance location backdrop, then use the 3mins of the dance to sketch the people. The deal of course is to be aware of the flashmob event’s logistics beforehand.

Darrell Lea, King & George St Sydney

A4 220g multimedia card, Artline200 Fine 0.4 pen, W&N watercolour wash.

I’ve noticed some urban sketchers using the word “reportage”, which I usually identify with journalistic photography. There’s a strong inference of ‘change’ here and my interest is in those signal moments in a city’s building history when its fabric changes. I can’t keep up with witnessing Sydney’ changes, let alone sketching them. Some examples: World Square (long a hole in the ground), the Broadway Tooths Brewery site, the new extension to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the new Willoughby Performing Arts Centre, Barangaroo, Gowing’s department store (now a building site and like Darrell Lea a corner shop).

Today’s interest is in the Darrell Lea chocolate company, established 1927 but now trading out of liquidation (apparently its licorice is big in the USA and UK). Not sure if the King & Market Street store will be sacrificed – both as a business and as a building.

Interest for the sketcher lies in its elaborate Vic torian Italianate (1863-64) rococco plaster ornament –  painted up in chocolate-box colours of gold, ochre and Provencal blue. The main problem in depicting Sydney shops is the intrusive awnings. Awnings with balconies were once common, but were banned because of the potential to collapse on to the footpath, but are now making a comeback – see shops in Redfern, Glebe and Leichhardt.

Shop with balcony-awning, Glebe Point Rd

Today’s approach comes from Veronica Lawlor’s One Drawing A Day: a 6-week course exploring creativity with illustration and mixed media. She’s big on sketching every day (as opposed to sketching every other day or less frequently); she’s kindly let me off sticking to the exact daily schedule in sequence.

Looking forward to drawing this chocolate shop on location. And the facade ornament certainly lends itself to vignettes, telling – in Veronica Lawlor’s words – the narrative of an urban landscape/building.

References

http://www.sydneyarchitecture.com/cbd/cbd3-011.htm