At the end of November I went to Los Angeles for ten days to visit our friends Nick and Rosie. I love L.A. Such a silly place. So sprawling, so spread out. Nick described it as a city in a glass poured over a table, it’s all jumbled up. It is so busy yet so quiet as everyone just drives. Like all city’s there are roads everywhere, yet here they are so open and wide, intersected by greenery and buildings as well as shadows, with all these lines interjecting. The light flattens everything down too, making it all so bright.
I took my sketchbook and camera with me, planning on recording as much as I could to then take back to the studio with me and work from. As I have previously mentioned, the last few years I have been working in the studio mostly from drawings I do in North Wales, so prior to travelling over to America I set out a plan to fill sketchbook and take as many photographs as I could with the aim to provide myself with plenty of source material for when I am back in the studio for the foreseeable.
Due to jet lag we would wake up naturally very early. So Alice and I got into a routine of walking over to a coffee shop around 7am on a corner of Echo Park Boulevard which sits opposite a petrol garage. Alice would pick out four colours from my pastel box for me and I would draw the road and the buildings in front of us. I like constraints and having decisions taken away from me, being forced into using something that I wouldn’t normally go for.
I tried to draw everywhere, using what was in front of me as a springboard into something bigger, trying to encapsulate the vastness of the place and the experience of being there as whole.
I was excited by working from Los Angeles. It works nicely in contrast to my work from North Wales, slowly leaning away from a natural landscape into a more populated concrete environment. In a way it is a meeting place of the two. A dense city spread out nestled within a mountain range.
There will be a part 2 to this looking at drawings I made of roads on the way out of the city of which I did whilst sat in the back of a moving van.
I enjoy writing these. They help me go through my process a bit more in my own head. I often find my work is constantly rolling onto the next thing so these bits of writing help punctuate certain moments.
Thank you to Nick and Rosie for having us for so long and to Rob and Ako for letting us look after Mo.