drawing fromLife Written by Lam Nguyen Photography by Daniel Garcia
Urban Sketcher Suhita Shirodkar fills the pages of her journals with watercolor sketches capturing snippets of everyday life.
S
uhita Shirodkar, a local artist involved in the Urban Sketchers Movement, mentions that she might be doing some reference sketches. What I expect to see are rough pencil-drawn outlines. Instead, as I arrive, she is already putting the finishing touches on a complete and intricate watercolor. On this day, she is painting the façade of the historical California Theater in downtown San Jose.
How do you choose your locations? Sometimes I choose locations based on an idea or a current obsession. Right now, I am on a hunt to find the fast disappearing artifacts of a time before Silicon Valley was as it is today: vintage signs, old-fashioned diners, old buildings...things that harken back to an earlier time, a different aesthetic, and just a very different place than what Silicon Valley is now.
What is the Urban Sketchers Movement? Urban sketching is about drawing on location, drawing the world around you, and creating visual storytelling and reportage. It is different from other forms of drawing on location, like plein air painting, in that it is not JUST about color, line, tone, and painting, but also about being a part of the world around you, and sharing it through your sketches.
Often, I don’t pick my locations, it is just where I am: I draw on family vacations. Mexico, Hawaii, India, all of it makes its way into my sketchbook. I draw at home. I enjoy it all, it helps me look at the world around me with the fresh and inquisitive eye of a traveler.
And then there is just my everyday life: I sketch in parking lots, when I have 20 minutes before a meeting, I sketch my How did you become a part of the Urban Sketchers Movement? kids as they play, as they eat dinner. Everything is fodder I always drew in a sketchbook, and while some of my work for my sketchbook. It’s a visual diary I look back at over is purely from my imagination, a lot of it is just capturing time. snippets of life around me. One question I constantly got when I drew was “What will you do with these? Will What is it about vintage signs and landmarks that attract you make paintings of them?”—which really confused you? me: I see what I create in my sketchbooks as my art, it As a first generation immigrant that has only seen Silicon records how I see something or react to my environment Valley in its present incarnation [Shirodkar moved here in the moment. To refine, gloss over, or recreate a more from India in 2000], it is fascinating to look at these “finished” form would be to lose that first, immediate, and landmarks and buildings that speak of a different time. fresh vision. It is also sad to see how quickly they are disappearing and being replaced by homogenous malls, parking lots, and I found the work of urban sketchers on Flickr, and found chain stores. I feel a need to draw them all before they that there was a growing community of people worldwide are gone. who did just what I did, so I started sharing my work online through their Flickr group and found this treasure I have only been drawing and blogging these vintage signs trove of a community! for a couple of months now, but I already have people writing in to me to tell me about signs in the area I haven’t drawn, things that are going to be torn down, sold,
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