Travel Sketching – Analog Artist Digital World

While teaching my Crealde School of Art, Travel Sketching Course on Sunday morning, one of my students mentioned that she would be going to the World Cup Final at Point Orlando on International Drive. This was clearly an awesome sketch opportunity so I suggested that any students that were up to the challenge should sketch the World Cup. No one including myself, was really looking forward to going to International Drive but I suggested they document the game wherever they were.

I looked online and found that there were several bars in downtown Orlando that were showing the game. I walked downtown from my art studio and decided to walk to City Arts Factory. I knew they had a very large screen TV in the outdoor area. The TV was impressive when I got there but the crowd was small and forced to sit with their backs against a wall. The energy wasn’t right.

Up the road a Wall street there were more big screens set up outside. This is where I decided to settle. There were big screen TVs at either end of the street, but I opted to sketch inside a bar where three TVs were showing the game above the bar. There was something tribal and communal about everyone crowded around the bar and looking up at the big screens. I was offered a beer from one of the folks who looked at my sketch but my hands were full of pencils and pens and I had no place to put the drink down, so I declined.

I dragged a bar stool into the corner of the room near the entrance. I probably looked like a security guard taking notes. Actually, one of the security guards checked in with me several times to see the progress and he gave me a fist bump when the sketch was nearing completion.

I haven’t followed the world cup games at all. I didn’t even know which team was which until the bitter end of the game when Spain scored a point. The crowd went wild. I finished the sketch before the game was over and decided to walk back to my art studio. I stopped off at a pizza shop to grab a bite on the way. The place was crowded and the game was on two large TVs on either end of the restaurant. I got a booth right in front of one of the big screens. Since I was so close I could now see the players as they got tripped and injured. I couldn’t figure out when the game might end. Rather than a clock counting down the clock was counting upwards. I figured out that the game was about to end by the excitement in the announcers voices. Everyone in the pizza joint cheered when the final buzzer sounded. Spain was victorious. They were the team in the red jerseys.

Returning from Europe, I was hoping to re-establish my courses at Crealde School of Art in Winter Park. The problem is that Crealde published a printed course brochure and submissions for the courses happened while I was away. My Urban Sketching Course was not in the printed brochure, so I would need to wait until the next brochure was printed. I filled out a revised course description last week to try and generate interest in the art of sketching on location. Instead of focusing on Urban Sketching, I decided to re frame the course focus more about Travel Sketching. My course will be offered again in the summer and fall.

At the Crealde Christmas Party, I got to meet the new Crealde Executive Director & CEO Emily Bourmas-Fry. She was wearing an adorable set of deer antlers. She was warm and inviting and made me feel right at home again. Jim Hobart the Crealde Photography Program Manager has been talking to me about mounting an exhibit of my series of WWII sketches that follow my father 1^st Lieutenant Arthur Thorspecken through Europe in 1945. It has been 80 years since Germany surrendered to end WWII and I sketched every city where my father’s C-Company was encamped and fought in France, Belgium, Netherlands and Germany.

Towards the end of the series I started adding black and white paintings based on historic photos on top of my location sketches which show what the area looked like in 1945. I now have to go back over all the sketches I posted while I was traveling in Europe to add these black and white historical visual notes. Since history is repeating, I sometimes let modern history morph into the history of the 1945 atrocities. I plan to show the paintings by framing them in white shadow box frames and then having the black and white historical paintings elevated on the glass to show some parallax and separation of past and present.

In sketching the artists mingling, I noticed David Cumbie, the Sculpture Garden Curator & Sculpture Program Manager. I sketched at one of his welding workshops once and when I think of an artist who is completely committed to forwarding the Crealde art cause, I think of him. My course is offered on Sunday mornings and when I used to walk to my classroom, I always noticed David hard at work in the sculpture studio.

For over 3 months I have not interacted with people since I could not understand what they were saying. In some ways that is liberating. I would just assume they were complimenting my sketch, and I would say, Merci, Bedankt, Dank Je or Danke, My American roommate had suggested that I would meet the love of my life in Europe (Eat, Pray, Love style) but that was impossible since I could not understand any thread of conversation. I did not know any French, Flemish or Dutch. I was happy that my limited German was partly understood for the final months of the trip. One German female artist did invite me to her studio, but when we discussed meeting again, I had misunderstood what she said, and I went to the wrong place.

American party small talk therefore was not something I was prepared for at this Christmas party. I talked to a few people about the project I am working on, but when I discussed the German Stalag Forced labor camp that my father’s C-Company helped liberate, I could see people’s eyes glaze over. It seems discussing war atrocities tends to be a party conversation killer. I listened to one conversation, but it was all about commuting times and I lost interest and walked away. I wasn’t interested in loosening my inhibitions with drink, so after I sampled the food and desserts. I drifted off and made my way back to the home studio where I could settle in for a quiet night to write and sketch.