Urban Sketcher

Posted on Jan 25, 2013 in Berlin | 4 comments

A ceramic sculpture at the Me Collection: half hare, half human, all creepy.

Two more sculptures at the Me Collection. I forgot to jot down the artists’ names.

January 24 was a big day because I picked up my friend G. at the airport in the evening.

But first I had another full Berlin day.

I am so lucky to meet locals here and get the inside scoop on interesting places to visit and to draw. Katrin and Manuela met me at the Me Collectors Room on Auguststraße 68 to sketch, and of course have a coffee or tea in the excellent cafe that is in the same space. The Me Collectors Room is one of those wild and wonderful Berlin things that I did not know existed in the world.

The Me Collectors Room continues the tradition of the “Wunderkammer”, which was a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ in the Renaissance and Baroque. As explained on the website: “Such cabinets were collectors’ rooms in which precious artworks (artificialia), rare phenomena of nature (naturalia), scientific instruments (scientifica), objects from strange worlds (exotica), and inexplicable items (mirabilia) were preserved. They reflected the standard of knowledge and view of the world at that time. Our Wunderkammer reanimates this tradition in Berlin once more.”

Another important thing to note about the Me Collectors Room is that it focusses on vanitas — objects that illustrate the vanity and shortness of life. This means the collection has a morbid tinge, which may not be pleasing to all people who view it.

Taxidermied giraffe head at the Me Collection, contrasted nicely by the ordinary Berlin street scene outside. Note the snow. It’s gotten cold and icy again.

Puffer fish at the Me Collection.

A life size sculpture at the Me Collection.

Sculpture at the Me Collection.

Looking out onto Auguststrasse from inside the wonderful Me Collection coffee shop.

After I picked up my friend at the airport and got her settled in the apartment along with her jetlag, I had to jet off myself to a Mozart concert by the Berlin Philharmonic. I had made a scheduling error in booking this concert on the same night that my friend arrived, but I was able to get to the concert, even though I was a bit late and had to wait for a break in the music to be allowed to my seat. What you see here, is the outside of the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall, designed by Hans Scharoun.

This is the view from my seat at the Berlin Philharmonic hall. When you book a ticket on their website, you get a 3-D interactive view so you can preview exactly what you will be able to see from the seat you are about to buy. If you don’t like the view at that point, you can still change the seat.

I spent much of the concert quietly sketching the amazing concert hall of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

This soloist at the Berlin Philharmonic concert seemed to melt into one shape with her seat.

Interior window detail at the Berlin Philharmonic.

Interior window details at the Berlin Philharmonic.

As I am walking back from the concert to the subway, I see these glowing benches near Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.

Posted on Jan 24, 2013 in Berlin | 0 comments

Jan 23 was a domestic day. I worked, cleaned the apartment, got some groceries, took out garbage to get ready for my friend G.’s arrival. I was motoring. G. is coming to visit me in Berlin, all the way from Vancouver for one week.

It seems that I was busy all day, but all I have to write is this one paragraph. There must have been more to that day. I may have inadvertently forgotten an outing to a Burlesque club, or a train ride to Madrid.

But I now remember that I started receiving the first of a batch of CDs that I ordered from Amazon Germany a few days ago. I am collecting the soundtrack of my Berlin stay: music I’ve heard on the radio or at concerts, music other people introduced me too, music by artists I liked in the past, music I’ve discovered online. I was especially thrilled to find some classical music CDs based on a saxophone recital that Nina took me to at the Akademie der Künste Berlin.

I would create a playlist on Spotify, IF Spotify was available to us Canadians, but it is not. So here are the titles and artists of some of the CDs I bought:

Posted on Jan 23, 2013 in Berlin | 1 comment

On January 22, I went to one of my favourite saunas in Berlin, the Meridian Spa in Spandau. I worked during the day, then I took the train to Spandau where I had a massage booked at 4 p.m. It was the first and probably the only massage I will have in Berlin, and did I ever need it! Then I used the saunas from 5 until 11 p.m. which was closing time. I was the last person in the sauna, they had to come look for me in the changing room at 10:59 p.m.

