Tag: prague

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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.

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

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Bohemian Quarantine (day 10)



Ok, I’m still apparently not used to blogging, but I did promise myself that I’d post an urban sketch from quarantine everyday. I’ve gotten all twisted up about the text for today’s (yesterday)’s post because I’m trying to figure out how to say way too much all at once. that I don’t have any idea when I’ll finish it. It seems like the best thing I can do now is just post the unfinished blog post and fill out those bullet points tomorrow.

As a consolation prize, I’m putting another version of almost the same sketch at the end of this unfinished post.


Thanks for bearing with me here 😊

Onto the delinquent post proper!

Zahradní Město from part of the the bedroom window. Yes, I sketched a view of Zahradní Město yesterday. Truth be told, I imagine I’m going to do many more quarantined sketches of it while hunkered in for the duration.
I’m pretty fussy about posting things but the promise I made to myself and abroad to post a daily home urban sketch of Prague presents a number of intriguing challenges for me.
namely:

  • Appreciation. There is no standard obligatorily gorgeous Prague architecture visible through any of the windows of our flat. I think this could be a great opportunity for me to work on trying to find and present whatever poetry I can in the inherently “drab” parts of Prague that are available to me to sketch. I imagine that for Edward Hopper there would be a zillion gems outside my windows. I gotta get better at recognizing them as such on my own.
  • Exploration.
  • Fidelity.
  • (I’m not sure how to phrase this one yet).