Copper Cliff Part Deux

Joel and I had a fruitless search a few weeks ago for a location in Sudbury interesting enough for plein air sketching. We wandered around for over an hour trying to find a somewhat inspiring location and came up with nil. This time, however, we opted to go back to our old sketching stomping ground for Copper Cliff Part Deux.

I’m pretty  much convinced that despite it’s industrial neighbours, Copper Cliff could be transformed into an artsy small-town suburb of Sudbury, if anyone in Sudbury had the imagination to do it (which of course, they don’t). There is a old style main street, a large green park, stately historic homes and an old building that must have been a hotel at some point but which is now an old folks home (what a waste of good architecture). Joel and I are kind of fascinated by Copper Cliff. Of course you would have The Stack constantly in the background, but we think it’s a place that has some kind of charm.

Copper Cliff, ON. We liked the look of this old school barbershop.

Copper Cliff Part Un, almost 2 years to the day in 2009

Mackenzie King Estate

Joel, Peanut and I were in Ottawa for Canada Day last weekend (saw Wills and Kate on a screen, yay!) We decided to take a jaunt over to the Mackenzie King Estate in the Parc Gatineau the next day and these “ruins” were on the property away from the house. Mackenzie King thought it would be fun to salvage various pieces of old houses from around Ottawa and leave them on his property as ruins. A nice place for contemplation, methinks, but not a night because that would just be spooky.

We would have sketched longer but we had forgotten to bring stools with us and therefore had to sit on stones, which hurt our bums. Note to self: always have camp stools handy in the car!

Part of a "ruined" window

Wayside

Feelings of isolation

Since moving back to Sudbury, whatever personal work I have been doing has involved a LOT of black ink. Metaphor?

A big empathetic thank you to all the teachers who have had to put up with me over the years. While in post-secondary education I was a much better student, I know in high school I must have been hard to handle. I just finished teaching a first year, semester-long drawing class at a local college and I can now say to you poor teachers: I know how you feel!

Naively, I expected them all to fall over themselves trying to glean some nuggets of wisdom from my experiences as an artist…but whatever I said or taught was mostly greeted with glazed over, indifferent eyeballs. I hope at least a few of them gained a better appreciation of drawing.

Cute animals

Babies are impossible to draw, so here are a group of baby animals instead!!

Do you recognize that beagle?

 

You can see this drawing on one of our latest Papillon Press birth announcements:

Papillon Press birth announcement