I got in four rounds of sauna, three of which were with “Aufguss“, did some resting and reading in between, and had a light dinner and a glass of wine in the sauna restaurant. Ahhhhhhhh, bliss-out.

Posted on Jan 16, 2013 in Berlin | 3 comments

On January 15, I stayed home to catch up on blogging. That is all I did all day. And I wrote this special-edition post which I had been planning to write:

As a graphic designer by profession, I can not help but look at type wherever I go. I have been meaning to do a special post just on Berlin subway station typography. This could be a topic for a design student’s thesis, all on its own, so I just want to give a few examples of the typographic variety you will find in the Berlin subway signage.

For further reading, however, you can take a look at the following links:

— A photoset on Flickr by Patrick Scholl that is more exhaustive than what I am showing here, and offers a pretty good selection of many Berlin subway stations.

— This typographer, Anton Koovit, has even designed a font based on the U 8 typography shown in the photos of Kottbusser Tor, Alexanderplatz (the one with the sickly green tiles), and Hermannplatz station signage.

— A related discussion of Berlin street signage on typophile.com.

— Another photoset on Flickr, this one by Kris Sowersby, with photos of Berlin street signs.

A general note on Berlin public transit: I like that you can always get some quick food and drink in Berlin, even on many subway platforms. There is enough people traffic here during each day that the food operators can survive in these artificially lit subway tunnels. I have been grateful several times when I was in a rush to be able to grab a coffee and pastry as a quick breakfast.

The opposite function is not as well served, however. There is a bit of a shortage of public bathrooms. The good thing is that when you find one, it’s usually clean because there is a “Toilettenfrau”, as the usually female attendant is called, who wipes the seat for you for a small fee and makes sure the toilets are clean and stocked with supplies. I have found prices for a loo visit as high as € 1.

Somebody has plastered stickers into the circular letterforms here — a graffiti-typographer!

Another interesting font on this U-Bahn sign.

Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist-Socialist-Communist in the early part of the 20th century who together with Karl Liebknecht organized an uprising by workers against the German government in 1919, shortly after the end of World War I, which they had also opposed. Both Luxemburg and Liebknecht were captured and killed, but are still commemorated in Germany, where pure socialism and Marxism are better understood than in North America, and are therefore not automatically looked upon as evil.

These green tiles are all over the Alexanderplatz station. I am sure the unfortunate hospital-gown colouring is a remnant from communist East Germany See correction/comment below from Ingvar Jensen, thanks Ingvar!

This station has several subway lines, and each line has their own typography at this station.

This fin-de-siècle/art nouveau inspired font at the Deutsche Oper station is my absolute favourite.

Eberswalder Strasse U-Bahn sign. This is my “home” station.

Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn sign. I hope to sketch this station before I leave, it’s a beautiful old subway station with a building above ground.

Hermannplatz U-Bahn sign.

Food stand in Hermannplatz subway station, Berlin.

Food stand in a Berlin subway station whose name I can’t remember.

Posted on Jan 11, 2013 in Berlin | 0 comments

January 10 was a day to play giant-catch-up-on-totally-neglected-client-work-thanks-to-my-bohemiam-Berlin-life-style but when I was done, I watched an old Heinz Rühmann movie: Der Hauptmann von Köpenick based on the true story of a poor saddler who ends up in prison for decades and gets frustrated by the bureaucracy of the Weimar Republic when he finally gets released, buys an old military uniform and stages a coup where he single-handedly commands a battalion to invade a station in Köpenick, a town outside of Berlin, in his quest to get a passport so he can leave the country and find work elsewhere. The civil servants of Köpenick become a laughing stock because they placed so much misguided trust in what turned out to be just a uniform.

I continued with my Berlin thing of watching old German movies on Youtube. Today it was Der Hauptmann von Köpenick. This scene fascinated me because of these giant beer goblets.

