Just returned from a 10 day vacation to visit old friends and make some new ones, have a break from my routine at home, attend art museums and sketch. When I was in my 20’s and 30’s I lived for eleven years in the Washington, D.C. area and have longed to go back for a visit. This vacation was much more of a social one than an opportunity for painting, but I did manage, with the forbearance and often encouragement of friends, to sketch a bit, “travel sketchbook style”. To me that means a kind of travel log in picture form with color sketches, bits of collage, bits of nature glued in, doodles, menus, etc. I do it for myself, and yet I realized on this trip that showing it was a kind of offering to my hosts. I am always amazed at the interest in my rough sketches and ramblings, so primitive, even if meaningful, to my own eyes. I will be offering them here, the bits and pieces of my trip, for the next few days.

The first picture above was done in the S.F.O. airport lobby in my half awake state. Note the newspaper headline “Air Trips Slowest in 20 Years”. I sat at a deserted gate for an hour before anyone showed up, too tired at first to worry, and then sat another hour until any plane arrived at the gate. Not a good sign that I would be going anywhere that day. Nevertheless the plane arrived and quickly boarded us, keeping to the schedule.

More airport lobby waiting sketching, with some cut-out collage glued in with my Glue Stick later.

Janet is my best friend from 8th grade, and still close like a sister to me. So we immediately fell into our old rhythms of being together. Walking along the C & O Canal on a warm and muggy morning – dogwood trees in bloom and a dense kind of greenery we do not have here in California. And with that comes. . .bugs. Bigger and peskier than I’m accustomed to. So as we sat and I began to sketch in the shade, a cloud of gnats found us and fogged up my eyes so badly that I had to swat with one hand to be able to sketch and paint with the other! Meanwhile Janet got to work trying to capture one of the bug band so that I could attach it as evidence (see the lower left – the dot is a real, though much condensed/flattened, gnat). Now how many of you have a friend like that?!

In the afternoon, following some more sightseeing we found a peaceful spot by the Potomac River in Great Falls Park where I did another sketch, attaching sand and shells from the beach there. THe next two days there were storms with torrential downpour and the river crested, submerging the entire area where we’d sat.

Next: Museum sketching