Exploring The World Down The Street

Update 1 XI 2023: This painting found a new home with a dear old friend of mine from way back in the nineties in Prague. Thank you for supporting me and my art 😚

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Thanks to COVID-19 (which I thankfully don’t have, yet) and a few other serious health problems (which I am currently wrestling with), I’m unable to go outside to sketch these days. That doesn’t make the visual feast of Prague any less alluring to embrace through sketching. This is from a photo that my wife snapped the other day down the street.

Dominican Court, Prague (Braník)

Since being rebuilt in 1689, after having been destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War, this structure has been used as a chapel, a brewery (several times), a walled farm, a police station, and as a cinema complex. It became abandoned shortly after the most recent brewery there failed in 1907 and is now boarded up and dilapidated with only three of its four walls still standing. Now it serves as a dangerous and spooky abandoned structure for preteens (and older) to illegally investigate Indiana Jones style and as a canvas for budding graffiti artists.

Recently there has been talk of renovating the structure yet again and repurposing it as a Waldorf school. 🙂

Demolition (which had first been proposed in the 1950’s) is also on the table. 🙁

January 19, 2021

D.C. on my expat mind

Of course I’ve been fretting a lot about D.C. especially after the Capitol siege the other week, and the brutal attack on Lafayette Park this summer, and …
Here’s hoping for some sanity and docility.

Now, I’m thinking about my hometown the night before the inauguration.
Thank you for making it through this difficult episode. Our country is tattered. I hope we will be able to incorporate many of the excruciating revelations about who we are into meaningful human progress within, and that global efforts like the Paris accord will let a rattled version of us back in to help.

Ink and Watercolor , 8×10 in.

January 5, 2021

Still got GA on my mind.

I quickly scrawled this out back in April while “relaxing” and hadn’t thought much of it.
Surprisingly, this large doodle resonated with me more strongly than anything I had been working on. It has remained unfortunately relevant for painfully obvious reasons; hence the repost. Truth be told, the only time I was ever there was as a child when my dad drove down to Florida for a vacation. Practically speaking the state of Georgia has never really crossed my mind except when hearing Ray Charles or Dr. John playing Hoagie Carmichael’s 1930 classic, or when when thinking about William Tecumseh Sherman’s hellacious March to the Sea in late 1864.

I’m over in Prague fretting about the senate runoff election happening now in Georgia amidst all of the dizzying poisonous disinformation that’s shrilling around it. Here it’s almost 11pm due to the six hour time difference. I’ll be asleep when(if) any results come in and whatever fallout that emanates from them start echoing through the chaos that’s brewing in D.C. for tomorrow’s Electoral Vote Count.

Got Georgia on My Mind
-frenzied scribble

Most of us are also concerned about this. A disturbing cohort actually seems to be looking forward to as much chaos and bloodshed as can be summoned.
Please let this craziness subside.

Until then …

Update: it’s 10am here in Prague (4am in Georgia) and I see that Raphael Warnock defeated Kelly Loeffler a few hours ago!