Posted on Jan 10, 2013 in Berlin | 2 comments

This is not my work, but a watercolour painting I am buying from one of the Berlin Urban Sketchers, Oona Leganovic. I very much admire her work and am thrilled that I can take this original piece home as a souvenir of both her work, and my Berlin urban sketching time. I think it’s a wonderful watercolour of a residential building in Berlin, gloomy, urban, almost industrial, just the way I like it.

On January 9, I had quite the bohemiam lifestyle, even though it was only for a day: I went to a 3-hour life drawing session in the morning in someone’s apartment in Kreuzberg. Oona had told me about this group that gets together and chips in for a model, so that it ends up being only €7 per person. The guy who rents the apartment where we drew, is a young American who moved to Berlin to play poker online. Yup, that’s how he makes his living. You meet all kinds of people here, and I find it fascinating how some of them make their money. Apparently it is not legal to play poker online in the U.S., or at least to make a living from it, I am not sure how he explained it. But he said, you can in Canada, and clearly in Germany as well. So he is here in Berlin, enjoying cheap rent and a cool city while making money online. Still, I am not going to start playing poker online anytime soon. I will stay with my graphic design studio and my clients.

After the life drawing session, I hopped on the subway to make it to a lunch date with my Vancouver friend J. and his partner K. who have just moved to Berlin. K. works from Berlin for his Vancouver employer from 3 pm until midnight so he’s roughly on an Eastern Canadian schedule anyway, and J. who is a graphic designer and artist as well, is hoping to find work in Berlin as a designer but also to pursue his passion for art. I wish him well, and I am sure he will do great — he’s a talented guy with a great work ethic and fantastic ideas.

Then I checked my highly complex, strategically planned subway schedule in order to go to yet another area of the large Kreuzberg district to meet several urban sketchers at Tante Emma Bar. I must really like this hanging out and sketching in bars thing, because I stayed in that bar long after the other sketchers left to continue drawing — I was there from 4:30 pm until almost midnight, a good 7 hours! I loved it. This is my kind of life.

Sketching on old newspapers.

Life drawing on old newspapers.

Urban sketch in Tante Emma Bar, Berlin, with Katrin and Omar as well two other illustrators. We already made another date for next week at a different location.

I started painting the lamp you see in the previous sketch in the right corner, in Procreate on my iPad and got wrapped up in its details, so I stayed another 3.5 hours after the other sketchers left around 8 pm. It was very pleasant and comfortable to sit in a bar by myself, a couple joined my table for a little while, as is common in Germany — in Canada we would not think of sharing a table in a restaurant or bar, but in Germany you just ask.

Posted on Jan 9, 2013 in Berlin | 0 comments

On January 8, I had an amazing tour of Potsdam with S., the mother of my old friend G. She grew up in Potsdam in the 1930s and 40s; she knew it before the war destroyed it, she hid in a bomb shelter in her house during air raids, she lost her father in the war, she saw Potsdam completely destroyed, then split off from West Germany, she witnessed Berlin divided after the war, she fled East Germany in 1953 and was never allowed to go back until the Wall came down. A child of war, a tragic story.

Still, her generation and that of my parents, even though they have been forever changed by their experiences as children of war, has proven to be incredibly tough and resilient, and many of these children have gone on to lead productive lives in spite of the hardship they experienced. But what can you do, I suppose? You have to go on with life, and it is easier to move on when you are still so young.

In contrast, I have had an easy life. Yet, these events repeat themselves in countries all over the world all the time. I thought of my friend N. from Vietnam who is my age and came to Canada with her family as a child as one of the boat people. She had to leave everything behind, she saw the destruction of her homeland as well. Only last year did she take her husband and children back to Vietnam for the first time. It was an emotional journey for her.

I’ll list a few things that I learned from S. about Potsdam, along with the photos. Note: the first few photos are overexposed, it took me a while to figure out I had changed a setting in my camera.

The River Havel flows around the town in such a way that Potsdam is really an island. The Glienicke Bridge which is the direction this photo points at, was further upstream and was right at the border between West Berlin and Potsdam, which ended up in East Germany after the war. Several times during the Cold War, prisoners were exchanged between the U.S. and the Soviet Union via this bridge.

