Urban sketching is a wonderful way to capture a place or a piece of architecture. But it can be limiting, too.
Sometimes, my go-to urban sketching style feels totally inadequate for capturing those moments in Berlin when I feel so surrounded by beauty, so overcome by the palpable sense of community in a place, or so moved by a simple, seemingly mundane encounter. As a developing artist trying to figure out what my "style" is, it can be easy to box myself into one method. I've struggled with that a bit while being abroad; expecting myself to display everything I make on my blog has made me feel like everything has to go together so that the body of my work while abroad will look cohesive.
I was getting frustrated by this pressure, and as a result, I was creating less. So I decided to just let go of that. Instead, I would make what felt right and experiment, even if the result didn't "fit" with the other work I've produced.
One evening, I walked into the kitchen to find my host mom cooking. We exchanged a few words, and I found the interaction to be so sweet in a simple way. In my notebook, I sketched this little comic with a ballpoint pen and two colored pencils:
I noticed that comic art was the perfect medium to capture moments that involve more than aesthetics or place. A few weeks later, I found another moment that could only be expressed this way. It was an unusually warm day in early April, and I was moved by the colors of blossoming trees and the clothing of one of my best friends. This comic was the result:
The simple, cartoonish style lends this work a totally different vibe than the more carefully-detailed illustrations or the sketchy ink-and-watercolor urban drawings I usually make. I simplified the color palette, and the result communicates a mood, a moment, more than it depicts anything architectural or spatial.
Viktoria Luise Platz is probably the place in Berlin I love the most -- the hexagonal park just a few steps outside the door of the apartment I've called home for the past four months. And yet, until recently I'd never tried to draw any of it. How could I communicate this place without betraying it? The stairs up from the U-bahn station, where, when I first arrived here in February I was struck by the quiet into which I emerged, suddenly away from the noise of the rest of the city... the tide of people who come to the Platz when it's sunny, dotting the six triangular lawn spaces with their blankets, their discarded shoes... the children who played in the basin of the dry fountain before it was turned on for the season... the harmony of this place, the way it changes from hour to hour and day by day, every lovely small flower bed and apartment facade, overwhelmed me when I tried to describe it visually on paper.
Several weeks ago, I lingered on Viktoria Luise Platz after sundown as the park began to empty. After a while, only a few people remained: some children skipping rope, a few dogs exploring the smells left behind by the many visitors to the park that day, a couple on the fountain, talking so quietly I could only tell they were speaking by the way they leaned toward one another. I watched the sky change color, the pinkish-gold coming on in the windows of the apartments that surround the square, the orange in the sky slowly succumbing to blue until everything, finally, was a wash of the same hue. I noticed that there were bats flitting over the fountain. I thought about the bats that appear at dusk in the summer at my house in New York, and how my sister and I used to throw tennis balls up into the air as straight and high as we could, and how the bats would chase them to the grass and seem to vanish out of thin air before the ball hit the grass. As though time worked differently for them. I thought about how much this place feels like home, the same way my backyard in New York feels, and about how the dusk washes these distant places with the same colors.
I made a comic about it, because there didn't seem to be a better way to record that moment: a bit of color, a few bits of poetry, and the panels, to represent the passage of time, a long moment in which the color of the sky and the movement of the bats progress.
It is clear to me that to imagine myself as just one thing is foolish; to confine myself to one style or try to force my work into some contrived cohesiveness is counterproductive. It is better to create, in whatever way feels right, whenever inspiration appears.
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