How this started
How did this start?
Badly, and by accident. I was an architecture student who could not draw fast enough to keep up with a site visit, so I started going back on Sundays to practice. Eleven years later I never went into architecture and I still go back on Sundays.
Why no pencil?
Because pencil is a way of not deciding. If the line is permanent you look harder before you make it, and looking harder is the entire skill. My first year of ink drawings is unusable and my second year is not, and nothing else changed.
Ninety minutes, always?
Almost always. Past about ninety minutes I stop looking at the street and start tidying the drawing, which makes it worse every time. The light has usually moved by then anyway, so the deadline is real and not a discipline I invented.
What do you do with the ones that fail?
They stay in the book. I have never torn a page out, partly out of superstition and partly because the failures are what the workshop is built on. Students relax enormously when they see the eleven bad Lisbon trams.
The same ferry terminal, a hundred and thirty times?
First Sunday of the month since 2015, same crossing, ninety minutes. It is the only honest way I know to see whether I am getting better, because the subject cannot flatter me. Three of them are genuinely good.
Eleven years, added together
Pages and the bag they live in
Thumbnails, half-finished studies and color tests. This is most of what the books actually contain.