The Potsdam City Palace, which was destroyed during the war, as was pretty much most of Potsdam, is being reconstructed after many years of deliberation. The government of the German State of Brandenburg will move in here after reconstruction is complete.

A building erected during Potsdam’s year as an East German city. It’s ugly, but it’s now part of this town’s political history.

A completed part of the Potsdam City Palace.

An memorial to the victims of war erected during East Germany times. Both S. and I agreed that the sentiment on this memorial was something we could subscribe to, and clearly the new Germany felt the same way, since the memorial is still here.

Potsdam is a beautiful and rich town surrounded by the River Havel and several lakes connected by the Havel. Quite a few large mansions surround the lake shores and line the river banks.

Prussian helmets in a shop window. I would have liked to bring one home for Jeff, but that might have been expensive and impractical.

S. grew up in this street. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, houses in East Germany were mostly returned to their original owners.

We walk into the Neuer Garten, Potsdam, which was the king’s garden and housed a couple of castles.

One of the smallish castles in this park is the Marmorpalais. It is said that this was built for one of the mistresses of a son of the “Old Fritz” who was King of Prussia.

Another castle in this king’s park is Schloss Cecilienhof which was built in 1914 for Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany and his wife to live in. S. said that she would still see members of the Royal Family in the 40s after the outbreak of the war carting home their groceries. She said they did not have much food either. But the most interesting story was that in 1945, this castle was used as the site of the Potsdam Conference, where Churchill (succeeded by Attlee), Stalin, and Truman met to discuss how to proceed with Germany after the Allies had won the war.

One of the more modern mansions in the Potsdam lakes area.

Posted on Jan 8, 2013 in Berlin | 0 comments

On January 7, I took a full day to return to some artmaking. I had a deadline approaching to hand in a sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project. To be fair, it’s kind of a vanity project where you pay a fee to register with the company that runs the project in New York. They send you a blank sketchbook and you transform it, then send it back to them and they digitize it, put it online, and also on a van for a travelling exhibit through a few cities in North America.

I had fun though, challenging myself to create a book with cutouts and transparent paper. I took the original sketchbook apart and rebound it using additional sheets of coloured transparent paper that I bought in a craft shop in Berlin.

I’ll just post the cover and some interior spreads here. The book became a bit of an improvised, free expression art book about my trip to Berlin and also about visiting the Berlin Hamam for women, which I enjoy, and which embodies some of the multi-cultural, creative Berlin experience for me. I also think that Berlin, and all of Germany, owes a lot to Turkish people who helped facilitate Germany’s “miraculous” growth in the 1950s by coming in first as guest workers, then to raise their families. Berlin has been incredibly enriched by Turkish culture. As it has been by many other cultures who continue to contribute to its diversity.

Berlin Hamam is the title of my book for The Sketchbook Project. I drew this graphic in one line and one go, not knowing what I was going to draw when I put the pen on the paper. But type as well as an image emerged.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A spread from my Berlin Hamam book.

A one-line drawing that I started at G.’s family’s house in Osnabrück. G. was nice to make room for me on a big table in the guest room where we stayed and encouraged me to make some art, so I did. I did the complete drawing there and then traced it with a thick black pen when I was back in Berlin. This is quite large, about 3 ft wide by 2 ft tall.

I taped the drawing temporarily over a framed picture in my Berlin rental pad because it fit there perfectly.

Posted on Jan 7, 2013 in Berlin | 0 comments

I toured this memorial right after I saw the WWII bunker with the Boros Collection, which was a fitting juxtaposition, but I felt this visit deserved its own post out of respect for the gravity of the subject matter.

Above is a short video I took of walking quietly through the memorial.

When you walk into the Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, you quickly realize how deep it gets. The initially waist-high steles get taller and taller as you walk down the declining pathways, until they dwarf you and make you feel trapped in the canyons they create. You can hear other people’s foot steps, but you can not see them until they bump into you at a corner. This results in a feeling of uncertainty and vigilance and even a bit of fear. If someone were to attack you in one of these canyons, nobody might see it.

