Previous work & Inspirations

I've been really busy this past week with Lloyd and Barbara's assignments so I'm going to post some of my sketches from last term, and a couple of clips from my 'chap' book that I find inspirational or just examples of good descriptive writing.

Taylor,Timothy. Stanley Park. P.43-44
"The cheapest flight from Paris had a twenty-four-hour stopover in Amsterdam, where he wandered the streets without purpose. He drank glasses of beer at a string of cafes until he could feel nothing but a light humming throughout his system. He sat on a bench near the Prinsen Gracht, thinking of the relais but watching the trolleys. One after another they would arrive, brilliantly lit in the night air, the entire length of the train an advertisement for Nike or Panasonic or Kit Kat chocolate bars. People spilled from each car and joined the traffic tumbling down the canal roads into the bars and restaruants and smoky cafes. Amsterdam was teeming: slackers and clubbers and queens; the Euro-homeless now free to wander and be poor on the streets of any city in the union; businessmen in French blue shirts and gold ties; Amsterdam women who looked like whooping cranes, all hips and shoulders mounted high on gaunt black bicycles. And every three minutes, another train with another load of people, and another marketing message designed to address the tumult."

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. P.19
"Cities and Signs
Travelers return from the city of Zirma with distinct memories: a blind black man shouting in the crowd, a lunatic teetering on a skyscraper’s cornice, a girl walking with a puma on a leash. Actually many of the blind men who tap their canes on Zirma’s cobblestones are black; in every skyscraper there is someone going mad; all lunatics spend hours on cornices; there is no puma that some girl does not raise, as a whim. The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.
I too am returning from Zirma: my memory includes dirigibles flying in all directions, at window level; streets of shops where tattoos are drawn on sailors’ skin; underground trains crammed with obese women suffering from the humidity. My travelling companions, on the other hand, swear they saw only one dirigible hovering among the city’s spires, only one tattoo artist arranging needles and inks and pierced patterns on his bench, only one fat woman fanning herself on a train’s platform. Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist."



Walled City

Your first glimpse of Suburbia is from the freeway. Travelling at excess of a hundred kilometres per hour, you see the rooftops flash by to the left and right, peeking over the top of the masonry wall that forms the canyon on either side of you. All at the same height, with varying shades of black and brown shingles, some feature chimneys of brick or stone, while others have just a metal pipe poking through the roof. At one point you might be able to see a dormer pushing up the eaves, allowing a view from the window down onto the river of cars. An exit ramp approaches and you make your way over, swerving and merging into the adjacent lane. You pull off of the freeway and turn onto another multi-lane road, slightly slower speeds, fewer cars, but the same walls looming on both sides. After passing through two lighted intersections, one boasting a gas station, the other an all night coffee shop, you turn down another road, and the walls are gone. Instead of concrete blocks, stately oak trees line each side of the asphalt; growing on banks of freshly mown grass. At intervals, driveways bisect the lawns, leading to the large blank faces of garage doors. The main entrances to the houses are many times hidden from the street; by design or plantings.
Behind these doors people live out their daily lives. They wake, eat breakfast and leave for work, congregating on the freeways to get into the city. At the end of the day they return by the same means, enter their homes and eat supper before going to sleep and repeating the process again the next day. Suburbanites live for weekends, when they can inhabit their little patch of land or leave it for the country. They live primarily in isolation of their own design. Existing within the community but not quite participating.

Doors

There is a door to the kitchen that keeps the smell of food from spreading throughout the house. There is a door to the dining room to limit a guest’s view of the meal preparation. There is a door to the study to lock out noise and disturbance while a person is working or reading. There is a door to the laundry room to hide the sight of dirty or drying clothes and limit the sound of a washing machine. There is a door to the closet to hide the jumble of shoes and outerwear from the view of the main hallway. There is a door to the garage to provide instant indoor access to the automobile from the house without being exposed to the elements. There is a door to the bathroom to provide privacy for necessary daily deeds. There is a door to the bedroom to provide a separation of public and private living space and to close off the sleeping area at night. There is a door to the closet to conceal the clutter of clothes and rarely used sports equipment. There is a door to the basement to hide the unsightly finish of bare concrete floors and insulation uncovered by drywall. There is a door to the fruit cellar to hold in the temperature that keeps food from spoiling prematurely. There is a door to the garage to conceal the presence or absence of a car from the view of the street, and to protect said cars from the weather. Finally there is a door to the house to shut out the world.