asleep on the couch...

A rather awkward angle for a quick portrait sketch...

My 10 month old son has had a fever for two days... today he is better. He takes a nap on the couch.

watching Ampanman on Youtube

Four loose sketches of my daughter occupying herself on the study computer watching one of her most  favourite cartoons...

my (short) week...

Just two quick sketches at lunch this work week... it's been a busy week.

Monday: a downtown car repair garage

Tuesday: by the abandoned downtown Ford dealership

A Mini-Tribute to my father... PART 8

(continued from Part 7; images are my father's work.)

By my father's childhood home ,  c.2008

I admired my father’s sketches… and in my adult life, he enthusiastically appreciated mine. But there was still the desire to hear my father’s approval whenever I showed him what I had accomplished at the end of a day sketching. 

As my father battled cancer, I visited him from Canada three times. With each visit, my impulse to sketch the city of Nagasaki – my father’s home town—intensified as the desire to know more about my father grew with the reality of his impending death. I sketched as much as I could on my trips, and delighted in showing the results the next day by his hospital bed, discussing the exact location and other experiences, encounters, and details. Often, these led him to reminisce about his own memories in the city. 

His fondest memories were about the home in the now-historic Minamiyamate neighbourhood of Nagasaki where he grew up, and the adjacent narrow stone-paved lane that frames a wonderful vista towards Nagasaki Bay. This was the last place he visited. 

By my fourth and last trip, my father would no longer be around to discuss my walks around town and his own intimate memories... I miss these conversations, and still have momentary impulses to scan and e-mail sketches to him after a good sketching day.

I left photocopies of all my sketches with my father at each visit. After the funeral, I learned that (true to his deskwork-centred managerial career) while he was still lucid, he catalogued all my Nagasaki sketches in hand written lists, complete with the date of execution, size, medium, and location (which he had remembered). I was touched.

(to be continued...)

The same scene in 1972, with my mother.

waiting for the concert...

 Pre-concert at the Winspear Centre... waiting to hear Rachmaninov's second piano concerto with Tsujii Nobuyuki as soloist, and Shostakovich's 5th Symphony. If only we had more access to babysitting... we would be doing this as regularly as we used to!

A Mini-Tribute to my father... PART 7

(continued from Part 6; images are my father's work.)

I received my one and only drawing lesson from my father when I was in grade three or four. Inspired by the way he drew so non-chalantly, I asked him to teach me; he obliged with the challenge of both a difficult subject matter and medium (sticks of charcoal). We both drew the same doll and took a photo of the occasion. I still remember the sense of respect and awe at seeing how different our drawings were… but also a bond that I now understand must be akin to what his retirement-aged painting peers held in common. Along with the weekly ritual of playing catch in my elementary school years, that lone sketching session is one of the most powerful memories I have that speaks to the notion of fatherhood.

A sketch from the same period...(1983)

(to be continued…)

to Peace River, Alberta

Took a day trip to Grande Prairie and Peace River, Alberta yesterday...

Grande Prairie had a surprisingly bustling Main Street, while the 2.5 hour drive to the little town of Peace River (population 6600) was quite beautiful. The town itself is nestled in a wonderful landscape by the bottom of the valley...

...crossing a great-looking bridge...

The Peace River

Approaching the town of Peace River

A little portion of Main Street

and finally, on the plane ride home to Edmonton...on a tiny 10 seat plane-- the smallest I've been on to date. 

my week...

It's finally warm enough to resume lunchtime sketches...

Monday: a construction site
Tuesday: lofts across a parking lot
Wednesday: down a lane
Thursday: an avenue towards the downtown
Friday: on a road trip... sketch to be posted later...

A Mini-Tribute to my father... PART 6

(continued from Part 5; images are my father's work.)

