Bus Stop Series

coming soon to a theater near me

a.k.a. carpe momento

I was able to get out for a little bit yesterday and even get a little urban sketching in! It’s been soooo long. It’s been years since I’ve been able to meet up with the Urban Sketchers Prague group. I really miss working with them. It has been have such a lovingly understanding and supportive community … and oh so cool.

It sure would be grand to find some way out of this box of pain I’m in and seem to have become. All of this being said, I think I’ve just figured out a way to get some urban sketching done in a way that deals with my finicky condition.

… I’m going to finish this post later. Right now I’m heading out to get a haircut! Maybe there will be a bus stop sketching opportunity on my way home 🙂

Pod Dálnicí bus stop 

Ink and colored pencil, 15*21 cm

Regardless … I do look forward to doing more random bus stop urban sketches. I guess this is going to have to be the modus operandi that I settle for if I am going to get any urban sketching at all done. Gotta jump at every opportunity to take advantage of those random slivered moments when I happen to be out and about on public transport and feel at all able to get off the bus to sketch and sketch.

Things aren’t getting any easier and there’s no point in waiting for a chronic progressive disease to stop chronically progressing. I guess whether I’m aware of it or not, I am continuously confronted by some kind of relationship with a set of limits that confine (define?) me. As those limits become less distant and vague, that relationship needs to get more accepting and less dismissive and antagonistic if I’m going to get anything sketched out there.

 

 

Doorway ať Jungmannovo Náměstí
Ink, 15*21 cm

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 🙂

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.

Dominikánský dvůr, Praha

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. 🙁

Dominikánský dvůr
Dominikánský dvůr