Nostalgia Attack #99

This one is for Ellen, whom I met in 6th grade. She was one of my two very best friends and while we don't live near each other, we're still friends and still in touch thanks to the internet and email.

I sat down at a table at the swimming pool yesterday with the object of sketching and then watercoloring the scene before me. One of my commandments to myself about sketching and watercolor is to just paint whatever I can see. Pick something and draw it! It certainly keeps you from being bored as you can always find something to draw, even if it's your own foot!

I sat down to work, wondering how this was going to go down on the page. They had really subtle music playing through hidden speakers. (It's a good thing too because the music started out country which was annoying! The Sports Fan would have told them that their radio was broken.) So I'm sitting there, looking at the blank page and wondering where to start.

Then this song, 'Sunny' by Bobby Hebb (I just found out that his name is Hebb and not Head), came on and instantly I was transported back to the summer of 1965 or 66 and Ellen and I were sneaking into the county park's swimming pool through the pump room where her sister's friend worked. It saved us each 35 cents that we could then add to our concession stand money. (UK readers, in the US, concessions are the food you buy at sporting events and other places where you walk up to a fixed place to buy them, not discounts on the ticket price for students, seniors, and groups!) We'd just nonchalantly walk in from the pump area that was hidden behind some bushes and trees and choose a spot to lay our our towels. I'd do it today because it meant walking about 50 feet from the street to the poolside area rather than the 3 or 4 blocks from the normal entrance through the locker room, across the huge patio, and down an immense, wide stone staircase to the pools.

I knew just what to do! I love those times when you put your pen down and the writing just spills out. Then you start to sketch and that spills out too. The painting required thought, of course, because watercolor still seems like painting inside out to me, who grew up in art painting in oils and eventually got into acrylics.

I may have been drawing the pool at a Hampton Inn in Garden Grove, California, but my head was totally back in 1965 or 66 with Ellen in North Park, which is practically the cradle of my childhood. When I was Googling for photos of the pool to share and help convey what a special place this is, I came across blog entries of people who say they've "been there a hundred times and I've never seen this..."

A hundred? I laugh. I know I've been there thousands of times. I grew up right next to it. We swam there, picnicked there, walked there, played there, ice skated there, I rode and showed my horse there, and I even was recognized by a cop who caught my boyfriend and I 'parking' there as the girl who rides the bay horse there! I went there to watch North Allegheny High School track meets at the Golf Course right across the road from the Show Rink where I showed my horse and practised, and the Ranch House where my 4-H Horse and Pony club met. In winter, we went sled riding on the golf course and ice skating at the Ice Rink, always hoping that the lake would be frozen enough for them to let us skate on it.

You get the drift. This was my home, my playground. It's near and dear to my heart and every time I go 'home', every time I drive away from my mom's house, I have to drive through the park on the way somewhere or on the way home.

A glimpse of autumn colors in 2007 on N. Ridge Drive in North Park.

The building there at North Park was built during the 20s to provide recreational opportunities to those who had no other way to experience them. The rich belonged to clubs that provided an opportunity to bathe, ride, picnic, or otherwise enjoy the outdoors. The buildings and parks that culminated from the efforts of the early Allegheny County Park Commissioners were fabulous though. You can read the history of their development here. I've been looking for a photo but can't find one oddly enough. The lodge at the pool is a huge log, wood, and stone mock-Tudor, Adirondack style structure with a big terracotta tile patio and a pair of flagstone steps leading down the hill to the pools. A local photographer, Amy Strycula, has some great shots of the pool and people enjoying it on her Flickr. (Gee, I wonder if she's related to Carl Strycula, who was the evil vice-principal of my junior high and high school days. I swear that that man picked on me!)

I'd been wanting to try to discipline myself to draw a building because getting all of the angles correct when you have to include perspective is challenging in a quick sketch that you want to keep loose. I did one last week based on a sketch seen on my friend, &rew's, blog. When I compared his detailed pencil sketch to my not-quite-so-detailed pen and ink sketch that had been colored with watercolors, I was bummed. I like it better this week because it has charm and still conveys the feeling of the building.

So this time, I tired to convey the feeling of the building without getting bogged down in detail too much. The two main things that are challenging me with watercolor as a media right now are that it dries lighter than it looks wet and that I know I need to have patience and let the color dry before adding more if I don't want to make a mess. I either forget that it is wet or am not patient enough to wait. So I wish that I'd thought to add another wash of color to the left side of the building and another to the water in the pool. More in the trees, too.

One thing that jumps out at me when I look at it is that I certainly need to spend some time figuring out how to portray palm trees more effectively. I also really like the .01 Micron pen for drawing because the lines are so delicate. I'm pleased with the way the other trees look though the trunks and branches could use work. There's one I really like and wouldn't change, so that's something.

Then, of course, it would be nice if I could take a decent photo! You can bet that the next time I go there, I'll be parked across the road from the pool building, sketching and painting it! In fact, it sounds like a good excuse to take my mom back to her home for one last autumn visit there. I'll be sure to share what I do here or on my Flickr.