I enter the Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. On this dark, rainy day this stark site is amplified even more.

The bright bus shelter ad with the image of a young man glowed saviour-like into the deep canyon I was in. What you see here is the result of my really long zoom — this poster was really much further away than it appears here, and many more steles were between it and me.

Looking out of the Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, you see a bright Star of David and a chunk of the Brandenburg Gate.

Posted on Jan 7, 2013 in Berlin | 0 comments

The Boros Collection is a private art collection housed in a WWII bunker.

Which one do you think is the entrance to the bunker?

Weeks ago, I had booked a tour of the Boros Collection for January 6. It’s a private art collection housed in a large WWII bunker in the middle of Berlin. The owners of the collection also own the bunker and occupy a large loft on top of the bunker as their private home. You have to book this tour online well in advance, it takes 1.5 hours and they only take 12 people per tour. The fee is €10.

The gist of it that this was an incredible experience. I enjoyed the art which was sometimes very playful in contrast to the bunker, and I appreciated the bunker architecture as a historical reminder and that the renovation architects left so much of it intact. Sometimes all the rebars that are inserted into the walls are exposed, walls are mostly left in raw concrete form, you can see where floor plans were altered, the artists have created much of their work to fit into the spaces, it’s really a theme park for art lovers in there.

The gallery’s owners collect modern art by (based on their website): Ai Weiwei, Awst & Walther, Dirk Bell, Cosima von Bonin, Marieta Chirulescu, Thea Djordjadze, Olafur Eliasson, Alicja Kwade, Klara Lidén, Florian Meisenberg, Roman Ondák, Stephen G. Rhodes, Thomas Ruff, Michael Sailstorfer, Tomás Saraceno, Thomas Scheibitz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Danh Vo, Cerith Wyn Evans und Thomas Zipp.

Taking photos during the tour was not allowed, only in the entrance and lobby areas, so I have nothing to show you, but you can find examples of the bunker rooms housing art on the collection’s website. Now enjoy this short tour.

The bunker floor plan seems sort of evil with its relentlessly precise symmetrical design. The walls of this thing are incredibly thick.

Entering the bunker, you are met by logs which seem to tell you where you can and can not go.

Entering the bunker, you are met by logs which seem to tell you where you can and can not go.

No, you steam punks, this is not a Bioshock game prop! It’s a real WWII bunker phone! Geez!

Real bunker doors.

Real bunker door handle.

This is just a reflection of the ceiling neon light on one of the white-lacquered benches in the waiting area for tour groups, but it turned into something that looked like minimalist art.

A lamp glows in the Boros bunker. I think I may have helped this effect by under-exposing, but I am not sure and too busy to check.

Who knows where this lead to, but it looks ominous.

Big brother is still watching you.

I walked by this “Moonlight” lighting store and could not resist playing with the globe lamps mixing with the reflection of the street scene outside.

As I leave the Boros bunker on this rainy Sunday of January 6, there are signs of still-heavy Berlin construction everywhere.

Many buildings in the Berlin government area have this “Bundestag” sign, which I take to mean there are German representatives working around here. I hope they are. All of Europe hopes they are.

Graffiti is alive and well in Berlin and definitely serves a purpose; it’s not always there just to tag, it’s there to express freedom of thought, opinion, make political and personal statements, to educate, decorate, inform. I am all for the graffiti. This particular one is a call to establish a minimum wage, which does not exist in Germany, believe it or not.

Looking over towards where Angela might be and one of her parks.

The British embassy in Berlin is barricaded off by these cylinders, a police car is parked out front, it is a dreary, cold, rainy Sunday in the first week of January, nobody wants to be down here right now except a lone Canadian tourist…

I believe this is an office building near Potsdamer Platz, Berlin with a cool mobile sculpture hanging into its lobby. The woman who is just walking down the stairs is wearing a jacket or dress with a white lapel with black piping that seems to echo the sculpture’s look.

Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.

Sony Center near Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.

A bar or cafe in the Sony Center.

Sony Center, Berlin. This was a day of many impressions, almost too many to process.