Sketching and Feeling

I have completed numerous travel drawings which I am not quite sure about. Right now they sit around, collecting dust, visible to the eyes of no one. But I don’t know what to do with them, because the genre of the architectural travel drawing is also in itself a very funny thing. A good travel sketch doesn’t necessarily have to be accurate or even beautiful. Rather, the goal is to capture the feel of a place as you experienced it at that point in time, and burn the memory of that feeling into your mind. In theory the memory may later be tapped into whenever its creator, in some future time of need, is hungry for precedent or inspiration.

Even by those unconventional standards, I have made some drawings which I wonder about. When I look at them, I can tell that they definitely mean something, but I am not sure what it is. I might put it away for a few months and then come back to it later and feel something entirely different towards it. The following drawing, which I made last winter while sitting in one of the grand old squares of Savannah, Georgia, was one piece that made me feel that way:

There. It’s posted. I feel better. And I will post more drawings to go along with it. Some of the submissions might be drawings that I have just recently completed, perhaps minutes before posting them, while others will be old work that I have been afraid to look at for months. Whatever the outcome, I shall be returning to an old art form that is often overlooked.