Travel

This was not a "Sketching Trip."  I brought a little blank book along, for taking down notes and observations, and occasionally made a drawing.
In railroad stations there is a lot of this:

In the streets, there are plenty of these:

In the joints you see this:

Out your window you get something like these:

There are lots of roons:

Plenty of frugal meals:

I drew Big Joe Williams from Crawford, Mississippi in the same hall where Beethoven premiered many of his works.

This is my favorite from this trip.  An artistic type in a cafe:

This was not a "Sketching Trip."  I came to study the nuts and bolts of art at the Rijksmuseum, Louvre, Jue de Paume, National Gallery, British Museum, Tate, Courtauld, Prado, Ufizzi, Academia, Pitti, Duomo, Barghello, Casa Buonarroti, Vatican, Capitoline, Brera, Kunsthistorisches, Pinakothek and others.

Clutter

I wanted to chronicle the appearance of this funky neighborhood bar, and it seemed more appropriate to record its mass of detail using only black lines on white paper than to render it in colors and tones.

Here, because of the mirrors in the barber shop, the coat hanger and whisk broom appear four times, all with the same weight of line.  The result is an open pattern spread upon the paper which gives a completely different appearance from what a tonal drawing or a photograph would give.

 Even a totally smashed Buick makes an attractive pattern on the paper:

Here is a sort of catalog of the contents of a long-ago studio of mine, featuring, by contrast, a fresh, white, as yet untouched canvas.