After a career that kept him abroad for most of his working life for years at a time (in the U.S., Australia, Canada, and Malaysia), retirement in Japan was a difficult season for my father to cope with, but the watercolour painting group in which he was an active member gave him a rich social circle as well as some form of routine and a sense of purpose. The weekly sessions got him out of the apartment regularly, while outdoor landscape painting excursions lifted his spirits. The semi(?)-annual group shows at a local gallery were occasions that he reported about to his children who lived far away on another continent; we were always delighted to hear him talk with such enthusiasm and receive e-mail updates of his latest masterpiece. At his funeral, a good proportion of attendees were from this circle of amateur painters. He was their peer, bound by a unique friendship that only a fellow painter who had week after week painted the same subjects together, struggled through the same technical and expressive challenges together, and shared some joyful ways of seeing together, could enjoy. 

(to be continued.)

A Mini-Tribute to my father... PART 5

(continued from Part 4; sketches are my father's work.)

His wife and his children were not the only portraits my father sketched; in his later years, my father would sketch bartenders and servers (without exception, female and young) at his favourite bars and pubs, giving away their portraits… this he also did at annual class reunion trips.  The receivers probably only humoured him most of the time, but I am sure he felt some satisfaction knowing that others appreciated the little, unique gestures, and the thought of putting a smile on someone’s face through such a solitary activity as sketching. 

(to be continued...)

A Mini-Tribute to my father... PART 4

(continued from Part 3; sketches are my father's work.)

Painting...(my mother is seen in the extreme top left)

My father further pursued this pastime of sketching and painting (en plein air) when he began working at a large corporation, first in Osaka, then in Nagoya where he joined the company’s “painting club”. It was in this social circle that he also pursued a young woman, who a few years later would become his young bride and favourite model. The sketches that are left today from this time, especially during my parents’ days as newlyweds in New York, are intimate sketch portraits of my mother. (to be continued…) 

circa 1970, in New York

circa 1970

1970

A Mini-Tribute to my father... PART 3

(continued from Part 2; sketches are my father's work.)

January 1961

In his youthful earlier years, my father was more deliberate about sketching and painting than the casual approach of our childhood. In his own young days, he probably enjoyed drawing, as did two of his three older brothers who likely had an influence on him. In his twenties, my father took hiking trips around his hometown of Nagasaki where, treating watercolours like oils, he painted some vivid images of local mountain landscapes. But artistic pursuits were always second place in comparison to his real passion -- baseball -- evident in how he named his son, who also became a catcher all the way until high school. 

(to be continued…) 

circa 1960

March 1960

A Mini-Tribute to my father... PART 2

(continued from Part 1; images are my father's sketches.)

Sketching was always a part of my father’s life. But as I was growing up, it was not in any formalized, structured, or intentional way. He never “planned” to sketch on any given day; it was always done at the spur of the moment. He never carried a sketchbook around -- often on a napkin or the back of an envelope (the kind that utility bills came in) most of the sketches that he left were done with whatever ballpoint pen or pencil he happened to find at the kitchen table, and usually while nursing a glass of scotch on the rocks. His choice subject matter was his family or familiar objects that, again, happened to be on the dining table.  In some ways, all this seemed to make sketching a more natural activity so intimately tied into daily life, inspired by some impulse of endearment as opposed to artistic discipline or exercise.   

 (to be continued…)

A Mini-Tribute to my father... PART 1

It will be just over 2 months since the passing of my father, whose life on this earth ended peacefully in the early hours of January 1^st in Nagasaki, after a 13 month struggle with cancer. I am comforted knowing he is now in heaven with the Lord Jesus praising his Father. Since returning to Canada after the funeral, it’s been back to life-as-usual for me, but not without moments to reflect and be thankful for the wonderful father I had.

This post is the first of a series as a tiny tribute to my father in the context of the subject of this blog… sketching. For without his influence, both direct and indirect, I would not have developed the privilege of this tool that enabled me to discover so much in this world. It is one of the many legacies he has left me, and which I wish to pass on to my own children.

(to be continued…)

March 1987, a sketch by my father of me

Kallin Chinese Restaurant

One of our favourite restaurants... it doesn't have much presence along 109 Street, but has been a regular weekday and weekend lunchtime hangout for the last few years.