Sketchbook: People on the move

Updated on 12 March 2017 (Harvard referencing).

17 September 2016. Since my son is back at school now, the everyday waiting routine gives me a few spare minutes to observe and draw people doing the same – move around and wait for something else to happen.

Here are a few of the latest drawings (and one or two I forgot to post before the summer):

Figure 1. Sketchbook – ink pen density drawing

The above (Fig. 1) is another of my little density series, which I started in Innsbruck last year. I choose a setting (here people walking in the hospital grounds in Salzburg – yes, I do spend a horrible amount of time in hospitals) and try to document every movement occurring during a certain time, say 10 to 15 minutes. The result appears quite dynamic to me, it is a record of “mass movement”.

In the next sketch I tried to capture the absolute essence of the scene, girls standing at or sitting on a table tennis table in the playground (Fig. 2).

Figure 2

Again the same playground, in the next two sketches obviously bored parents are waiting for their children to finish playing (Fig. 3-4):

Figure 3

Figure 4

Two more sketches I made while waiting at the train station. These were extremely difficult to draw, because waiting people have nothing else to do and immediately sense my presence. So what I do now is draw the very first impression I gain to check a few more times through half-closed eyes. Still I am happy with the result and I can see how my ability to observe and reproduce correctly has improved over the years (Fig. 5-6).

Figure 5

Figure 6

The last sketch is not about people on the move, but the gate to a garden and house long abandoned by their last inhabitants. I put it in this post, because to me the gate looks alive somehow, as if it were a store of memories of people walking in and out for a very long time (Fig. 7):

Figure 7