Urban Sketcher

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.

Posted on Jan 6, 2013 in Berlin | 0 comments

Jeff is used to me sketching him. I think I have his features down by now, so I can get on with what really matters: drawing his caricature.

On January 5, Jeff had to fly back to Vancouver in order to get back to work on Monday January 7. Unlike me, he has to show up in an office and interact with colleagues and employees.

I was sad to see him go; we had a great time over the Christmas holidays. After dropping him off at the airport in the morning, then doing a couple of hours of house cleaning and laundry, and catching up on some work that I had pushed aside to do after his visit, I walked around my neighbourhood on my way to an art supply store. On the way there I saw some shop windows that intrigued me and photographed them. I also spent €40 at the art supply store for a fancy calligraphy pen, two pocket-size sketchbooks that still allow me to draw in my favourite panorama format, and to restock my regular sketching pens.

It occured to me that maybe I was shopping to combat a bit of loneliness after saying goodbye to Jeff, even though I do use a lot of these supplies. It made me think about how accumulating stuff is often about subconsciously filling an unmet need. Not that there is anything wrong with any met or unmet needs, these are all part of being human.

But I have realized over the last few years that it doesn’t matter what you do, who you are, and what you have accumulated. What matters is how you feel about it.

Remembering that insight was my Zen moment for the day.

Restocking my urban sketching art supplies so I can get on with some artmaking.

The display in this shop window of many types of “Strick Liesel” (Knitting Liesel) gave me some nostalgia. I remember knitting weird little tubular things on these knitting devices, for which there seemed to be absolutely no earthly use. At least nothing that you would want to admit to.

Miniature scenes in a shop window display.

Antique shop window display.

Posted on Jan 5, 2013 in Berlin | 0 comments

January 4 was Jeff’s last full day in Berlin, and we tried to make the most of it: a visit to the Photography Museum, then Nina invited us over for a chat and a wonderful soup, later we shared a pizza for dinner and then went to one more sauna in the late evening.

We are the sauna champions. During Jeff’s visit, we made it to five saunas: Liquidrom, Mediterana, Rykestrasse Saunabad, Meridian, and this last one was Olivin. Olivin is quite small, only has one sauna, they were out of bathrobes to rent so we had to wrap ourselves in towels, and it was really too full for its size. But on a less crowded day it would have been just fine. Also, it’s in my neighbourhood and it costs only €10 for a 2.5 hour visit.

Olivin sauna courtyard.

Olivin sauna interior with shower.

Olivin sauna lounge area

Olivin sauna