Sketchbooking

Senedd Cardiff
Lloyd’s of London
Radcliffe Camera

 

Pen and ink.
TWSBI Diamond 540.

These are a selection from a sketchbook kept last autumn in London.

Stay tuned.

And Back Again

And so it was that I returned, across the sea under an unending mid-day sun.  To Texas.

WAGNER/BRANDONM
20 Dec 2012

UA35               LHR  —> IAH         09:20 GMT —> 13:45 CST         777-200          41A
UA1725          IAH    —> SAT         16:40 CST —> 17:50 CST         737-700          28A

20 Dec 2012

Stay tuned.

St. Paul’s

SONY NEX-5n
SEL1855 OSS
ISO 100

Bird’s Eye

SONY NEX-5n
SEL1855 OSS
ISO 3200

University of London

Stopped on the way to Birkbeck Library after spotting the light through the trees.  Snapped a few shots, and surprised myself after with this playful overlay.

University of London, WC1

Stay tuned.

Londoning

The fifth week in.

The night is lost.  Writing now — past 03:00 — it seems obvious, the power of darkness to enlighten.  Walking the city at night, photographing it, smelling it, hearing it, just walking it — this is often the lasting image of a city’s “cityness.”

In San Antonio, it’s interval; small movements in preparation for the show — locusts in the summer, warm breezes, that unnamable odor.  In Syracuse, it’s a tension; the suspension of cold, still air before daybreak — cop cars, changing lights, silhouettes of smoke over the horizon.  In New York, it’s no different; same buildings, same streets, same sounds and smells — just muted to a soft murmur.

In London—–

All I have is a voyeur’s eye, but nothing to see.  Another night.

The fifth week in.

I still haven’t seen London, in all my Londoning.  Trying to take the deep view, discovering the city as it comes — that is the method of London.  I stumble upon monuments, spot them unexpectedly during wanderings street-by-street, mis-identify them or not.  Guided by one Slothrop, demon of the blitz, the feeling is not deja-vu as much as exhaustion.  It’s not London, but another London.  Would you, if another London appeared in the morning sky, trade one step for another and jump?  Would London?  That is the premise of my few short months of stay on this rock.

The filth, weak, win.

Stay tuned.

14 Stourcliffe Close

A flat off Edgeware, just north of Marble Arch and Hyde Park, on the third floor, with morning sun into my bedroom.  Hardwood, paned windows, hot radiators, glass table and black leather chairs, cream walls and white ceiling.  Three windows to the West operate as the lame television between, framed perspectives into a back-alley London.  One to the tower of council flats on the distant horizon; one only to the blueing sky above and the endless loop of early-morning pigeon flocking; and one across to the flats of neighbors, into kitchens and dining rooms and bedrooms.

London: The Unique City.  For but four months, this impossible and extraordinary, phantasmagoric metropolis is home.  In a Western context, no other city layers a history of ideas, conquest, growth, reconstruction, impotence, and optimism so thickly as London.  Largely because of the success of Empire and East India, the stories of Britain past — to even its Roman and Pick origins — become as near to the present as yesterday’s news.  The immediate relevance of London collapses the entire timestream of the city onto a single image, the Holy Mother of all multiple exposures.  It is this impossible density which drives investigation.

Stay tuned.

First Flight

To London:

Newark Liberty nearly forced the start of the semester off the rails.  Houston Bush offered a clear leap across the skyspace cluttered by flights delayed through a handicapped EWR tarmac.  But one BBQ Bacon Cheeseburger later, and the scheduled United 28 to London Heathrow was screaming across the sky, against final long rays of Northern summer sun.

 

WAGNER/BRANDONM
10 Sept 2012

UA1648          SAT  —> EWR         11:45 CST —> 16:34 EST         737-700          22F
UA28               EWR —> LHR         19:35 EST —> 7:40 GMT          777-200          35D

11 Sept 2012