From the Sketchbook-an Old Bookstore

I did this drawing over the weekend from an old photograph of Foyles, the London bookstore. The largest, but not my favorite. My favorite haunt for books in London is a small side street called Cecil Court. It's off Charing Cross Road.

la Tempietto

When we were in Rome we stayed a stone's throw away from what many consider the most perfect building in Europe. It's tucked away at the top of the Janiculum Hill, and worth the climb. There is something felicitous about a quick drawing, imprecise and imperfect, of a precise and perfect building.

The Naked City

I remember riding the train into the city when I was a kid, thinking to myself that there were people inside all of those buildings. That there was something going on inside every window, between people I didn't know and would never meet.

Earth hasn't anything to show more fair

This isn't exactly the view Wordsworth was writing about. Westminster Bridge looks on the buildings the other way round. But there is a grandeur here that is fun to draw. The trick is eliminating the extraneous elements and drawing quickly. Sometimes I work directly from the perspective lines, as here. More often I do not, and it is the imperfections that set it apart from photographic reality.