Bissone 2

*All of my Travel Sketches may be re-painted by commission.  If you see one you like that is sold or you'd prefer in different colors, contact me!*

Overwhelmed by the beauty and the sublime experience of space in European towns and frustrated by my inability to capture this new feeling in my drawings, an evolution was initiated as I began sketching while walking.  I call it "experiential drawing." Through a transformative process, including a break-through moment in a narrow stepped village street in Ticino, I finally learned to create with my pen an experiential representation of a place. The drawing, a combination of plan, section, perspective and diagram exhibited surfaces, openings and paths exploding out from my sketching stance - essentially, maps. The drawing became dynamic as I moved through spatial sequences and my hand moved pen on paper, continuing to build the drawing while experiencing the space. This drawing in Bissone Switzerland represents “the moment it clicked” for me. There was no architectural landmark - simply the beauty of space, aged materials, light and shadow, path. I drew my path and the forms that created this path in plan, section, elevation. Adding watercolor, now, makes the experience even more tactile.

I made the ink drawings as an undergraduate architecture student on travel study abroad with the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech in 1998. I used watercolor to enliven and re-interpret the drawing here, in December 2022.

Watercolor Paper 140gsm12” x 12”

Welcome to my Travel Sketches II Collection: lines drawn on site now illuminated by waterCOLOR, a little more wild and free than the first collection of May 2020. Together, the Sketches reveal my personal evolution in architectural travel sketching and offer a piece of travel art that can remind you of your own memories in place.